About BrickZoid

BrickZoid converts a photograph into a mosaic you can build flat out of 1×1 plates, laid across whole baseplates and viewed from above.

Why baseplates decide everything

A mosaic 50 studs wide needs two 32-stud plates and leaves fourteen studs of the second one bare, which is awkward to build and worse to display. So widths snap to whole baseplates. That single constraint is the difference between a buildable mosaic and a picture of one, and it is the main thing BrickZoid adds over a generic pixel-art converter.

How the image is reduced

Your crop is averaged down to one cell per stud in linear light, so midtones do not darken the way they do when you average gamma-encoded values. Colours are then clustered by weighted k-means in CIELAB, which minimises the error your eye actually notices rather than the error a computer finds convenient. Finally each cluster is matched to the nearest available colour by CIEDE2000, and two clusters that land on the same piece are merged.

The clustering is seeded deterministically. The same photograph with the same settings gives the same mosaic every time, which matters when you are about to spend money on parts.

What you get

A build chart with a unique printable symbol per colour so it survives being photocopied in greyscale, a piece count per colour, and a PDF tiled across sheets at a constant readable stud size rather than shrunk onto one page. Heavier rules mark where one baseplate ends and the next begins, so you can build a plate at a time and butt them together.

Studs up, flat

This makes flat, studs-up mosaics only. It does not plan brick-built sculptures, SNOT construction, or anything where a piece is anything other than one square of one colour seen from above.

Last updated September 2026.