Mini Lego

2009-05-30

A while ago I posted some Lego images of miniature car constructions. These gave me the inspiration to build a simple 3D application where you can interact. I'll present now the steps that took to achieve what you'll see in the program: the models were built in the LDD (Lego Digital Designer), then they were exported to the LDR (LDraw file format) and later converted to the 3DS format. Each 3DS file was imported in 3D Studio Max and the normals and pivots/rotation had to be adjusted per lego piece (basically a reset transform was applied to each piece). The model was then exported to the FBX format and finally imported in Unity3D. This time the programming was easy and took only one afternoon of work.

Here are two links for a high and low quality versions. You'll have to install the Unity Web Player plug-in for your browser if you don't have it already. It's free and it shouldn't bring you any problems.

High quality version (slower)	Low quality version (faster)

Hope you like this interactive experience sponsored by ZPX :)

2008-11-18

I'm not a Lego fanatic like someone I know but I like to play a bit. This colleague of mine bought some legos from a new collection called creator. These models have an interesting characteristic, that is, you make 3 different lego models from each set that comes in the box(or at least, according to the instructions) and besides this, the models are very small.
It's curious how you can do so much with just a few pieces and to show you what I just said I propose a challenge: how many mini cars can you build with the following 10 lego pieces?

The following model is the original that came in one of the sets:

Now lets see the models that were made from these 10 pieces (each line is a new mini car variation, except from the truck loaded with the cookie which takes 2 lines):

Update

Well, there were some rumours about not having a plane so... here it is ;)

With some effort we could have done some more mini cars, but I think these are enough to show that we can do a lot with just 10 pieces. :)

Note: With minimal changes we could have done lots of permutations on the cars. Example: changing the two orange triangular pieces by the white ones and other similar changes but we tried to minimize these kinds of permutations.

I hope that you liked the models and in case you have some suggestions to new ones, go ahead, send them to me!