I sincerely applaud everything ending up on IA. However, if you're searching for specific instructions brickinstructions is excellent as it is far more navigable. For a random example see Starguider¹. I wonder if someone has already scraped that site for IA, beyond simply praying to the Wayback Machine.
That is great. I could see a lot it was in the wayback machine, but I have no idea what the pipeline for that is. Poking around from your link was informative, thanks!
I admit to being a total sucker for Star Wars LEGO but I do love the classic sets with no “lore”. It’s some kind of space truck. People probably need trucks in space right? You figure it out kid.
Thank you for sharing this. I’m going to show it to my 6 year old and he’s going to lose his mind. Great way to make use of my massive box of childhood legos and empty summer hours.
When brickinstructions goes belly up, or just messes up its URLs for shits and giggles, you will need to go through archive.org to find out what used to be at that URL.
My kids being 4 and 6 means we’re full into Lego. I grew up with two brothers so we have like three hundred pounds of it. But lost most of the instructions.
It’s been amazing to go online and find any instruction and re-assemble these kits.
It also made me realize something: half the value of buying a kit these days is that you aren’t spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.
> It also made me realize something: half the value of buying a kit these days is that you aren’t spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.
What! That is the best part!
Wading through a mound of Lego has to be one of the most satisfying sounds I know, the clatter of a bajillion pieces of precision plastic, each with their different cavities and sonority, moving around each handful you scrape off to the side... Good times.
In the rare occasion I get a Lego set nowadays (no kids yet), the first thing I do is open every bag of pieces into a tray so I can do it on a smaller scale.
You will know no fury as when your kids intentionally mix up all the pieces for fun. We have hundreds of LEGO people, and my kids intentionally dismembered them into their individual pieces (including HANDS!). But how can you get angry at kids playing??? twitch
My daughter will be getting her own Lego and possibly a selection of mine. I organized mine for the first time in my life last year. Some of the sets I've had since the very late 80s and early 90s. Those aren't getting lost :P
She can play with them supervised, but she'll have her own. This is all assuming she's even interested, she's only 2 so who knows yet.
Mine is also two and really into Duplo, so Lego will be a natural progression, especially considering that the blocks are compatible, so I wholeheartedly recommend it.
Also some the ones she's playing with are currently over 30 years old and still going.
I think having sets that you like to keep together and you don't want to mix up is fine. Too many people saw the Lego Movie and took it to mean that keeping sets as sets is bad. Note that the person you responded to isn't stopping their kids even as they cause more destruction than the Lego Movie showed, they're simply complaining about it here because what _they_ had is gone.
Yes, let kids mix and match and play. But also acknowledge that we all play differently, and for some people having a model of something that they built is where the fun lies. People who like organization can still have fun, let's not shame them for their preferences.
Uhhh... the GP was written in a kinda funny way, so it just seemed fitting to plug a reference to the movie. If you want to keep sets together, power to you. My kids have a mixture of both (sets they want to keep as is and a mountain of pieces from other sets) and... that's just fine.
The word 'Grüschteling' is a German word used by German Lego fans. It is used to describe the distinctive sound made when you sift through a large bucket of Lego, trying to find the right piece.
One of my "core memories" wrt Lego is meticulously spending days sorting small parts into some of those Sterilite multi-drawer things and then knocking it over, spilling all my hard work onto the floor and undoing it.
I was probably 8 or 9. From that point on, fuck it, they all go in one big box. My brothers and I would compete to see who could find the most valuable pieces. Mostly treasure chest coins, little gems, and basically anything translucent qualified - transparent single stud pieces, cone pieces, and lightsaber beams were very high value, since one could not build a respectable Lego sci-fi arsenal without all of them.
I'm guessing that back in the day it all came in one bag?
When I built Titantic last year (first Lego I'd done in maybe 30 years) it was split out over dozens of small bags, and all the parts you'd need for one section would be in that one bag with no more than, say, 200 pieces in it. Often there's be a smaller bag inside for holding the 1x1 stuff.
So I built the whole thing with two tupperware containers..one decent size square "bowl" and s much smaller one for the tiny stuff.
Killed a month off and on putting that thing together. I was recovering from foot surgery so stuck in bed.
Luckily, the Titanic actually builds as 6 sections, with 3 pairs that join more or less permanently, while there are then a couple of pins and rods that hold the whole thing together (along with a rather clever tensioning gear... the main lines are there as strings, and do hang in a true catenary. )
So each of the 6 sections I basically built on a hardback book.
