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.

And today,

[by Anonymous Coward]

From the "too much free time and no girlfriend" files of Slashdot...

Copyright!

[Evil Adrian (253301)]

Has Escher's copyright run out yet? :-)

Re:Copyright!

[limekiller4 (451497)]

Evil Adrian writes:
"Has Escher's copyright run out yet? :-)"

Well, if we represent a timeline with an Escher staircase and we represent the passage of time as the people walking up the stairs, then the answer is no, his copyright will actually never run out. =)

Why, why

[Reggie Funk (623676)]

If only they gave a Nobel Prize in misplaced talent.

Re:Why, why

[aarondsouza (96916)]

Actually this would make an excellent candidate for the Ig Nobel [improb.com] awards

White Stripes Video

[Mtn_Dewd (15169)]

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.

Re:White Stripes Video

[by Anonymous Coward]

they weren't done with any filters, that video was built by hand

Re:White Stripes Video

[nullgel (602884)]

Perhaps he meant (and I believe this to be the case) that most, if not all, of the video was shot normally with the musicians/actors/sets. They then might have taken the raw video through some filters adjusting the colors to LEGO colors and perhaps "pixelating" the video. They could then use these filtered frames as a reference to build the LEGOs.

Only a theory, but this is how I would attempt to do it anyway.

Michael Gondry

[sh0rtie (455432)]

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 [mtv.com])
"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 [mtv.com])
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 [sputnik7.com]. 'boards mag has a MOV here [boardsmag.com].

his other works can be found here [director-file.com] [try not to kill it]

More than one

[RoC MasterMind (576689)]

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!

Nope.

[Inoshiro (71693)]

This is not a repeat! The Escher works are newly added in October.

Go read the original story [slashdot.org] -- it's about unrelated works.

More information

[kaosrain (543532)]

More information on MC Escher, including his artwork and uses of his artwork, can be found here [worldofescher.com] and here [mcescher.com].

What suprised me...

[Cervantes (612861)]

... was that this made /. without having a Lego Penguin...

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...

... Hmm, maybe they were right about that whole "acid trip flashback" thing...

Re:What suprised me...

[DigitalDad (307095)]

He did...

Penguin [ericharshbarger.com]

Or is your poison BSD? [ericharshbarger.com]

Must be nice..

[l810c (551591)]

This guy has either:

A) No Job - Stays home all day to play with Legos
B) A Really Cool Job - Stays home all day to play with Legos

Misplaced effort . . .

[Pike65 (454932)]

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!

Re:Misplaced effort . . .

[GuyMannDude (574364)]

Someone get this man a copy of Photoshop, stat!

Using a user-friendly tool like Photoshop would defeat the whole geeky purpose! He was able to use the words "custom program" and "hacked" in the same sentence -- a prerequisite for recognized by slashdot. The only things that could have made this cooler would have been:

• Reverse-engineering the Photoshop software and then modifying it for his purpose
• Using assembly instead of C
• Making his webpage with a text editor while watching Star Trek

All in all, a good geek project!

GMD

Re:Misplaced effort . . .

[meringuoid (568297)]

Someone get this man a copy of Photoshop, stat!

Using a user-friendly tool like Photoshop would defeat the whole geeky purpose! He was able to use the words "custom program" and "hacked" in the same sentence -- a prerequisite for recognized by slashdot.

OK, shall we compromise? Someone get them a copy of the Gimp...

Good geek project?

[DirtyJ (576100)]

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.

Re:Good geek project?

[Reziac (43301)]

Bah. REAL geeks use "copy con program.zip"!!

limerick

[bobtheprophet (587843)]

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.

Mona Lego

[kaosrain (543532)]

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 [ericharshbarger.com].

Re:Mona Lego

[fobbman (131816)]

Screw art, we need more Lego Porn [corrupt.net].

Re:Mona Lego

[Xtraneous (594376)]

Funny, it seems to be slashdotted.

What a sad, sad world...

