offsky

Hi guys. Thanks for the feedback. A "retired" color is one that is not currently available through LEGO's official Pick-a-brick store, but is still available through bricklink, or other 3rd party retailers. I am sorry that the demo site isn't working for you. It is still in beta and uses some bleeding edge browser technology. I will look into it. Our goal is to create a website ( brickapic.com ) where you can upload an image and purchase the kit including instructions, bricks, etc. So, the software will be server side and available via any modern web browser. Some of the important software features. There are a few steps to creating a good lego Mosaic. 1) Scale and crop. This is pretty basic, but the software will provide a way to crop and zoom into an image so that people don't have to do this ahead of time in an external image editor. 2) Posterize. This is the technical term for taking a true-color image and decreasing the number of colors that it uses (44 in our case) in a way that preserves the most details. This is where we really shine compared to the alternatives, because we use some good dithering algorithms and perceptual color math to get a really good effect. 3) Brick placement. We could use all 1x1 bricks, but that is tedious and more expensive than it needs to be, so we have an algorithm that intelligently places the bricks to maximize the size of the brick and minimize the total number of parts, to save on cost. 4) Instructions. We are still working on this part a little, but we will have some software that will produce some easy to follow instructions for assembling the mosaic. I hope that helps explain the project a little more. -Jake

Hi, Yes, there are several brick mosaic tools out there. We tried them all when building our software, and we think that our software does a more accurate job because it uses both current and retired LEGO colors. Most of the existing tools ignore the retired colors, so the final mosaic is less accurate. We also have a very good posterization and dithering algorithm that produces better results that the other tools we tested. Also, we will stock all the bricks, so you can purchase the kit with one order instead of piecing it together from several smaller bricklink orders, which can be annoying. But most importantly, our target audience is not necessarily LEGO experts who already know how to use CAD software and make bricklink orders. We are trying to make this a one-stop easy website for the proverbial "Grandma" to use to make LEGO mosaics of her grandkids.

Hi everyone, Sorry for the self promotion, but I think this will be interesting to you guys. I have created some software that can turn any image into a Lego Mosaic. I am trying to build a website around it so that anyone can use it. Right now, its a prototype and a Kickstarter project, but it can be a reality soon. Please check it out http://kck.st/1seNrR2 -Jake