Ah, good old Lego™. I remember how much fun I had with that as a kid…I’d probably still do, if there weren’t three major drawbacks to it:
1. The difference between a Lego™ brick and a bar of gold: the brick is made of plastic, but the bar of gold is cheaper.
2. You never have enough bricks.
3. Building with Legos™ involves getting away from your computer.
Enter the dedicated people of LDraw.org! Thanks to their efforts to produce and maintain a freeware Lego™ CAD software package, including a practically all-encompassing parts library and rendering interface, you can now build virtual scenes that would require thousands of bricks in real life. Then, render photo-realistic pictures that make the stuff look just like real…uh…plastic – as seen above (from Cityscape 3: Bus Stop in the Summer Sun by Niels Bugge).
Finally, being a Lego™ dork can be integrated seamlessly into the computer nerd lifestyle.
Just in case I left out any™ signs in this article, here are some spares: (tm) (tm) (tm)
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