This repository contains my personal fork of Allen Smith's superb Bricksmith application. Bricksmith is a fantastic and productive tool for building LEGO models on macOS based on the popular LDraw CAD model format. It has a long pedigree, but was almost abandoned a few years ago; however, it was generously open-sourced. Updates to Bricksmith to keep up with changes to macOS SDKs have been a patchy community effort. However, since early 2021 efforts by bsupnik and the original author have made it possible to build Bricksmith on modern versions of XCode to run on recent versions of macOS, including 10.14 (Mojave), 10.15 (Catalina), 11.x (Big Sur). The most up-to-date and supported Bricksmith repo can be found here: bsupnik / bricksmith
I was desperate to continue using Bricksmith since I had become so productive using it. Furthermore, Bricksmith's internal LDraw model renderer has exceptionally good performance, even with massive LDraw models. I was anxious to make the switch to Bricklink Stud.io and therefore forked the Bricksmith repo a few years ago and made changes myself to keep up with evolving macOS SDK changes, in particular deprecation of support for OpenGL. Since then, it has grown into a more customized (janky!) version to suit my particular preferences and features.
I have rolled in some changes from the main repo; however, I have deviated too much from the original code to contribute with PRs without major merging headaches. In any case, I have created this repo for my own sanity and in case anyone is interested in tinkering.
Some (but not all) of my changes/customizations include:
- support for dark mode theme
- axis lines from origin in all viewers
- different LDraw syntax highlights in model tree view (with differentiation of submodels vs. parts)
- different style for parts browser
- menu command to insert step at current step (rather than append to the end)
- navigating the tree view in step mode also changes the current step
- almost all math computation converted to double precision floating point
- favorite colour list added to colour picker inspector with a button to mark favorite colours
- LDraw.org - Official maintainer of the LDraw file format specification and the LDraw official part library.
- Bricksmith for macOS by Allen Smith
- Bricklink stud.io new and modern design tool designed and maintained by Bricklink
- LeoCAD cross platform tool
- MLCAD for Windows
- LDView real-time 3D viewer for LDraw models
- Original LPub publishing tool by Kevin Clague
- LPub3D successor to LPub by Trevor Sandy
- Manual for Legacy LPub 4 tool (last version by Kevin Clague)
I hope speak on behalf of the Bricksmith user community to say we owe Allen Smith a debt of gratitude for creating and maintaining Bricksmith in the first place. He should be truly proud for contributing such a productive and efficient tool to the macOS user community!