The LEGO Digital Designer

Now you can play with LEGOs at work.

Overall score:

I've been playing with the program for a couple weeks now, and having successfully broken the $1000 mark on the fee required to purchase the LEGO bricks for my particular design, I think I've reached a point where I can talk intelligently about the ups and downs of this software.

The very idea of this software existing is very cool. Cool enough to spend hours with. And I've enjoyed it. So even though this is largely going to talk about all the thinks that it doesn't do, I just want you to know that it gets about 8 stars (out of 10) for just allowing you to build LEGO creations with any LEGO ever.

Which is where we reach our first complaint. There are LEGO bricks in the menu that I'd never conceived of. I know there's a faction of LEGO purists who insist that if the brick isn't rectangular, it's too specialized. These people are nutters, however. It's awesome to have them all here. However! while the number of shapes is overwhelming, it's not complete -- the base plates in particular are... well, non-existant. Not completely, but there are only three, and the largest one is like 16x32. That's tiny. My ziggarat monstrosity is 92x69 (all measurements are in "bumps") if you take it as square.

I'll follow up with a minor thing. There's a neat feature where you can put it on a background. But there are only 5 photos, and you can't add your own. On top of that, you're allowed to "explode" the LEGOs, which makes the bricks all disconnect and spin and expand, like a LEGO Big Bang singularity. For both, the screen shot takes a shot of the base model, not the chaotic swirling LEGO mass or even the background photo. (And come on, you know you wanted to see an exploding LEGO ziggarat in space).

You can move the hinges and other LEGO pieces meant to be moved (like wheels), but some testing show this to be a bit buggy. It doesn't always reclose all the way. I'm not sure what causes this.

There's a lot of functionality I'd really like to see added in. Stats would be a huge help. Number of bricks, broken up by size and/or color would be fun to know. And it would be helpful for there to be hideable signifiers for the dimentions of portions of it.

The selection tool leaves a lot to be desired. There are a lot of ways to select matching types of bricks. The most helpful are single brick, adding a brick to what you have selected, and selecting all connected bricks (even more helpful if you're building complex bits like my little mutant plant here). You can also select all bricks of the same shape, same color, or same shape AND same color. There are problems though. While you can just hold CTRL and grab several bricks, you can't do something like select all connected bricks, and then hold CTRL and grab a different set of connected bricks in the same selection. It sounds silly, but it's come up several times more often than I thought it would.

I would also like some rudimentary intelligence in the program to recognize differences and similarities in things like proximity, angles, and color changes for the program to select portions of the model, regardless of connected status.

Now, for the delicate issue of color. Now, partially color is limited to simplify programming, I would think, but also because, frankly, the Digital Designer is a marketing scheme. They want you to design something, and then like it so much you want to build it in real life. For this purpose, you can create building instructions (for print out, though they're not nearly as handy as official LEGO productions) and submit your model to LEGO.com.... where they will put the pieces together and ship them to you (if you pay, of course). The price is way off the scale of even their prepackaged sets, which I love, but still think are too expensive already. But it can be done. However, there are a few pieces available for use that aren't available to buy. So... why not more?

In my opinion, you should be able to make any piece any color you want. I don't see why not, honestly.

It's also irritating that you can't change more than one brick's color at a time, en masse, even if they are all exactly the same shape (so would have the same colors available).

The big thing, though, is LEGO placement. It can be a right pain to get a brick in the exact right place when you've got a large model. Sometimes the smallest movement of your mouse can throw the brick off by a huge amount. The view controls are excellent, but moving the brick itself... not so much. There need to be keyboard controls that move the bricks one brick's worth vertically, horizontally, etc. It would go a LONG way to making these easy to work with.

But while I'm fantasizing, let me just add that it would be nice if there was a "fill up this space" option, whereupon the LDD would ask about relevant variables and then fill it up the most efficient way (either in number of bricks or "cost"). This could be 2d space, like a wall, or a 3d space, using "fatter" LEGOs. It would save a lot of time on major projects.

Anyway, that's my evaluation. Really more a list of complaints I know, but it's only because I love it and don't want to get irritated by it. LDD3 will hopefully improve the user experience. We'll see.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a plan for a giant space ship I need to start on...

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Written by SaintEhlers on October 06th, 2009