I’m a big fan of LEGO and started building my own MOCs about a decade ago. At some point I wanted more than just building — I wanted to create **building instructions** so anyone could recreate my models.

Back then my workflow looked like this:

* Build the model in **LEGO Digital Designer (LDD)**
* Convert it to **LDraw**
* Generate **PDF instructions** from the LDraw file

It worked, but it always felt like I was fighting the tools. LDD was too limited, even after I started patching it myself (I’m a software dev, so of course I tried to mod the tool instead of changing my habits 😄). I tried a bunch of other editors, but nothing really felt right.

# Discovering Bricksmith

Eventually I stumbled across **Bricksmith** for macOS:  
[https://github.com/bsupnik/bricksmith](https://microurl.app/bricksmith)

That was a game changer. I realized I could finally get rid of LDD entirely and work directly with LDraw on my Mac in a way that felt natural and efficient.

The nicest surprise was the codebase: it was very clearly written “with love” — well structured and heavily commented. As a developer, it was actually *fun* to explore and tweak. I started making little improvements for myself, and after a while I realized these changes could be useful for other people too. I contacted the authors and started contributing.

And… right after that, development on the original project basically stopped. 🫠  
So I decided to keep going with my own fork.

# Bricksmith-M: my fork

Here’s my fork:  
👉 [https://github.com/Serg75/Bricksmith-M](https://microurl.app/bricksmith-m)

And a ready-to-use macOS build:  
👉 [https://github.com/Serg75/Bricksmith-M/releases/tag/v4.0.0](https://microurl.app/Bricksmith-M-release)

If you’re a Mac user and you need a productive tool to build LEGO models in LDraw, this might be interesting.

Some of the bigger improvements that might matter for actual building:

* **Support for MLCAD “group”** If you’re used to grouping in MLCAD, you can now use that concept in Bricksmith-M as well, which makes working with complex sections of a model a lot more manageable.
* **“Axes by Part Rotation” command** Lets you align axes based on how the part is actually rotated, which makes precise positioning and adjustments much easier.
* **“Origin by rotation center” command** Handy for rotating submodels/sections around a meaningful pivot point without manually fiddling with coordinates.
* **Automatic detection & selection of missing parts** When you open a model with missing parts, Bricksmith-M will automatically detect and select them so you immediately see what’s wrong instead of hunting through the file.
* **Enhanced parts export with Rebrickable compatibility** Parts export is now much more friendly for use with Rebrickable.

…and more other quality-of-life tweaks that come from actually using the app for building MOCs.

Behind the scenes, I’ve also:

* migrated the old Objective-C codebase to modern **ARC** (automatic memory management), and
* added a **Metal-based renderer** to replace deprecated OpenGL so it behaves better on current and future macOS versions.

# If this sounds like your kind of tool…

and you:

* use **LDraw**\-based tools,
* build on **macOS**,
* and care about having a fast, focused editor rather than a huge all-in-one suite.

…then **Bricksmith-M** might be interesting for you. The project is completely free and open source. I’d love feedback, bug reports, or just to hear if it helps you build cool stuff.

And finally: **huge thanks to the original Bricksmith creators**. Their work is the reason this fork exists at all — I’m just trying to keep a great tool alive. 🙏

If you try it, let me know how it goes!

New life for Bricksmith on macOS