Slashdot Mirror
Escher Paintings with Lego Bricks
sciuro writes "a couple of guys (A Lipton & D Shiu) have built three of M C Escher's 3D-distorting paintings using Lego bricks (and some carefully chosen camera angles). Balcony, Belvedere & Ascending and Descending are all down at the bottom of the page. Nice!" Some other pretty pieces as well.
From the "too much free time and no girlfriend" files of Slashdot...
Has Escher's copyright run out yet? :-)
evil adrian
If only they gave a Nobel Prize in misplaced talent.
If anyone has seen the White Stripes video where the entire thing is done in lego-like animation, that is what this reminded me of. The filters to create this animation are quite unique.
My little sad piece of the internet: www.mtndewd
The webpage mentioned in the article has been posted here before. I'm too lazy to find the link, but the guys are really good, these are just three new logo projects they've done. Anyway, imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
Hacking the Network
I have never understood the geek factor in creating stuff using LEGO blocks. Or probably they have too much time on their hands... ....
(*Shrugs*)
More information on MC Escher, including his artwork and uses of his artwork, can be found here and here.
Hmm, would that turn the Lego into GNU/Lego? Maybe that would discourage militant lego lawyers from attacking anyone who doesn't put up a disclaimer. Oh, sure, I know what you're thinking, Lego Lawyers, how scary are they, you can just pull their head off or stick the holes in their feet to some little pegs in the ground, but don't be fooled! Once those little bastards call in the Space Frontier Force, it's over! Those laser-light things burn, man! If I hadn't had the Lego Rescue Rangers there to save my ass, it would have been bad! Thankfully, they took all the lawyers, broke them apart, made an ambulance, and took me to the hospital, where they replaced a few bricks, and I'm fine now...
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
A) No Job - Stays home all day to play with Legos
B) A Really Cool Job - Stays home all day to play with Legos
Our eventual solution was to take a number of separate shots, zooming in on distinct parts of the model, and glue them together as a mosaic panorama. The image above was constructed in this way from 16 images. The final Escher transformation was implemented in a custom C program that I hacked together.
For the love of God! Implemented in C?!
Someone get this man a copy of Photoshop, stat!
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
There once was a man named D. Shiu
Whose work is now being viewed.
His page will be slashed
Hashed dashed and mashed
Linked from slashdot; to his page: adieu.
Don't give me none of this "nature theme" business.
This article got me to wondering what other art works had been made with Legos. What I found isn't quite the same, but I still enjoy it nonetheless. You can find a complete recreation of Mona Lisa made with Legos by Eric Harshbarger at this site.
No, this is not a duplicate story, it's an update on their projects. It is a story about the same people that we wrote about back in July, but what if we cried out "duplicate story!" every time a story about Microsoft or Linux was posted?
..It's upstairs in the basement.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The same perspectives used in the original works, I might add.
1) Lose your job
2) Build geometric and paradoxical shapes out of legos
3) Get them posted on Slashdot
4) ???
5) PROFIT!
I actually like his work, it's very mathmatical.
I don't usually do this, though these are pretty darn cool so I setup a mirror!
http://www.zachlipton.com/mirror/lego.htm
Zach
While this link of Andrew Lipson' was mentioned back in July, this is not a repeat. The Escher works are newly added in October.
Here is the 3D models I made of Belvedere, it has Side and back pictures as well, if you wanted to know how it was done. I had to program it at the University of utah, in a language for their alpha_1 modeling. Took me two weeks to learn the language and make it.
This is a traveling exhibit of Lego Master Builders; it started in MA, has been to MD and NY. I see that it was just assembled in Chicago and will be there for another week.
Lego had/has a line for really small tykes called Duplo. They are quite huge.
Though, I think you are referring to even bigger blocks. Yeah, I think I rememeber those. And those giant Tinker Toys. Made a 5-foot tall robot out of giant Tiinker Toys when I was in the third grade.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
... is the following snippet from the article:
"The chef's hat was suggested by my wife Lesley..."
