“I wanted it to be proportionally accurate,” he says. I just hoped it would stick without breaking apart.”Ĭharles’ biggest design challenge (and concession) was the ship’s bridge-the oblong hexagon that towers above the wedge-like body. Every time I designed something, I had to find places to hook it together. “I jumped back and forth a lot between crafting the aesthetically pleasing parts of the model-the plating and turrets-and refining the superstructure underlying it all. “Of the 15 months I spent designing and building this thing, most were spent in this software,” he says. Once he had the hull mapped out, he moved on to the specifics. “That triggered a lot of the other choices I had to make about proportions.”Ĭharles acquired a publicly available 3D scan of the A New Hope Imperial Star Destroyer and overlaid it into Studio 2.0 to design the skeleton of his build. “I decided at the beginning I wanted the whole thing to be 5 feet long,” says Charles. Given that the ship is shaped like an acute triangle, precision with the structure’s angles was paramount.
“I hadn’t tried a project like this because I thought I’d need all the parts in front of me,” he says.Īs a collector and hobbyist-crafter of Star Wars props-Charles just finished a life-size replica of Han Solo trapped in carbonite-Charles’s first concern was making sure his LEGO Star Destroyer would be as close to film fidelity as possible.
Lego digital designer star wars ut at software#
He says he made the switch because the fan software felt similar to the professional programs he used at his animation job. Charles used Studio 2.0 for his Star Destroyer after struggling with LEGO Digital Designer, the LEGO Group’s in-house program. Today, fan-written LEGO programs like Bricksmith, LDraw, and Studio 2.0 allow builders to “try out ideas without needing to dig through your tub of LEGOs or go out and find parts at a garage sale,” says Jacob Moore, creative director at BrickLink, a LEGO fan forum, brick market, and publisher of the Studio 2.0 design program. Like most new LEGO projects, Charles’s ship materialized on a computer before he started clicking bricks together.
Lego digital designer star wars ut at movie#
Whether you’re looking for cutting-edge software to design your next project or a site that can generate a piece-by-piece instruction booklet, it’s likely out there, free for download.Ĭharles’s ship is accurate to the stud except for one thing: The bridge is four studs wider than movie scale. Throughout LEGO’s 62-year history, die-hards have always built wild, imaginative models from their plastic scrap heaps, but a new wave of fan-made digital resources has given builders the tools to craft custom models that rival the detail and integrity of official LEGO sets.
“I’ve seen one over 10 feet long.” His construction is distinct because it’s custom, the first such LEGO model he’s built.Ĭharles credits his Star Destroyer to a digital revolution transforming LEGO fandom.
“There are definitely bigger and more impressive LEGO Star Destroyers out there,” says Charles, 43, a senior technical animator in Raleigh, North Carolina. But it’s not the mass, weight, or obsessive detail that make Charles’s starship so remarkable.
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