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In Lego store, and on many photos on the Internet, I've seen vertical "rocky" walls made of slopes and simple 2x1 bricks. For example this one.

Is there a software that would take wall length and generate a semi-random rocky-looking wall? Something similar to sphere generators we all know and love?

Designing such wall by hand in LDD is a time consuming and not really funny task, and I'd like to avoid it, if possible.

Note: I tried dropping models from Thingiverse to Brickify, but Brickify does not use slopes and there is problem with scale.

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  • Interesting idea, but I think most people would use just the parts they had on hand. It might not be too difficult to design something that produces a pseudo-random rock face, but it's another issue to have that be translated into brick form. If anyone has created something like this before, it probably would have been a procedural generator for The LEGO Movie.
    – Ambo100 ♦
    Commented Feb 21, 2018 at 11:41
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    @Ambo100 Well, I was thinking more like Pick by brick shopping list. And I doubt Lego (stores and movies) does it all by hand, but of course they may be reluctant to release their tools.
    – Mołot
    Commented Feb 21, 2018 at 11:50
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    I'm not aware of anything that does this, but I am working on a project that uses a customizable context-free grammar to describe connections between Lego bricks. Once the grammar is defined, an algorithm can be used to "grow" interconnected shapes to meet certain parameters. It should be possible to procedurally generate a rock face this way, but I'm not there yet.
    – jncraton ♦
    Commented Feb 21, 2018 at 21:47
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    @jncraton I would be very interested in seeing that. I have some ideas based on genetic algorithms, but I'm at the "sketch of a sketch" stage. Sadly, my ideas are more about solving "how to put bricks I already have" than about preparing shopping lists I wanted.
    – Mołot
    Commented Feb 22, 2018 at 9:20
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    @Mołot I'll definitely post an update here if I get anywhere. In the meantime, you may be interested in an older project of mine: github.com/jncraton/procedural-bricks
    – jncraton ♦
    Commented Feb 23, 2018 at 16:18

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I was able to integrate this into a research project applying context free grammars:

PCFG rock face

This is not a polished software package, and the design is a bit esoteric given that I started with the goal of applying context free grammars to a practical problem. Hopefully there's something in there that may be useful to someone. :)

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  • 3
    Looks amazing. Pretty close to what I hoped for.
    – Mołot
    Commented Apr 13, 2018 at 15:43

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