I tend to remember multiple bags, but I don't remember seeing the numbered bags where you only opened one at a time until I bought a few sets as an adult. That seems like a relatively modern thing.
Anyway like I said, we definitely always built the kit per the instructions first, it's just that the impulse to keep a TIE fighter a TIE fighter was never stronger than the impulse to build something new.
Ha! That was a common competition between me and my friend around that age too.
He is very fortunate to be part of a reasonably affluent family, so he had like 6 60-liter boxes full of assorted Lego.
We would spill a couple at a time (who am I kidding we spilled all of them) on the floor, when the flow of pieces stopped, the game was on! So many arguments about the nature of the simple shapes, like "oh no this isn't a blue lightsaber, it is a cylinder of pure diamond!"
I recently had the realization... I've carried this enjoyment onwards into how I store parts for hobbies. While I use compartmentalized containers for things, compartments are still a mix of parts. I can search for quite a while without getting frustrated, just knowing, "those servo mounting brackets are in one of these two containers in the garage..."
I don't buy or aspire to own new Lego as an adult, but I'm still basically doing the same thing I did as a kid: every time I decide to do a hardware project is me digging through my bins of assorted parts instead Lego parts.
Oh and of course, my desk is perpetually just as messy as the floor was as a kid, and I'm often fidgeting seeing how random things do/don't fit together.
(also, also... building the set? nah, building my own things without instructions, and similarly writing my own code...)
Agree! My partner disagrees though. She wants the LEGO organized by color or set. I find this blasphemous. It’s legit harder for me to find pieces when they’re sorted like this. My brain is tuned with specialized LEGO bin stirring techniques that reliably turn up what I need… but that doesn’t work at all when the piece has been squirreled away where it “belongs”!
> Wading through a mound of Lego has to be one of the most satisfying sounds I know
There are two sounds I associate with Lego. The one you describe and the other.
The words you can find and the tone you utter them with when you unexpectedly stand on a piece, or even better, when you kneel on a bit when trying to find the tv remote.
> It also made me realize something: half the value of buying a kit these days is that you aren’t spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.
It's a bit of work but I found enjoyment in sorting my old childhood Lego. Don't do colors, do categories (bricks, slopes, plates, etc). Once done, I could complete my old childhood models even faster than the unsorted ones you buy new. It also lowers the threshold to break it down and build something else since it's so easy to find the parts. On the downside, it takes more space than a single bin.
>>*half the value of buying a kit these days is that you aren’t spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.*
Are you NUTS?
Are you trying to shame my 1980s values with LEGO?
"I KNOW that FN piece is in here!!!! I JUST SAW IT!!!!"
You're robbing your kids of a life lesson. and better image recognition, memory, sorting processing thoughts, etc.
There are so many lessons embedded in working with LEGO that can only be learnt through the frustration of a F-ton of brix in a bin and your looking for that specific 1x2 -- or worse yet, 1x1 smooth piece.
I used to buy things in bulk from LEGO at the mall in San Jose and just have bins of smooth pieces and other were parts...
I get what you're saying, but in a large pile, finding the right piece is easily 10x harder now because the number of unique LEGO parts is much, much higher than when you and I were kids.
You need a rule that you cannot mix more than 2000 pieces from different kits. Basically 1/3 of those organizer boxes. A balance between search ability and organization, otherwise you get in these situations where it’s not feasible to rebuild a kit that you have, it’s like mixing different engine parts and expect to build that same engine
> you aren't spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.
I guess that's for people who have a specific thing in mind that they wanted to build. I find a lot fun just picking out random pieces and then thinking about where to attach them afterwards.
I disagree. A whole bunch about Lego is the search. I was recently reintroduced by my son (5) and the fun of searching for what we want to try to complete a build - and occasionally redesigning due to what we find - is amazing.
Also helps him learn to adjust on the fly, which is a great thing to learn at a young age.
I have been building with my 6yo, and he has the traditional giant bin where all the sets of Creator pack of assorted bricks, plus the sets from Ninjago and Spider Man and Minecraft and various cars and so on all get disassembled after about 3 days for him to dig through.
