Today at Toronto Comic-Con I was fortunate enough to meet Greg Hyland, an actual Minifigure artist for the Lego Group for the past 15 years. With all the Brickonicle concept art in mind I asked him a few questions about official Lego rules he has to adhere to. That way we can keep these in mind when trying to make realistic Brickonicle concept art.
Maximum of five inc colors per figure. (Each additional colour costs approximately 10 cents extra.
Every set and figures must survive the “Oven Test”, a test in which they are placed in an oven heated to 110 degrees. If they survive without cracking, they keep their designs.
There is a minimum thickness for the lines on a design, however he could not remember the exact number.
After all this I asked him about specialized minifigures, such as the droids from Star Wars or the old Bionicle playsets. He said often there is no way around using specialized pieces however when I asked about Bionicle specifically he said that :
“It [standard system Bionicle] could definitely work. It could look good, but maybe not sell too well”. He even said he personally liked the idea of a system based G3 Bionicle.
Finally, he drew up a sketch as to how he would design a standard Lego Minifigure based off of Tahu from 2001, which I will include below. I hope you have all found this useful, I only wish I could have gotten some more exact answers from him.
The explanation I was given is this is likely the maximum heat a Lego set would be exposed to if left next to a window on a hot summer day. (Though the exact temperatures may vary depending on the region. I’m really not sure.) This way, they’re testing to make sure the set won’t break just for being left in the wrong place in the house. Minifigures must also go through this process, as molds with stretches of plastic too thin will crack in this heat. Hope you found this helpful.
ahh…that makes a bit more sense. Goes to show how much lego cares about product quality - covering all their bases in terms of the worse case scenerios a minifig could go through
Thats some cool art, by a designer too. I’m interested by these requirements though, the heat test and colours seem no issue, this is Bionicle, colour schemes are pretty good at staying under 5 different colours for one character or type of characters. The line thing could be limiting but looking at minifigures now, it seems more like try different designs and see what works.
That art is seriously cool, its great you took the time to do this.