Blockland Forums > General Discussion
Invisible Bricks: Yea or Nay?
Pliny:
Oftentimes when I'm building, I try to go for a sense of 'structural integrity', a sense that what I'm building would be able to support itself if I built it out of real Lego parts, or if t were an actual object. However, when it comes to building certain things, such as vehicles, odd or highly detailed structures, or things that rely on being small, I wind up using invisible bricks, which isn't exactly irksome or bad, but which sometimes makes me feel as if I'm not doing the best I can without 'cheating' a little.
For instance, if I were to build a rock face out of 8x cubes and wanted a wooden catwalk on it, if I were to try and build the catwalk directly into the side of an 8x cube, I couldn't- the 8x cube is too big, and I'd have to break the cube up into smaller bricks to fit in the supports for the catwalk. If I used invisible bricks, I could simply make an invisible support beam or set of beams to actually hold up the catwalk, and then make fake supports that look like they're going into the rock face. While the solution with invisible bricks is more brick-efficient, it doesn't give me the sense that what I'd built could actually hold itself up. If I build the catwalk without invisible bricks, it'll be more brick-intensive and potentially more ugly, but it would be able to support itself in reality, giving a sort of feeling of solidness and adding a bit of realism(?).
TL;DR
Sometimes you can use invisible bricks to do stuff more efficiently or effectively than by building everything solidly, but it doesn't feel right and gives the impression that the build couldn't stand or exist in real life or without those bricks (to me, that is).
How do you feel about using invisible bricks? Why?
Kevin:
I use them if whatever it is I'm building needs to be flat/clean.
But otherwise I try and build some kind of misc. junk item/ scenery on top to cover it.
"Oh hey nice tree!"
"Thanks, its holding up the four houses its connected to."
Treynolds416:
I will take great pains to never use invisible bricks in most builds. The only time I will use them in structures is when there is literally absolutely no way to not use them and still have the build look nice. I usually regard builds with superfluous invisible bricks as the result of laziness
Mysteroo:
I never put too much thought into that before, but I know what you mean. I don't mind having to use invisible bricks when need be, but it does seem to add a nice, almost sorta realistic quality to builds when you don't use any.
Fireboy:
invisible bricks are nice in my opinion, i don't really have any problem with using them