01 — Overview
Three passes, one wall.
Every frame goes through the same pipeline. The source is sampled at one cell per stud, colours collapse into a handful of tones, and the result is drawn as moulded plastic - nothing in the output is a filter over the photo; every brick is placed.
Quantize
Colours collapse into a small set of levels, so neighbouring cells agree on a tone and the image reads as moulded plastic instead of pixel noise.
Merge
Runs of matching cells fuse into 1x2, 1x3 and 1x4 bricks with staggered seams, row by row - bonded the way a real wall is.
Emboss
A colour-independent relief pass stamps bevels and stud highlights over every brick, so any tone catches the same moulded light.
02 — The mechanic
One stud is the unit of detail.
Brick size sets the sampling grid: every stud is one sample of the source. Small bricks resolve eyes and edges; large bricks abstract the image into fields of tone. Everything in this grid changes one value only.
Brick Size 12
fine detail
Brick Size 24
balanced
Brick Size 48
tone fields
03 — Bonding
Runs become bricks.
Where neighbouring cells share a tone, the engine fuses them into longer bricks and staggers the seams on alternate rows. Turn merging off and the wall becomes a pure stud grid; turn it up and flat areas read as long moulded pieces.
1x1 Studs
pure grid
Short Bricks
up to 1x2
Long Bricks
up to 1x4
04 — Colour
Three ways to read a palette.
Original keeps the source colours and quantizes them in place. Vivid snaps every cell to the nearest moulded-plastic colour from a fixed fourteen-tone palette. Mono drops colour entirely and rebuilds the image from grey plastic.
Original
quantized source
Vivid
14-tone palette
Mono
grey plastic
05 — Relief
Light is painted on.
The relief slider drives one shading pass: seam darkness, edge bevels, stud shadow and highlight all scale together. At zero the render is a flat mosaic; at full strength every brick catches studio light.
Relief 10
nearly flat
Relief 55
moulded
Relief 100
hard light
06 — Studs
Studs make the surface.
The stud is a single pre-rendered relief stamp - shadow, rim and highlight with no colour of its own - repeated once per cell over the finished brick. Remove it and the same wall becomes smooth tile.
Studs Off
smooth tile
Studs On
moulded plastic
07 — Presets
Eight ways to build a wall.
Presets are variations of the mechanic - size, bonding, colour reading and build order - never colour palettes. Pick one and every value stays editable; your own settings simply override the preset’s starting point.
Classic
long bond, rise
Mono
8 grey levels
Baseplate
1x1 studs
Duplo
chunky bricks
Micro Tile
no studs
Vivid
plastic palette
Scan Build
left-to-right
Brick Rain
bricks drop in
08 — Sources
Stills and footage alike.
An image is sampled once and rebuilt on demand. A video is resampled every frame - quantize, merge and emboss run live, so the wall rebuilds itself sixty times a second while seams stay stable between frames.
Image
sampled once
Video
re-bricked per frame
09 — Controls
A control room, in the canvas.
Every instance can carry its own flat control panel: upload a file, replay the build, switch presets, resize bricks, change bonding and colour reading - live, without opening the editor. The panel appears in preview and on the published site; the editor’s property panel mirrors every control.
Overlay Enabled
visible in preview + published
Lego Engine
Quantize. Merge. Emboss.