More recently, I also got out my old boxes of Knex, which I'd put away a decade ago by sorting the parts by color into about a dozen quart-size ziploc bags (there are far fewer variants of Knex than of Lego, even ignoring the myriad custom tiles and stickers). He was THRILLED to have them all sorted, and for more than a month now - probably a dozen sessions of use - has put them back in the right bags. It's like pulling teeth to get him to keep his art supplies organized, those can just be piled in a heap, it can take two hours for him to do his laundry, typical playtime with friends is an explosion of toys from bins, but it is critical that the Knex go in the right bag even during use.
After seeing that, I got a compartmentalized organizer that used to hold fishing tackle, dumped all the tackle in the big tackle box, and washed it, and he has been keeping "the good Legos" in that. If you're curious, it turns out that the good Lego are the wheels, propellers, blocks with pins to connect to those wheels and propellers, the Technik couplers, the Ninjago transparent flames, especially the Ninjago spring-loaded bolt gun thing, and the Minecraft character heads Not the character bodies, not the Iron Man head, not even the ones that look like him and Mom and Dad, just Minecraft heads - everything else can go in the bin. I think he made a good selection, builds just seem to go together faster when those parts are available. In particular he used to need help on occasion to find the right wheels - everything seems to need wheels - and now he has them.
I’ll have to check it out again. Last time it looked like it wanted a subscription.
I would just like to pay once for an app that 100% offline scans for blocks. Let me pick an instruction book and begin pointing out pieces to me that belong in the set.
Probably an age thing, but I’ve never understood the point of Lego instructions. Or the sets.
The whole point of Lego was creative free form building. Remove that & it’s dull as hell. It just becomes model building with poor quality models as the result.
I’m happy other people find it fun, but to me it misses the entire point in favor of weak licensed “kits”.
For us growing up, the point of the sets was that you got a cool spaceship or whatever, which you would put your personal Lego guy into, park near your "base", and play with until some other project demanded the parts. Then it would be disassembled mercilessly and consigned to the bin as grist for the constantly evolving construction project laid out on our much-abused air hockey table.
If a set was a particularly cool build, we might disassemble it and then rebuild it - but most of the time, once something got taken apart, no one was ever going to bother trying to reconstruct it from the manual, since doing so would have involved finding all 500 necessary pieces in the mega-bin.
Some people want to play with playsets. Some people want to display models. Some people want to create art. Some people want to construct machines. Some people want to assert allegiance. Some people want to collect.
All of these aims are valid. The diversity of ways to buy LEGO supports them all, while maintaining a high-quality, largely compatible, reasonably consistent medium.
In recent years, there is a general drift towards "collectible display models". This means that the piece count in most sets is inflated by a majority of small "finishing" pieces. The models are finicky to build with lots of unusual building techniques (attaching bricks on sidewalls, for example) and are not easy to repurpose into something else in a reasonable amount of time.
In the 1990s, it was a "construction toy" first, playset second, display model last. A kid could take any set and rebuild it into something else in an hour or so. Now, they would need more time only to sort the tiny 1x1 pieces before starting to build anything.
> In recent years, there is a general drift towards "collectible display models"
I think there is an actually an "addition" here rather than a change. You're an adult conversing with adults (I assume) and therefore the discussions you have and the marketing you see are more about sets targeted to AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego).
The classic Lego childhood lines (Lego City) still exist and still work just as well for play and creative construction as they ever did - and they don't use a lot of 1x1s. It's just that we've also gained these new lines of large adult sets that never used to exist.
Even the vehicles in 5+ City sets are affected by this trend. It takes about 50 parts stacked in intricate ways just to build the base chassis structure of a van, for example.
In the 1990s, Town vehicles were 4-stud wide and didn't focus on the small detailing. The instructions for the original vehicle were just a single sheet of paper with less than 20 steps. You could build the original vehicle by memory after having built it a couple of times with instructions. The back of the box suggested alternative builds, which, although looking "imperfect" were a solid base for imagination.
Once they've got a few sets like that, the rebuilding into unspecified stuff seems to come naturally (at least with the cousins and friends kids I've played with).
Those complex sets are great for stimulating certain types of spatial reasoning, perseverance, and fine motor skills. My four year old went from 'building a tractor (60287) with dad helping' to 'building 5+ kits all by himself'.
The kits don't stop him from just building his own stuff either. The two forms of play seem complimentary.
