THE DIGITAL TOOLBOX
Like most new LEGO projects,
Charles’s ship materialized on
a computer before he started
clicking bricks together.
Today, fan-written LEGO
programs like Bricksmith,
LDraw, and Studio 2.0 allow
builders to “try out ideas with-
out needing to dig through your
tub of LEGOs or go out and find
parts at a garage sale,” says
Jacob Moore, creative direc-
tor at BrickLink, a LEGO fan
forum, brick market, and pub-
lisher of the Studio 2.0 design
program. Charles used Studio
2.0 for his Star Destroyer after
struggling with LEGO Digi-
tal Designer, the LEGO Group’s
in-house program. He says he
made the switch because the fan
software felt similar to the pro-
fessional programs he used at
his animation job. The intuitive
system surprised him. “I hadn’t
tried a project like this because I
thought I’d need all the parts in
front of me,” he says.
As a collector and hobbyist-
crafter of Star Wars props—
Charles just finished a life-size
replica of Han Solo trapped
in carbonite—Charles’s first
concern was making sure his
LEGO Star Destroyer would be
as close to film fidelity as possi-
ble. Given that the ship is shaped
like an acute triangle, precision
with the structure’s angles was
paramount. “I decided at the
beginning I wanted the whole
thing to be 5 feet long,” says
Charles. “That triggered a lot of
the other choices I had to make
about proportions.”
Charles acquired a publicly
available 3D scan of the A New
Hope Imperial Star Destroyer
and overlaid it into Studio 2.0 to
design the skeleton of his build.able. “There are definitely
bigger and more impres-
sive LEGO Star Destroyers
out there,” says Charles, 43, a
senior technical animator in
Raleigh, North Carolina. “I’ve
seen one over 10 feet long.” His
construction is distinct because
it’s custom, the first such LEGO
model he’s built.
Charles credits his Star
Destroyer to a digital revolution
transforming LEGO fandom.
Throughout LEGO’s 62-year
history, die-hards have always
built wild, imaginative models
from their plastic scrap heaps,
but a new wave of fan-made digi-
tal resources has given builders
the tools to craft custom models
that rival the detail and integrity
of official LEGO sets. Whether
you’re looking for cutting-edge
software to design your next
project or a site that can gener-
ate a piece-by-piece instruction
booklet, it’s likely out there, free
for download.but opposite the enormity is an
attention to detail—the filigree of
LEGO figurine hands ringing the
docking bay; the barnacle-like
swath of pipes that make up the
vents, pipes, and cannons—that
makes the ship an artistic, archi-
tectural marvel.
It took Charles 15 months
and more than 500 hours to
design and build his LEGO ver-
sion of the iconic Imperial Star
Destroyer, first imprinted on the
collective consciousness when
it crawled across the opening
shot of Star Wars in 1977. Like
the ship in the movie, Charles’s
destroyer intimidates with its
size. Weighing 44 pounds, the
creation boasts almost 20,000
LEGO bricks, three times as
many as the biggest set LEGO
has ever published (the 2017
Star Wars: Millennium Falcon
set, priced at $800).
But it’s not the mass, weight,
or obsessive detail that make
Charles’s starship so remark-Charles
Anderson’s
Star Destroyer
stretches
almost 5
feet long,
50 March/April 2020