The latest update to Bricklink’s Studio – 2.1.8 – has been released. There are a host of improvements, but the big new feature is a Mosaic maker. Lego mosaics are nothing new, but they’ve gained popularity in the last couple of years with, first, the Lego Store Mosaic Maker and, more recently, the release of the Lego Art range.
The Studio mosaic option is available as an icon along the top toolbar. It brings up a window where you can upload an image, choose the scale and decide whether you want to crop it.
Clicking the Mosaic tab shows you broadly what the image will look like as a Lego mosaic. A whole host of options let you select the colour scheme, tune the palette and decide how wide a range of colours are used. You can also choose whether plates, tiles or bricks are used and whether tiles and plates are round or square. At the bottom is shown an estimated part cost if you were to buy everything from Bricklink.
Tuning these options can be absolutely crucial to how good the final mosaic looks. Not only that, but it can have a massive effect on cost. In the Homer Simpson example above, the estimated cost varied from 453 dollars to as low as 2 dollars! You can see the differences in the 4 images below.
One neat option is that you can specify a custom palette. This could be useful if you bought a bulk load of tiles or plates and then wanted to do the best job you can in those colours.
Overall, I was really impressed with the mosaic function. However, to get good results, you’ll need to put in quite a bit of work yourself. Choosing the right image is important but you may also find that better results are had by editing the image before you import it into Studio and editing the model once it’s in Studio. In the case of the Homer Simpson image, I first edited the image to replace a white background with blue, then editing out some other blemishes. After that, I shrank it to a 64 x 64 pixel image before importing into Studio and making a 64 x 64 stud mosaic. You don’t need to do the shrinking, but I did get slightly more predictable results by doing it. Once you’ve selected the best settings in the mosaic maker window, clicking on Import places the mosaic into the main Studio view. You’ll probably then want to do some manual editing, as I ended up doing for Homer.
Here’s a render of the final mosaic:
I also had a go at producing a Harry Potter mosaic:
And Tom was very keen for me to make a mosaic of Steve from Minecraft:
Have fun creating your mosaics!