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Ok, last one. This has been on my mind for a long time.
Ever since I saw Dr. John V. Muntean’s dragon/butterfly/plane shadow build about 10 years ago, I knew there needed to be a tool to help create things like it. This is my attempt:
https://steelcitylug.com/brickscubed/If you’re not familiar with his shadow sculpture, I highly recommend looking at it before trying the tool:
The basic idea is that you can create a brick-built cube/sculpture that casts different projected images from different angles. You can start from shapes or text, and there’s also drawing functionality so you can modify the projected image directly. It doesn’t strictly have to be used as a “shadow tool” either. You can also use it to design carved-out cube forms or other voxel-style LEGO models.
One feature I’m especially excited about: you can export the generated model as an .ldr file and import it into BrickLink Studio. From there, you can inspect the build, make adjustments, and generate building instructions.A few screenshots are attached.
This is still very much an early version. There are lots of tweaks I already know I want to make, and I’m sure there are rough edges I haven’t found yet. I’d really appreciate feedback, bug reports, weird edge cases, and ideas from anyone willing to try it out.
Maddie says she wants to build one, so I might be going through a test case to see how the instructions and structural integrity hold up.
There’s probably an existential conversation to be had about my motivations and how this fits for steel city lug apart from me, which we can talk about. At a high level though, it’s a tool available for member inspiration and eventually will let other lugs have their own copy, if they’re interested. There’s probably even an end goal thought of is this bridging into 3D printing art or distracting from human creativity, but I’m too sober for that kind of poetic wax today.
That’s a clever project. I noticed in the video that the guy had his sculpture mounted on a metal rod so he could rotate it. That’s another level of complication.
Just looking at the cube, that could probably be built without needing software, but it would have to be hollow all the way through and I assume the words would have to be backwards on opposing sides. I can’t grasp how the cube could be rotated to show the three separate words as shadow, but an internal light source and three separate outer walls might work.
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