See, I love all those detail bits. I love to make tiny, intricate models that say a lot in a small space. I love grabbing a couple of random gribbly bits, sticking them together, deciding they look like the beginning of something, then sticking on more bits to make it more like the thing.
The "voxel sculpture" style where you just stack (mostly) rectangular bricks into a shape is perfectly valid, but it's less interesting to me personally.
Modern Lego supports both. Both are valid. They still sell big brick buckets, and no one's stopping you from buying one of those and doing your thing.
What I'd really like to see is a "brick bucket" that contains mostly large bricks and maybe a few doors, windows, and slanted tiles. I'm all for gribbly bits, but it seems harder to accumulate a good collection of the basics these days - because the big "brick buckets" you describe are probably half gribbly bits. In my experience as a kid, what we really wanted was enough mass to build walls and houses and forts, and were not as interested in small detail stuff.
That looks pretty good actually, but now I'm going to move the goalposts and wish for a similar box with less color variety so that you can build, for example, a white house with a red roof, instead of having to cobble together various colors.
Still though, I just might have to top off the kids collection with one of these boxes. Good find.
Lego nailed it in 1980 with the 8860 Auto Chassis, IMO. It does all of those things in a nice balance with piece count of 662 (for a 57 cm long car) and IMO still ends up looking better than today's 3000 piece models.
The 1x1 sticker tiles sort themselves by granular convection [1] to the bottom of a Rubbermaid tote just like the sunflower seeds in a snack mix. In our house, they frequently get neglected except as gems/coins/treasure to fill a pirate chest. The large plates and bricks float to the top during shaking and digging.
I'm in my early forties but I still grew up with instructions and sets. Usually I'd assemble a set and probably learn a thing or two along the way, then I'd tear the sets down and build stuff myself.
As a father of three, that's exactly how I see my kids using the sets today. The sets get built once, then they get torn down and the bricks get reused.
I personally agree about the whole point of Lego being free form building - and I still have some Lego magazines from the days when that was explicitly encouraged by Lego - but you need kits and instructions to get to the point where you can do free form building. It's like composing music, you're going to have a very difficult time of it if you don't first study a whole lot of existing, well-constructed music.
Neither did I till I had a kid. My kid loves following instructions, builds a set a few times, then he goes into creative mode and builds his own way. Instructions helped my kid learn the basics of instruction following which is a good skill to have for a 5 year old.
The purpose of the instructions is to learn the techniques. First you build with the instructions, then you tear it apart and build what you want.
Not everyone is into the instructions -- my daughter follows them meticulously and will only build with instructions. My son refuses to follow instructions and will only "master build".
When I was a kid I'd build with the instructions, and eventually I destroyed everything and built a whole city from scratch.
Growing up, myself and my siblings built sets when we first got them as gifts, but after that they went in the pile. We would build whatever was in our imagination, from the multicolored heap.
Now I have my own kids, and they all want to build sets from instructions. The odd time we'll dive into the pile of orphaned bits and build a house or a boat or something, but mostly they want to recreate what they remember. My wife spends hours finding all the pieces of a set and bagging them up for the kids to build later (so she's gonna love this)
It's tempting to say "kids nowadays" but I think it's just different personality types. In other media, my kids are far more creative and imaginative than I ever was, but with Lego sets they prefer to recreate the perfect image than make a hodge podge thing that never existed.
The fun of building new sets off instructions is the satisfying-ness. You know the instructions are correct, that no pieces are missing and all pieces click together satisfyingly into the result, that looks and feels nice. Each click is satisfying.
It is a whole lot different from tinkering with arduino hats/sw, as frustration can creep in if things don't work as expected.
I like both. I think Lego sets are in many ways my first experience of technical documentation and I still use those skills. It also helped me learn about how sets went together so I could design my own. Finally, I wanted to play with what was on the box.
> The whole point of Lego was creative free form building. Remove that & it’s dull as hell.
The point is that Lego can be played with in a bunch of ways. It's parts that you can do whatever with, and it has instructions for one or more models that you can make. Some people like the sheer possibilities of making things up, and some people find that daunting. Lego supports both, and anything in between.
Following the instructions does teach you techniques that you can use on designing your own builds. It's a way to learn from experts.
How they reuse molds in Lego models is crazy. I have a model with a pagoda, that uses bananas for the points on the eaves. My favorite is the orchid model, where the smaller orchid blossoms are demigorgon heads from the Stranger Things sets.