After all this, they're still married?!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
There seems to be enough articles about them... every time they make something new... article on Slashdot.
We could expand the segment:
* Give the guys an idea for a lego model (My guess 95% will be for Star Wars or LOTR models... the other 5% will be nude women)
* See what they do with the rest of their time (My guess is weird little contraptions around the house)
and maybe
* Live webcam updates of them building... in realtime... never miss a second of the thrilling lego building action!
This is not a repeat! The Escher works are newly added in October.
Go read the original story -- it's about unrelated works.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Legos can be wonderful teaching tools that can demostrate mathematics and art (in the case of Escher) in way that can make difficult abstract ideas more tangible. Lego takes the designing and building of models which meant to represent buldings, machinery and so on seriously that they actually hire engineers to design and build the Lego structures for thier showrooms and projects like Mindstorm. http://mindstorms.lego.com
"You helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 17 -- 1976." --George W. Bush, to Queen Elizabeth, Wash
Where did you get the effect for "lid closing"?
May we never see th
Warning: Picky complaint about semantics. Stop reading here if such things annoy you.
I didn't know Escher did any painting.
In any case, what I see on this page is a couple of guys have built three of M C Escher's lithographs using Lego bricks.
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
I keeping looking at "Ascending and Descending" and I can't see where the trick to illusion is. I can't SEE how he did it. The "Belvedere" is easy to see how he cheated the illusion - it's in the columns. How in the *UCKIN' HELL did he do it?
I've been staring at this for fifteen minutes, connecting the stairs, following the path of little figures, and this is really pissing me off. And I'm not an idiot.
This one is flat-out amazing. Some lady has managed to build scale models of all sorts of construction equipment--and functional, too!
Mind-blowing design work, that's for sure.
There are many other neat things on this guy's website besides the Eschers, most notably these mathetical scultupes and Rodin's Thinker. From the Rodin's Thinker project: This took a lot of work, despite starting from computer-generated instructions based on photographs (actually the programming was nearly half of the project). Cool!
The other day I was using my overclocked, water-cooled Linux PS2 to write some assembly code to automatically record ST:TNG while I'm out seeing TTT on November 18th. I knew it was going to take a while, so first, I used vi to write a Perl script to have my NeXT workstation brew a fresh pot of java every 30 minutes using the Mr. Coffee clone that I built out of legos. Everything was going fine for a while, but then I started thinking about M$, the RIAA, the MPAA, the DMCA, and all those goddamned emacs users, and I found my blood boiling. So I tried playing a little Q3 to get my agressions out. But despite being l337, I was getting fragged badly because the ping on my 802.11b network was too high. So I gave up and settled down in front of my plasma TV to watch Babylon 5.
Fans of motivated lego may be interested in this link to a winning demo for the Assembly '01 "wild demo" competition. Stop frame photography + lego blocks + talent = cute little movie (38mb mpg).
see, another example of why lengthy copyrights are bad... with the copyright enforced on the escher images (according to the page they are still under copyright) we wouldn't be able to have our society enriched by important derivative works such as these. ;)
This space available.
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
They would have gotten better pictures if they had photographed the scenes from far away using a telephoto lens. The way they did it for this webpage, perspective is still way too visible, and makes some of the "pillars" easily recognizable as non-vertical. By moving the camera further away, this effect is reduced.
*looking at an apartment inspired by Escher's 'Relativ'* Leela: "Wow! Now *this* is fantastic!" Fry: "Hmm... I'm not sure we want to pay for a dimension we're not gonna use " *Bender falls down a dozen random stairs at varying angles* Bender: "Oooh Aaah Oooh Ufff Ahhh Ohhh"
Quote the website:
"I'm quite pleased with the dome - and I finally found a use for the blue ball that appears in LEGO set 8269!
I,,,, but,,,, aaarrrghhhh... damn!
my sig
Enjoy the following plans for snapping together your very own cultural icons! Start saving your 1x1 bricks!
