[Paper ]LEGO builder: Automatic generation of LEGO assembly manual from 3D polygon model

Author

Ono, Sumiaki and André, Alexis and Chang, Youngha and Nakajima, Masayuki

Abstract

The LEGO brick system is one of the most popular toys in the world. It can stimulate one's creativity whilebeing lots of fun. It is however very hard for the naive user to assemble complex models without instructions. In this work,we propose a method that converts 3D polygonal models into LEGO brick building instructions automatically. The mostimportant part of the conversion is that the connectivity between the bricks should be assured. For this, we introduce agraph structure named ''legograph'' that allows us to generate physically sound models that do not fall apart by managingthe connections between the bricks. We show some experimental results and evaluation results. These show that the 3Dbrick models generated following the instructions generated by our method do not fall apart and that one can learn how toefficiently build 3D structures from our instructions.