Re:Mona Lego

[jmoriarty (179788)]

If someone can make a convincing Salvador Dali out of legos without melting any bricks, you could color me impressed.

I got one of these..

[geekoid (135745)]

..It's upstairs in the basement.

carefully chosen camera angles, eh?

[e40 (448424)]

The same perspectives used in the original works, I might add.

Re:carefully chosen camera angles, eh?

[jedie (546466)]

I think the visual deceit only works from those specific angles (because of shadows and whatnot that fool the eye and brain of the beholder).
I do actually wonder though what the sculptures would look like from different angles: it would be interesting to see what's *really* there, and not just what our brain thinks there is.

It strikes again...

[403Forbidden (610018)]

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.

Mirror

[zachlipton (448206)]

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

Not a repeat!

[jlv (5619)]

While this link of Andrew Lipson' was mentioned back in July [slashdot.org], this is not a repeat. The Escher works are newly added in October.

I made a 3D model of belvedere!

[by Anonymous Coward]

Here [utah.edu] 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.

The most amazing thing about this...

[FyRE666 (263011)]

... is the following snippet from the article:

"The chef's hat was suggested by my wife Lesley..."

After all this, they're still married?!

Give these guys their own segment

[spoco2 (322835)]

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!

Not just for children......

[bkontr (624500)]

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

Escher's paintings?

[turg (19864)]

Warning: Picky complaint about semantics. Stop reading here if such things annoy you.

a couple of guys (A Lipton & D Shiu) have built three of M C Escher's 3D-distorting paintings using Lego bricks

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.

Ascending and Descending...How did he do it?

[alchemist68 (550641)]

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.

Re:Ascending and Descending...How did he do it?

[Idarubicin (579475)]

From the other replies to your post, I can see that there are a lot of people on /. that don't realize that you're really not an idiot and that you know the answer to your question is at the bottom of the page.

Apologies to the other posters if you really are an idiot despite your denial.

Cheers.

Yeah, but did you see the links?

[milkmandan9 (190569)]

This [strath.ac.uk] 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.

Notice it's a girl/woman/female

[lingqi (577227)]

Original Lego Designs by Jennifer Clark [mailto]

Unless some guy was named "Jennifer," which would explain why he whould be hiding at home spending that much time on legos.

derivative work

[Jafafa Hots (580169)]

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. ;)

M.C. Escher & Douglas Adams

[cmeans (81143)]

Escher did for architecture what Adams did for literature.

angles

[h4x0r-3l337 (219532)]

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.

Obligatory Futurama Quote

[darkitecture (627408)]

*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"

Blue ball,

[Openadvocate (573093)]

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 [lugnet.com]!

I,,,, but,,,, aaarrrghhhh... damn!

LEGO: Ellen Feiss, Osama Bin Laden, Bill Gates

[dstone (191334)]

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 [lugnet.com]
Osama Bin Laden [lugnet.com]
Bill Gates [lugnet.com]
and, of course...
the goatse.cx guy [lugnet.com]

Don't miss his Dilbert sculptures

[Russ Nelson (33911)]

Don't miss his Dilbert scuptures. He has Dilbert, the Pointy-haired Boss, and Wally.
-russ

Damnit! This is cool!

[multiplexo (27356)]

Where can I get the four dimensional Lego tesseracts. I'm tired of all the Mindstorm and Star Wars crap.

Re:duplicate story

[kaosrain (543532)]

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?

Re:Strange....

[SoCalChris (573049)]

I'm not sure why the parent got modded down as flamebait, but oh well...

I think that most of the geeks here on Slashdot probably played with Legos a lot as little kids, and most of us probably still play with them (I know I do when I have time!). A lot of the new Lego sets aren't very geeky, and a lot of people find the new sets downright boring. So when someone comes along like these guys and create something that is really cool/complicated/hard to do, it is generally something that most Slashdot readers would appreciate, so it gets posted.

On the other hand, I've never been a fan of anime, and don't know any other geeks who are so I'm not sure why those are posted on Slashdot. When an anime story comes by, I just usually ignore it.