Lego

For Christmas 2015 I created custom Lego instructions to use bricks we already had. Some of the models were based on photos on the side of sets we had (but for which no instructions had been provided) or from old sets where the instructions had been lost. A few were just things we came up with.

We printed them, collated them, and presented them with the bricks in plastic bags. Printing them (they’re set for very large sheets of paper) was not cheap, but it was a fun project.

Instruction booklets

• Container ship
• Fire engine
• Horse and cart
• Racecar
• Sailboat
• Train
• Space models

Tools used

• Bricksmith
• LPub
• POV-Ray

Notes

I tried rendering with Renderman because, hey, Renderman! But I could not get it to play nicely with Julian Fong’s l2rib library. Between updates to the Renderman language and oddities of my models, I couldn’t patch enough things to get it to work. And in the end, POV-Ray was my first ray-tracer, going back to Craig Lindley’s Practical Ray Tracing in C.