Baichtal - Building with virtual LEGO: getting started with LEGO Digital Designer, LDraw, and Mecabricks

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John Baichtal has written or edited over a dozen books, including the award-winning Cult of Lego (No Starch Press, 2011), LEGO hacker bible Make: LEGO and Arduino Projects (Maker Media, 2012) with Adam Wolf and Matthew Beckler, Maker Pro (Maker Media, 2014), and Hacking Your LEGO Mindstorms EV3 Kit (Que, 2015). Hes hard at work on his latest project, a compilation of LED projects for No Starch Press. John lives in Minneapolis with his wife and three children.

Thanks to Matt Wagner for helping make this happen. I also want to thank everyone at McGraw-Hill for believing in the project. My mom, Barbara Baichtal, helped a lot, as did the builders who let me publish screenshots of their models. Finally, I couldnt write a word without my wife Elise and kids Arden, Rose, and Jack.

IHEAR THE COMPLAINT all the timeLEGO bricks, while amazing, just cost too much. A typical price is 10 cents a brick if you purchase them in sets, more if you buy them individually from a LEGO store. It doesnt help things that those bricks are likely to last 20 years or more. LEGOs legendary quality derives from really great plastic that holds its shape and color long after inferior formulations have gone into the trash bin. Called ABS, this plastic unsurprisingly costs a lot to manufacture, and that price is passed on to the customer. In the end its simple economics: if you want a $200 set and cant afford it, you cant buy it and cant build the model.

Enter the concept of building with virtual LEGO. Imagine a design application that allows you to build any model you can imagine on your computer using nearly every brick the company has molded in a vast array of colors. You can see an example in : any brick in any color! You manipulate the virtual bricks with your mouse to build anything you could build with real LEGO.

Figure 1-1 LEGO Digital Designer (LDD) offers every part in every color. The rest is up to you!

In this chapter youll learn about the three most popular LEGO building programs: LEGO Digital Designer (henceforth LDD), Mecabricks, and LDraw, as well as discovering reasons why youd want toor might not want touse such an application.

With virtual building, your ability to build is not limited by economics, nor storage space in your house, nor even what parts and colors the company currently offers. Of course, there are downsides. You do not end up with a physical model the way you would with the normal way of building. Furthermore, there is no tactile experience of running your hands through a box of parts looking for that one perfect 2 3 dark red brick that you need for your latest project. Its kind of like the comparison between buying a book online versus rummaging through a dusty old bookstore hoping to find a gem that you never knew existed. Building physically and building virtually both are great, and both are needed, but its not an either-or.

The following are some features common to virtual LEGO building programs.

You can build virtual LEGO models using these programs, just as you could build LEGO models on your dining room table. Its the most obvious aspect, perhaps, but it bears mentioning. You can build anything you could build in real lifeand a lot besides. In general, the programs I describe in this book are intended to closely shows a simplified virtual model that illustrates just how easy it can be.