LEGO Prototyping With Tinkercad’s Brick Mode

[Andrew Sink] made a brief video demonstrating how he imported an STL of the well-known 3D Benchy tugboat model, and instead of sending it to a 3D printer used the Brick Mode feature to make a physical copy out of LEGO bricks in an eye-aching kaleidoscope of colors.

For those of you who haven’t used Tinkercad lately, Brick Mode allows you to represent a model as LEGO bricks at various scales. You model something as usual (or import a model) and by pushing a single button, render it in LEGO as accurately as can be done with standard bricks.

In addition, [Andrew] shows how the “Layers” feature can be used as a makeshift assembly guide for the model, albeit with a couple of quirks that he explains in the video embedded below.

LEGO can be useful for prototyping, so once you’ve sorted all your LEGO blocks with the aid of a DIY machine and converted a few motors to be LEGO compatible, you might want to give this new feature a whirl.

12 thoughts on “LEGO Prototyping With Tinkercad’s Brick Mode

  1. I want to design LEGO barrier strip (terminal block) with screws in the holes along the top. I’m no expert on CAD for 3D printing though, and I wonder if it’s too ambitious of a project to start off. If someone else designs it, I’d be happy to buy it on Tindie.

    1. Depending what you want and how much. But you could design it by yourself quite easily
      1) Buy the smallest terminal block possible and take the metal part out.
      2) Check out tinkercad – It took me 20min to teach a group of 12year olds how to use it
      3) Download LEGO 2×4 brick model from thingiverse
      4) substract the metal part from the brick
      5) send the model to imaterialise/shapeways or some other printing service.

  2. “For those of you who haven’t used Tinkercad lately, Brick Mode allows you to represent a model as LEGO bricks at various scales. You model something as usual (or import a model) and by pushing a single button, render it in LEGO as accurately as can be done with standard bricks.”

    I wouldn’t be surprised if people did use it for Minecraft.

  3. It would be great if it had some few tweaks, like:
    – Count how many pieces are needed for each model (separating them by type)
    – Offer different types of “lego” pieces, (besides the standard 1×1, 2.2, 3×2, 4×2, etc.) that would be selected or unselected before the generation of the model “legofied”
    – Choose colors, similar to a 3D paint tool, but painting by blocks.
    Maybe if I learn to program in script, I can make something similar for the 3ds Max, in the future. ;-)

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