(these are undithered, top-viewed LEGO art and use only 6 colors: black, white, yellow, red, green, blue)
Ellen Feiss
Osama Bin Laden
Bill Gates
and, of course...
the goatse.cx guy
You'll need a VRML 97 compliant plug-in in your browser to view the model.
Perose Staircase in VRML
Don't miss his Dilbert scuptures. He has Dilbert, the Pointy-haired Boss, and Wally.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Where can I get the four dimensional Lego tesseracts. I'm tired of all the Mindstorm and Star Wars crap.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Yeah, if i didn't spend all my time reading and posting to /., maybe i could do something cool too.
I think the items represented were originally woodcarvings.
Unless some guy was named "Jennifer," which would explain why he whould be hiding at home spending that much time on legos.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Most advanced I ever got was trying to recreate the bridge of a Star Destroyer. I even made a Grand Admiral Thrawn.
/nerd
I made a pretty sweet X-Wing once. Folding wings and everything. But then again, who hasn't made an X-Wing out of legos at some point...
Ritvik makes mega bloks. However, their site is very very useless. You can get them at Toys R Us, but I would suggest that you go to a local toy store (try one of the independant stores) and see if you can get them to order them in bulk?
I have no idea how these blocks are sold, so YMMV.
Lego also makes (or used to make) very large foam lego bricks. They show up on ebay and bricklink.com sometimes.
And after typing this entire post, i reread yours and saw that you were looking for 2 INCH by 4 INCH blocks... in that case what you probably want is Duplo, made by lego. look at lego's catalog.
Forgive me if this post is incoherent, I really should go to bed right now.
Malcolm solves his problems with a chainsaw,
And he never has the same problem twice.
You have to appreciate the irony of using lego to make impossible structures!
I stole this Sig
Michael Gondry speaking about his video for white stripes in an interview with RES
"I really like the basic-ness of the music - one voice, one guitar, and one drum. I like this concept, and I thought it was very close to the primary color of the Lego blocks." On the video's creation: "We shot a very basic video of the band [in London], we edited it and then we had a program that pixelized the video, roughly the size of the Lego blocks and then we printed each frame [25 frames per second] on paper. Then we had an animation team building up Lego blocks to match each frame. Then we reshot each of those frames on a film camera. We didn't have enough Legos to do more than five frames at a time, so after five frames were shot [the Legos] were demolished to build the next five frames."
The imagery is kinetic and jubilant. Audio levels thump, people swim, a walk sign says "go!", and the candy cane-colored White Stripes jam out.
To acquire this job, Gondry didn't write a treatment. According to Meg, "One day he came to a restaurant and he had Jack's head in Lego." Jack: "You couldn't argue with that. When someone brings a Lego sculpture of your head to dinner and says this is what the video's going to be, you pretty much say, 'That's it, go ahead.' " (credit)
"I've seen 'Star Wars' build-ups and huge model displays, but this is the most intense creation that I've ever seen done in Lego, and definitely the most creative and original," said Roger Cameron, a senior designer at Lego. "It definitely has that retro feel, because they used just the basic colors and pieces from 30 years ago. They didn't even use green or orange." (credit)
The video has won many, mostly technical, awards, including an MVPA Award, and 3 MTV Video Music Awards. Jack and Meg accepted the MTV Breakthrough Video award on Michel's behalf.
"Girl" is available in America on a companion DVD issued with new copies of White Blood Cells. You can also find a Quicktime copy on #2 of a 2-CD single set released by Third Man/XL Recordings (UK).
Excellent copies of this video are at sputnik7.com. 'boards mag has a MOV here.
his other works can be found here [try not to kill it]
I've seen bigger ones. At the kid's room in Schipol airport (Amsterdam) they had a shed-load of large bricks. In the few hours that we were there, my kids built themselves a fort.
Of course, my pics of it never made it onto my server....
Michael