I had all these beautiful design elements that wouldn’t fit if I made it smaller, and I couldn’t bear to lose them.”Īfter 11 months, Charles’s design was finished, and Studio 2.0 gave him a parts list of almost 20,000 individual bricks, which he uploaded into a fan-written inventory software called BrickStock.īrickStock is connected to a database of every type of individual brick the LEGO Group has ever produced. “But I had to give in and make it about four studs too wide. “I wanted it to be proportionally accurate,” he says. I just hoped it would stick without breaking apart.”Ĭharles’ biggest design challenge (and concession) was the ship’s bridge-the oblong hexagon that towers above the wedge-like body. Every time I designed something, I had to find places to hook it together. “I jumped back and forth a lot between crafting the aesthetically pleasing parts of the model-the plating and turrets-and refining the superstructure underlying it all. “Of the 15 months I spent designing and building this thing, most were spent in this software,” he says. Once he had the hull mapped out, he moved on to the specifics.

“That triggered a lot of the other choices I had to make about proportions.”Ĭharles acquired a publicly available 3D scan of the A New Hope Imperial Star Destroyer and overlaid it into Studio 2.0 to design the skeleton of his build. “I decided at the beginning I wanted the whole thing to be 5 feet long,” says Charles. Given that the ship is shaped like an acute triangle, precision with the structure’s angles was paramount. “I hadn’t tried a project like this because I thought I’d need all the parts in front of me,” he says.Īs a collector and hobbyist-crafter of Star Wars props-Charles just finished a life-size replica of Han Solo trapped in carbonite-Charles’s first concern was making sure his LEGO Star Destroyer would be as close to film fidelity as possible. He says he made the switch because the fan software felt similar to the professional programs he used at his animation job. Charles used Studio 2.0 for his Star Destroyer after struggling with LEGO Digital Designer, the LEGO Group’s in-house program. Today, fan-written LEGO programs like Bricksmith, LDraw, and Studio 2.0 allow builders to “try out ideas without needing to dig through your tub of LEGOs or go out and find parts at a garage sale,” says Jacob Moore, creative director at BrickLink, a LEGO fan forum, brick market, and publisher of the Studio 2.0 design program.

Like most new LEGO projects, Charles’s ship materialized on a computer before he started clicking bricks together.

Lego custom star wars ships