Virtual Lego for Mac

Fairly successful Christmas shopping today. Got a brand new PSOne for �19.95 in John Lewis, who were also selling my Samsung laser printer for �99.95, which is more than double what I paid for it. That made me feel gooood. So I can play Wip3out, Toy Story 2 and be unbearably smug all at the same time.

I ended up in the Lego store. I passed by rows of great looking kits, even eschewed diving into the pick and mix (look at all those clear bricks! I could have an entire tub just of transparent bricks!), and pitched up at the checkout. I felt embarassed.

“This is the dullest thing in the entire shop,” I said, handing over a large grey base board (�7).

“But essential!” beamed the assistant, who’d probably seen me eyeing the Lego Millennium Falcon, and the reeling with laughter at the price tag (�100).

I got thinking about the neat bit of classic Mac software I saw yesterday at my son’s primary school, that let you build Lego models on the computer. When I got home I thought I’d have a quick Google to try to find it – I didn’t, but I found something very similar, and free.

Henry’s teacher had been telling me she doesn’t like Mac OS X much, and with so much Classic software running on their iMacs, I can see why. But I forgot to tell her about the cool free stuff you can get for OS X, like Audacity, TuxPaint, and now Mac Brick CAD.

Mac Brick CAD is freeware that allows you to make virtual Lego models, view, save and share them in LDraw format. You’ll never run out of bricks again. The bricks are free!

If you don’t like the fairly crude rendering of Mac Brick CAD, you can do
shinier, classier rendering in POV-Ray for Mac, like this image here. Oh, and POV-Ray is free as well.

Find out more about LDraw and Mac Brick CAD at the LDraw web site – just make sure you download the LDraw package first, or you won’t have any bricks to play with at all. There’s a whole world of virtual open-source Lego out there that I knew nothing about, and oodles of software for lots of platforms – including classic Macs. My only beef so far is that it doesn’t seem to support transparent bricks, which I’ve always had a strange thing about.

Now, I wonder how long it would take me to knock up a Millennium Falcon…