It’s December 1st! For many LEGO fans, the Christmas Season is already in full swing with Christmas music playing 24-7, Christmas trees up and decorated, and lots of wrapped packages underneath with that extra special rattly sound that only LEGO makes. Today is also the day that we start opening our LEGO Advent Calendars with all those fun mini-builds and unique minifigures. C-3PO in an ugly Christmas sweater? Yes, please! I’m sure you’ll see many other LEGO fan sites doing daily posts, analyzing every aspect, minibuild and minifigure from each of LEGO’s five(!?) calendars this year. But here’s a secret: Advent hasn’t officially started yet. It officially starts on Sunday, December 3rd this year. (It only starts on December 1st on years when Christmas falls on a Wednesday, like 2024 and 2030! Who knew!?) So What is Advent? Christmas wreath 2 in 1 Set 40426 modified with tall purple and pink...

Now that we’ve all spent our money between Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays, it’s time to kick back and enjoy our monthly LEGO community round-up! While November traditionally is a jungle of sales announcements, we were once again treated with a smörgåsbord of insightful articles, interesting features and deep drives from all across the LEGO community. We are lucky to have this many outlets and channels that keep creating incredible content, and these are the best of the month. Here at BrickNerd, we celebrated Nerdvember and wow, did we get nerdy! We witnessed the heartwarming rebirth of Mega Nerdly and got introduced to a LEGO engineering department. We insured our LEGO collection, created custom light effects for our MOCs, and hacked BrickLink’s Stud.io. We played with LEGO SNOT puzzles, and learned all about LEGO coupling rods and Open L-Gauge. And we chronicled the LEGO minifigure skin tones over time, got nerdy...

Yes, you read that title correctly—we did not misspell nerd! To wrap up Nerdvember, I am going to introduce you to NED. So, who in the world is NED!? To explain that, I first need to tell you about Bricks LA which began in 2015 and sadly held their last event in 2022. It was organized by Ayleen Dority. They had a great run of eight conventions, and it was even part of a small collective of conventions worldwide called Recognized AFOL Networking Events. The last year of the convention brought us a behind-the-scenes look into something rarely seen: a presentation from LEGO engineers about NED, which stands for Novelty Element Development. The presentation came via video conference by Tore Christensen and Andreas Malling Jensen. They gave us a walkthrough of their daily activity and some example projects. This article aims to share that presentation with you and all the nerdy...

Today’s guest article comes from BrickNerd patron Wayne Tyler. We’ve featured Wayne’s work numerous times and always marvel at his technical prowess and stunning renders. Today he shares the secrets behind bending BrickLink Studio to his will. Render Like Blender A picture is worth a thousand words, so what is a digital render worth? It depends on the quality of the render! Before I’ve talked about the lighting options in Studio, but today we are going to talk about how to get that perfect shot of your digital MOC, but only if you are brave and want to explore how to hack the process. My approach to using BrickLink Studio digital LEGO software is a little different than most folks. The final output for me is an interesting image, not necessarily an accurate rendering of a LEGO model or a list of parts and instructions to build a MOC in real...

I have written six articles covering the many aspects of SNOT that I think are necessary for an advanced LEGO builder to know about. In this article, however, I will focus on how I learned many of the tricks I know and how to think when applying SNOT to your MOCs. It's time to talk about reverse engineering, or more specifically, the Reverse Engineering Contest (REC). I participated in my first REC competition in 2014. It is actually one of my most precious moments so far in my AFOLhood. It was basically a LEGO SNOT puzzle that you were challenged to recreate. A new puzzle was released every week, and if you didn't solve it you didn't get any points. That basically meant you wouldn't win, so it was an equal mix of stress and delight. I made it to the final challenge, which I failed. But it was such a...