If you’re the Lego type (and we are in spades in this house), then this is a nifty tool that might appeal, although it has a lot of bells and whistles and takes some patience, so not ideally suited to the younger or less patient aficionados out there.
Lego have a free Digital Designer tool that lets you design your own model and generate build instructions at the end to make it yourself and share your design with the world.
Design Mode (
) gives you a panel of brick options to select from on the left, and a building area on the right where you can arrange them and stick them together.
View Mode (
) lets you inspect your creation from all angles to see how it’s working out.
And when you’re done, Build Mode (
) generates build instructions for your model and gives you a few different options for how to view them:
- To follow them in the Lego Digital Designer, click the Next brick icon (
) at the top of the screen each time you want to proceed, and you’ll see a little animation of the bricks fitting together. - To generate HTML instructions that walk you through static images of each stage, click the HTML icon (
), specify where to save the instructions, and they should automatically open in a browser once downloaded. Again, keep clicking the Next icon (
) to walk through the stages. - To print out the sequence of static images, along with an inventory sheet at the end that tells you how many of what brick type you’re going to need to make your creation, first generate the HTML instructions, then click the Print icon (
) from within them.
If you don’t have the patience to design a model from scratch yourself, there’s a gallery of builds other folks have already shared, so you can have a rummage and look for something you’d like to build/emulate there. (Note that you only get a Download link for a model in the overview page – once you’ve clicked through to view it in more detail, you’ll need to click the Back link at the top left of the build image to get back to the overview.) Once you download a design, open it in the Lego Digital Designer and follow the build in one of the three ways described above.
