BrickLink Studio

BrickLink is the largest online marketplace for reselling Lego products. Its website also offers resources for Lego fans, including an extensive catalog of products and parts and community forums.

History

BrickLink was founded by Dan Jezek, who had made it after other online sellers were impressed by the website he made for his own Lego store. Originally named BrickBay, the site started operation on June 19, 2000. After online retailer eBay challenged the use of "Bay" in the name, it was renamed BrickLink in 2002.

In 2010, Jezek died suddenly, and his mother Eliska Jezkova succeeded him as CEO. In 2013, the site was acquired by Nexon founder and CEO Jung-Ju "Jay" Kim, who transferred its assets into BrickLink Limited, a Hong Kong-based company. Kim, a Lego fan himself, created some of the most important features of the current BrickLink website, including the BrickLink AFOL Designer Program (now the BrickLink Designer Program) which sold top-rated fan designs as packaged, unofficial sets, and the BrickLink Studio digital design software.

On November 26, 2019, The Lego Group acquired BrickLink Ltd. for an undisclosed amount.

Other projects

Studio

BrickLink Studio (initially Stud.io) is a freeware computer program for creating virtual 3D models with Lego bricks. It was released on BrickLink as an open beta on December 13, 2016. The next major update to the program, version 2.0, was released in open beta on July 18, 2018. Multiple features were added to the program, including a photorealistic rendering option, BrickLink integration for ordering parts to recreate the model physically and an instruction manual generator.

Initially, Studio for their own parts library silently used LDraw Parts Library, developed by ''LDraw.org Community'' under Creative Commons Attribution license. After ''LDraw.org'''s admin contacted with the Studio developers the info about use of LDraw has been publicly added to the website and into software.

In 2021, it was revealed that the Eyesight, a render engine of the BrickLink Studio, is built from the Cycles render sources developed by Blender Foundation (at the time, Cycles' source has been already under Apache License, allowing it to be included into proprietary software, while Blender's source stays under GPL), but in same time BrickLink Studio proprietary binary included some GPL-licensed source from Blender too, at least parts of bf_blenlib source files, that is visible in Studio binary file via hex editor.

Later, the source of Eyesight was released on BrickLink site, as well as the modified sources of POV-Ray, FFmpeg and other software libs used in Studio.

In January 2022, The Lego Group announced that BrickLink Studio would replace the Lego Digital Designer (LDD) software as the official virtual Lego building software going forward.

Part Designer

Part Designer is a freeware computer program for creating virtual 3D models of the Lego bricks and custom bricks as parts to be used in the Studio software. It is supporting various file formats, including LDraw File Format, STL and other.

AFOL Designer Program

In 2018, to celebrate 60 years since the modern Lego interlocking brick design was created and patented, BrickLink teamed up with The Lego Group to create the AFOL Designer Program. It allowed users to upload their own Lego set designs into a competition. The winning designs had the opportunity to be crowdfunded and, if successful, sold on the BrickLink marketplace. The program was similar to Lego Ideas, where the designs that get more than 10,000 likes get accepted to finals and the winning one becomes an official Lego set.

References

External links

*

BrickLink
at the LDraw Wiki

BrickLink Studio
at the LDraw Wiki

Eyesight
at the LDraw Wiki

BrickLink Studio’s Eyesight, native on Linux
(compiling guide)

{{Lego

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