Blog 442: Lego Digital Designer

LDD has been around a while. You could build with a reasonable selection of bricks in a reasonable selection of colours, and then order your models.

That’s all fine and dandy and delightfully entertaining, but when you’ve been bursting with ideas for Lego sets your entire life, the selection of bricks (let alone colours of bricks) eventually becomes somewhat limited.

So you pine for something more. Imagine a suite of almost all bricks ever made, and the ability to paint them in any available colour…

Imagine no more.

• Download: http://ldd.lego.com/download/default.aspx

Lego Universe Mode

I don’t know how long LDD has had this update for; I checked a few days ago and it was just there.

The program still functions as normal in DesignByMe mode — you have the same limited set of bricks and colours as you always did, (barring the occasional changes) but you can actually buy your new set. Which is great, but I don’t really intend to buy all the hundred-pound scenes I’ve cooked up over the years. I just want to infinite-build all the things I never could as a child, all the things it would be impractical to realise in life.

But this last update came with Lego Universe mode. Lego Universe is an MMO so I don’t really care, but shit, son. Almost every brick ever produced. In any colour.

This Lego Wreckage

And what better to way to exercise this newfound freedom than to try and assemble the cast of This Wreckage in Lego form? I mean, that’s the pinnacle of any franchise — to be immortalised in Lego.

Obviously Lego doesn’t cater for everything; I haven’t yet, for example, worked out how to make a Feral Shield (at least, one that isn’t three times the size of its bearer), and as you can see, there’s only one armoured chestplate decoration (which is clearly not plate mail — obviously, to give Henrik the backpack, he cannot have an actual plate mail piece).

Taking it back in time (and abusing glorious, glorious transparency), we can wheel out WtFSA‘s lead villain Pyraeus.

It would be nice to get some luminous glow-in-the-dark eyes painted on that face.

Of course, we couldn’t go through a This Wreckage-related post without wheeling out the Scholar. Lego doesn’t really let us do the whole hunched-over thing, and he can’t have a backpack and the cowl, but it does let him have a shiny green face and fashionable trousers.

Pretty much the rest of the important cast of This Wreckage are, of course, Murloc. This is the point where brand new body and head and arm and leg pieces would be required. Their basic shape is just too non-standard.

This, naturally, didn’t stop me having a go anyway. Using the classic Battle Droid (“Space Skeleton”) pieces and some flippers…

These are clearly ridiculous and would fall apart on actually being played with. Ah well, can’t fault me for trying.

Conclusion

This is now the best piece of software even invented.