I am in-between - so, the way I used instructions was for ideas on how things could be put together that were "non-obvious".
I would build it once, then play with that model for a bit, then deconstruct it, put it into my box of loose LEGO and then build whatever I wanted - sometimes it would look similar, but it was never the same way twice.
I fail to understand expensive sets that get built and sit on shelves or in glass enclosures... Might as well break out the Kragle (I think many people failed to see the point of that movie...)
I'm with you. I remember my childhood experience with Legos. Me and a friend down the road would drag out this big bucket full of random stuff. We'd build forts, and then crazy many-wheeled trucks that would assault them.
The whole thing was about those designs just springing from the imagination, and I really don't get what fun building toward a prescribed design would be, especially since it's so low fidelity.
There are no 'models' to build, and the "instructions" that come with it are more a discussion of architectural principles, as adapted for Lego as needed.
Yeah we never had sets or instructions as a kid (of the 80s). But now doing sets it's pretty relaxing, fun, easy. It's a puzzle. Eventually everything ends up in a heap like other comments mention. I imagine once the heap is big enough we'll go back to creative free form building with the variety of generic and tailored pieces we've accrued.
Free building is great, but my experience is that my young son also wants to build his sense of competence - following the steps correctly, fixing mistakes, and making something exactly like the picture. Sure, he plays with it for a minute and then tears it apart to make something original - but, like you said, that’s the beauty of Lego.
I love following instructions. It's so relaxing for me to just follow without having to figure anything out. Building my own stuff with Lego would be a completely different thing and I never enjoyed that, probably because I'm not very good at it.
It gives you a core set of patterns for going off on your own and building. Think of it as lego practice that shows you a neat model at the end you can then scrap :)
I didn’t. That’s my point. Kits were rare (usually just suggestions with a slight subset of blocks) and most “sets” were 100s of pieces & so infinite options to build.
Now that’s still available but VERY much tertiary.
One of these days, I want to learn enough computer vision to write an LEGO instruction booklet to LCAD convertor that could be fed old instructions and generate a 3D model of the set. An archive of the instructions is nice, but a virtual archive of sets would be nicer.
Over the last several years I've made a habit of downloading PDF manuals for many things I own and saving them in a Google Drive folder for safe-keeping.
You never know when you need one until you do and it's a nightmare if you lost it!
My old man recently got a bunch of boxes from my childhood out of his, including multiple tubs of mixed Lego and a box of incomplete instructions. This will prove to be a valuable resource in the coming months, thank you very much!
I keep staring at all the artwork included on some of the early Bionicle instructions and I love that dark mysterious island aesthetic.
I was sad not to see the original Technic Super Car. It had a working V8, 4 wheel drive with 4 wheel steering and 3 way differential, and even an actual gear box with shifter. You could see the pistons pump when you pushed it around. One of the best birthday presents I ever asked for.
I had Test Car 8865, which was quite a bit more primitive but still fairly complete (a 4 cylinder reciprocating engine in a V configuration, a 3 speed transmission, a working rear differential, working front and rear double wishbone suspension, rack and pinion steering, retractable headlights, and adjustable and reclining seats)
That was an amazing set. The first one I bought from my own hard-saved cash as a kid. Really fun to build and amazing (and informative) to see the working steering, differential, suspension, and gear train assemblies.
I have this set laying around, mostly complete. Should really rebuild it someday!
I was dreamed about this set back in mid-90s. Unfortunately my parents wasn't able to afford it, and I only had small and mid sets and not a single "technics" set.
So I was doomed to re-read a paper catalog countless times hoping someday I'll get it.
Do you know the set number?
There is a "Super Car" in Technic with set number 8070, available in the archive.
Not sure about the steering and differential, but it seems to feature a V8 and a stick shift.
Internet Archive is a great resource, but man the interface sucks. Part of it’s because there’s no good way browse online, and part of it is because the search is broken. Indexing so much data in such diverse formats with questionable or missing metadata is hard. I’d love a better interface, but I also suspect that a crappy interface is what help IA stay alive. There’s plenty of legally questionable data hosted there if you know where to look.
It wasn't until I started buying Lego for myself (in my 20s) that I learned that Lego came with instructions. When I was a kid my parents would open the box and discard the instructions before giving it to me.
Back then (60s/70s) the sets were quite general and open ended. Modern day Lego has the thinking done ahead of time, and has too many specialised pieces.
