Bricksmith — Put your creativity together

I am not sure how many of you are super fans of LEGO, but Rockia myself is a big fan. I still remember the excitement I received my first LEGO puzzle box when I was young. Needless to say how much I love to dissemble stuffs into parts, but I love to put separated parts back together. However, since Rockia is not a very organized person (at least I was not while I was young), my LEGO pieces get lost one by one; my parents didn’t get my any more LEGO since I lost two big boxes.

I didn’t touch LEGO for many years; yet, every time I pass by the LEGO stores or I see some great LEGO creations, I will still admire the creativity of the users and the infinite possibilities from LEGO. Now, I am going to introduce you a great software with the whole set of LEGO library, and you could use your imagination to create your own LEGO product virtual 3D model.

You could download the software Bricksmith on the official site. >>>Download<<<

The installation is very straight forward; you could choose the Application only if you already have the LDraw Library, which is a “a collection of 3D models of Lego building blocks created by enthusiasts from around the world”. If you don’t, then you can download the whole set and drag the folder to your Applications folder after you unzip the file downloaded.

Bricksmith offers the following features:

• drag-and-drop building
• thousands of parts at your fingertips, with no limitations on which ones you can use
• a full Lego color palette
• support for steps and submodels, to document exactly how to build your creation
• undo, cut, copy, and paste
• multiple viewports
• a Minifigure Generator

Let’s take a look at one example on what Bricksmith could do. Here is a sample piece from Bricksmith’s website:

OK, let’s launch the software up:

This is the main window of Bricksmith, you could put the parts you need here and rotate them and put them together. You see there are 4 views on the same LEGO workstation. The 3 smaller ones are for you to view your creation in 3 different angles to make sure the pieces are in the right positions.

If you need more parts, just simple drag them out from the parts browswer:

There are tons of parts available for you to choose from under a detailed categorized drop down menu. For me, the parts are more than what I need, but if you have such a hunger, you could also get more parts from Bricksmith.

Since I don’t have enough time to accomplish my LEGO, I really hope someone could really share what they have done with me and I will post the gallery here or a link to your artwork. Hope you all enjoy the software, if you really love it, don’t forget to buy the developers cups of coffee (there is a donate link on their website).

Post Note:

I really like this software since I feel like I could pick up my lost childhood memories without worrying about losing a single piece of LEGO. And I am sure this software will help if you really want to create your own LEGO model in real life. You could use it to assemble your final product first and export the steps to replay it; all you need to do is to follow the steps and do it all over again with the real parts. Or you might just generate a mini-figure and save it.