I think after anyone plays through Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (like I did a few times), they fall in love with the droid companion BD-1. After recently stumbling over these build instructions on BrickLink which were built based on a youtube video “hachiroku24” building the same model I knew I had to give this build a shot. I don’t normally do a lot of custom Lego creations but my childhood dream was to be a Lego designer so even though someone else did the designing I still wanted to try and cover as much of the process as possible to build the kit. Hopefully gifting it to a friend for their birthday.
Lego had their own digital designer software I’ve used once before but it was a little challenging to use and since discontinued in 2018. Searching a few different forms recommended to use Studio, a design software tool created by the same website where I first saw the BD-1 Design, BrickLink. Included features also hav custom designs for building instructions and a quick piece exporter of your build so you can pretty easily bulk order everything needed for a custom build. So with the software and the build instructions I began digitally building the BD-1 kit to both verify everything is physically possible to assemble and to get my own digital copy of the model.
With the digital copy complete next was the tedious step of designing the assembly instructions. Studio has the workflow built in but during my initial build I grouped every single Lego brick into a single assembly step without realizing it so I had to break it up into the final 111 groups that held together the main droid, display base, and a small minifig that comes with most of the bigger Star Wars Lego models.
After the instructions were complete (and they were continually updated and tweaked until this entire project was complete) the next step was taking the plunge of buying all the pieces required. As mentioned before it was as simple as exporting the part list from the Studio program into the BrickLink website which then you can create a wishlist from and have them sort from their countless sellers across the globe to quick and easy shopping checkouts. BD-1’s 462 parts came from 5 different resellers and once all the packages arrived and were verified it was time to get building!
Assembly was a breeze and with a custom display sticker from ultimatecollectorstickers.co.uk I had a pretty professional looking droid companion. The last process of my project idea was a box for the pieces. Thankfully I recently was gifted a D-0 and with a close enough part count to BD-1 made for the perfect box. Some design software isn’t my strong suit and Adobe Photoshop is definitely one of those softwares. Taking way too long with a lot of help from youtube I was able to get a digital rendering of BD-1 imported in along with all the typical model stats that usually are displayed. The only sign that I did a decent job on the artwork was the recipient of this BD-1 gift. For a good couple of seconds they did believe that this was a new kit they did not know of yet until I explained that it was an MOC. One of my more fun Lego builds to do and something I would do again for the right model.
