Virtual Lego

{brickr} is a fun package by Ryan Timpe that lets you build 2D mosaics and 3D models with Lego-like virtual bricks,¹ with a little help from Tyler Morgan Wall’s {rayshader} package.

Build 3D LEGO models & mosaics in #rstats! {brickr} is now on GitHub. More examples, How-To's, and vignettes coming soon. Can't wait to see what you all build! https://t.co/vBK0A70PTl pic.twitter.com/5kXRGta4jx

— Ryan Timpe 📊 (@ryantimpe) 15 March 2019

You can get started with the brickr toybox, which lets you arrange bricks in a spreadsheet that {brickr} can turn into a 3D model.

{brickr} update to help new users get started! Create models in an Excel template & pass to bricks_from_excel() using {readxl}. Examples included! New repo to post & share. https://t.co/CHKYkJSnfk #brickr #rstats #rayshader pic.twitter.com/qIPCT8Z41w

— Ryan Timpe 📊 (@ryantimpe) April 10, 2019

Kick-off

I’ve written a function called create_brickr_player() that lets you build a soccer player and select the brick colours for the shirt, socks, and much more.

It lets you create the same model but change the brick colours with minimum fuss.

The (completely untested) function lives in my package of misc functions, {dray}, which can be installed from GitHub.

# Load packages
library(dray)  # remotes::install_github("matt-dray/dray")
library(brickr)  # install.packages("brickr")
library(dplyr)  # install.packages("dplyr")

The function is simple. It helps you create a data frame that specifies the location and colour of individual bricks on successive 2D planes to build up a 3D model.

This data frame is a plan that can be interpreted by {brickr} and transformed into a special list that can be rendered in 3D space.

Here’s what happens when you use the function with default arguments.

player_plan <- create_brickr_player()
player_plan  # preview the object

## # A tibble: 45 x 6
##    Level   `1`   `2`   `3`   `4`   `5`
##    <chr> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
##  1 A         0     0     0     0     0
##  2 A         0     2     0     2     0
##  3 A         0     2     0     2     0
##  4 B         0     0     0     0     0
##  5 B         0     7     0     7     0
##  6 B         0     0     0     0     0
##  7 C         0     0     0     0     0
##  8 C         0     1     0     1     0
##  9 C         0     0     0     0     0
## 10 D         0     0     0     0     0
## # … with 35 more rows

Each layer of bricks gets a separate value in the Level column.

The x-dimension is represented by the rows of the data frame and the y-dimension by the numbered columns.

Every non-zero number represents a brick and each value represents a different colour.

For example, layer A has dimensions of 3 x 5 where 4 spots will be filled with a brick. Each of these has the value ‘2’, which encodes the colour black. Layer B, meanwhile, has a couple of bricks with value ‘7’, which is bright red.

How do you know which numbers encode which colours? You can access the codes from the lego_colors data frame in the {brickr} package.

select(lego_colors, brickrID, Color, hex)  # colour codes

## # A tibble: 39 x 3
##    brickrID Color             hex    
##       <int> <chr>             <chr>  
##  1        1 White             #F2F3F2
##  2        2 Black             #1B2A34
##  3        3 Medium stone grey #A3A2A4
##  4        4 Dark stone grey   #635F61
##  5        5 Bright green      #4B974A
##  6        6 Bright blue       #0D69AB
##  7        7 Bright red        #C4281B
##  8        8 Bright yellow     #F5CD2F
##  9        9 Bright orange     #DA8540
## 10       10 Dark orange       #A05F34
## # … with 29 more rows

So ‘1’ is white, ‘2’ is black and so on. I think Timpe selected this set of colours to match the colours available from Lego sets.

# Convert plan to list with brick types and colours
player_bricks <- player_plan %>%
  bricks_from_table()

names(player_bricks)  # see the element names

## [1] "Img_lego"    "Img_bricks"  "ID_bricks"   "mosaic_type" "pieces"

display_pieces(player_bricks)

display_bricks(player_bricks)  # opens separate window

# Build player plan with certain colours
man_city <- create_brickr_player(
  hair_col = 2,           # Black
  skin_col = 39,          # Dark brown
  boot_col = 7,           # Bright red
  shirt_body_col = 13,    # Light royal blue
  shirt_sleeve_col = 13,  # Light royal blue
  shorts_col = 1,         # White
  sock_col = 27,          # Earth blue
  sock_trim_col = 27      # Earth blue
)

# Convert plan to list and render it
man_city %>%
  bricks_from_table() %>%
  display_bricks()

Extra-time

Hopefully this is useful for anyone who wants to create the same {brickr} model in multiple colours. I realise that might be a niche audience.

The obvious next step would be to allow for features of the plan to change. For example, you could set an argument for player_height and add or remove layers from the plan to make the final model taller or shorter. Or maybe different shirt types could be specified, like horizontal_stripe = TRUE.

Pull requests always welcome!

## [1] "Last updated 2019-09-08"

## R version 3.5.2 (2018-12-20)
## Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0 (64-bit)
## Running under: macOS High Sierra 10.13.6
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## 
## locale:
## [1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8
## 
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
## 
## other attached packages:
## [1] dplyr_0.8.1       brickr_0.0.0.9200 dray_0.0.0.9000   kableExtra_1.1.0 
## [5] knitr_1.23       
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