My Red Brick Mech (in Augmented Reality)


When life hands you bricks, make an anime-style brick mech.

I picked up a brick kit a few weeks ago that looked fantastic on the box. Unfortunately, the build didn't come together properly: pieces kept popping off and falling inside of the build, which made the pieces harder to find. However, the pieces that were part of the kit were too colorful to let them go to waste, so I decided to use them for a different kind of build: a brick mech.

As a kid who grew up during the Japanese robot invasions of the '70s and '80s, I've long admired the mech designs from anime series such as Mobile Suit Gundam, Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, and Fang of the Sun Dougram. Unfortunately, my admiration didn't translate to competent model construction when I tried to build Macross and Dougram kits that were sold in the U.S. though Revell's Robotech line. Thankfully, a group of Lego fans have been creating their own mech kits, so I decided to take a shot at one of my own with the bricks I wasn’t using.

Since I had more than enough pieces for the mech's armor, I needed to find a jointed mech armature as the foundation for my build. I found an armature instruction manual by Ransom_Fern on the Rebrickable site, which appeared to me to have the right amounts of flexibility and external-facing studs upon which to mount the armor. This wasn't a perfect design (I couldn't get the exteriors for the thigh areas to stay on) but it worked for what I wanted to accomplish. It even has hands with posable fingers and thumbs.

Below is a selection of photos I took of my completed mech. I've also included a photo and video of what the mech looks like in augmented reality (AR) via Adobe Aero. You can use the QR codes at the bottom of this post to access this model (either in the original size or larger size) through your own AR-capable device.

















Above: My red brick mech model (left) and it's scale-accurate 3D model
in augmented reality (right).
Below: A video I took of the larger-scale 3D model of my red brick mech
in augmented reality.






Above: The QR code for the smaller red brick mech 3D model.
Below: The QR code for the larger red brick mech 3D model.







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