Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Lego Digital Designer: Playing with virtual bricks

Few people outside of Lego fandom may know this but there is actual software out there that lets you design Lego models on your PC or Mac.

It's called the Lego Digital Designer (or LDD) and is a free download from the Lego website:

The Download Link!

After installing it and then running it this is what you get:

Pretty spiffy opening screen!

As you can glean from the screen you have three building modes:


Standard Mode - the full spectrum of available Lego bricks
in the official Lego colors

Mindstorms Mode - for Mindstorm models

Extended Mode - The full range of all Lego bricks but with the option to customize colors


You can spend practically days on end just trying out any kind of idea for a model in your head.  The bricks are unlimited and can be mish-mashed in a variety of ways.  The only limitations I find are time and of course my own imagination.

Creating a model is a simple as picking the part from the left hand portion of the screen and dragging it to the building area:

Building in Mindstorms mode

You'd probably spend a good chunk of your time just looking for the right brick for the model in your mind.

Isn't she pretty? :)



Just finishing two minifigs took me about half an hour because of the vast amounts of choices for parts:

Why hello there strangely hued Bossk! (Creating in Extended mode, custom colors yeah!)

It's a fun piece of design software and a great way to try out your Lego ideas without breaking your wallet.

Too bad Lego stopped the service where you build in LDD and then order the actual model from them.   It was awesome because the model you created would come in an official Lego box with official Lego instructions.

LDD is still capable of producing Lego-like instruction sheets for your creation.

It's an awesome piece of software and no die-hard Lego fan should be caught without it.



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