This is definitely a “get off my lawn” comment. Creativity with Lego has never been more vibrant. I encourage you to visit your local Lego fan convention, or explore one of the many online forums where people share their “MOCs.”
Those “specialized” pieces are incredible fodder for sculpting. Check out newelementary.com to see some examples.
Agreed - the constraints of a limited set of bricks really forced creativity.
However, there's been a huge paradigm shift in terms of what is "allowed" as far as odd brick placements so the realm of what's possible to build has expanded at least as much as the inventory of brick options.
Now if someone would just make an app that can figure out which set my bricks belong to. I have at least two sets that I can't find the instructions for, because I have no idea what they're called or which number they have. The bricks are fairly unique, they can't be in more than 10 sets.
You can try to find the parts that stand out on bricklink[0], which will point you to the sets they were used in. It's pretty quick, once you figure out what the part can be called or what category it fits in.
If you can't figure it out, you can ask for help on the "bricks" StackExchange site[1].
I've attempted to find some sets based on a single complicated brick and it can be challenging. How do I find the "official" name of the brick based on my own vague description [0]? What is the true color? How do I find special printed bricks? I'm sure with practice it gets easier. How open is bricks stack exchange to posting just an image of a brick with not much more to go on?
[0]: As an example, here the description of a brick I struggled to name. I've since figured it out, but you are welcome to guess: flat 4x1 with bumps only on the ends (yes, "bumps", because I don't know what the technical term is. Again, I'm sure there's a guide or glossary I could find.)
I have a palette of bricks of known color to calibrate against. If you've got a good number of sets, you'll likely start to accumulate things that are only in a few colors. If possible, it's nice to switch those up with a 1x2 brick in that color for consistency and because the 1x2s are stable on the large area maps.
> As an example, here the description of a brick I struggled to name. I've since figured it out, but you are welcome to guess: flat 4x1 with bumps only on the ends (yes, "bumps", because I don't know what the technical term is. Again, I'm sure there's a guide or glossary I could find.)
You kind of work up to it. There are very small and hard to read numbers on a lot of the parts that helps sometimes. Searching for 1x4, ignore printed parts, shows 230 parts on rebrickable (other sites may vary), looking through all those pictures gets me to "Plate Special 1 x 4 with 2 Studs" [1]. I don't think there's a brick like this, or I can't find it, just the plate; but then you didn't know the magic terminology that the flat pieces (1/3rd height) are plates, not bricks. Had I properly interpreted your description, I'd have jumped to the plates, special category, and skipped the search.
> How open is bricks stack exchange to posting just an image of a brick with not much more to go on?
Judging by the 623 answered questions with the "part-identification" tag (out of 636)[0], I'd say pretty open. A lot of them are just what you are asking for, people helping IDing a single part from a picture. Some are much more specific, asking about minor variations on parts, and still get a detailed answer a lot of the time.
I'm sure there was a brick scanning app that appeared a while ago, or try and find a number and enter it on Lego site [1], otherwise post a picture on BrickLink and I'm sure someone will know what it is! Then you can look on BrickLink or Rebrickable to find sets that it came from
I'm surprised there's no copyright notice on these instruction booklets. Has LEGO ever stated that their booklets are freely reproducible or is this a gray area?
Note: I'm talking about the layout and graphics of the booklets themselves, not the logical instructions (i.e. recipe book versus recipes).
Oh man, this sent me down a trip to memory lane. I had a lot of the Spyrius set as a little kid, and I loved them to bits. I just looked up how much they'd cost to buy them again, and they're like $1000 a pop :o
You may be able to (entirely legally) part out the sets on bricklink, buy the generic bricks from webrick, and buy the specific bricks from bricklink sellers. This will be substantially cheaper and it’s an onboard into non-Lego building bricks which have gotten really good in the last few years. The glut of vendors selling copied Lego sets has given the field a bad name, but the brick design is out of patent and there are many sellers designing their own sets as well as selling MOCs.
can we create an AI that has knowledge of the size, shape, color and name of each lego brick ever made??? We then feed it 3d renders and select a desired model scale (ex: 1:4 scale), and it prints out a lists of each piece you will need, as well as instruction/brick location to assemble an item that looks similar from lego parts.
¹ https://lego.brickinstructions.com/m/lego_instructions/set/6...