Once in a while you may find yourself apart from your Lego collection for longer periods of time. For me, these are the times to experiment in one of the many digital Lego designer tools that are around!

In this case I decided to try my hand at creating realistic rockwork in DBG (Dark Bluish Grey), utilizing the full variety of existing blocks. I settled on the motif of a rocky island, trying to create a look of a cliff-face where the bottom had been hollowed out by years of waves striking it. And, of course, I had to add some trees on top

These smaller renders of the design process shows some of the rockwork up close. There is a bit of repetition when it comes to patterns in this build, though I tried to make sure it would not stand out too much.

My personal conclusion (that I sort of suspected, having seen others using it) is that the piece ‘Plate, Modified 1 x 2 with 3 Claws / Rock Fingers’ is absolutely fantastic for rockwork! And wampa horns too, though they’re simply not financially viable Normally I tend to gravitate towards using LBG rather than DBG for rocks, but from the result of this it might be different in the future

This build was built and rendered with the digital lego design tool, Stud.io. The upside with these types of tools is of course that you have unlimited bricks at your disposal, being able to test out bricks that you may not have or those that are just too rare or expensive to get a hold of in real life.

The downside (to me) with digital tools are that some of the constraints of the real world are removed, such as gravity and stability, which sometimes makes it hard to gauge if what you create is actually a viable lego build. In my mind, a build that cannot be reproduced in real world lego is of no interest whatsoever. Also including, of course, any build using bricks, color combinations or techniques that don’t exist or work in real life. Others may have other opinions on this, but these are mine

Hope you found this interesting and/or useful