Brixels: The Feldberg, brick by brick

Oct 13

5 min read

Real elevation data for the Black Forest's highest mountain, rounded to whole bricks, with the files to build it.

A brick relief seen from above at an angle: a green plain on the left, brown slopes rising to a grey and white massif on the right, with a scale and colour key along the bottom

The Rhine plain and the Feldberg as Brixels exports them: 32 × 32 studs, 25.6 cm square. Each stud stands for about 1.2 km of ground, each plate for 69 m of height.

I build these tools at the edge of the Black Forest, and its highest point is the Feldberg: 1,493 m, almost 1,300 m above the Rhine plain it rises from. What does that climb look like when every 69 metres of it becomes a plate you can stack?

Below is how the plate above came out of five decisions, and what Downloads gives you to build it. Open this exact map and change it as you read.

How this one got made

The search frames the mountain and leaves out its valley

Open brixels.krshi27.art, type Feldberg under Location and press Fly there. The map lands on the Feldberg's own municipality and builds 1,786 bricks at the default Mid size.

The first render is a field of grey and brown. Almost everything in this window is high plateau, so the colours run from 213 m to 1,416 m and the summit is a scatter of white bricks with nothing low to stand against.

Zoom out one step with the map's − and drag until the Rhine plain fills the left third. The scale then starts in the plain, and the Feldberg stands at the top of a real escarpment. I made heights and colours relative to the view on purpose: an absolute metres-per-plate scale would flatten lowlands to nothing. The price is that the frame decides the picture.

To stop the colours following every pan, open Colour and type 150 and 1,450 into Min (m) and Max (m). Values you type stay put until you press Fit colours to view.

Two brick maps side by side: on the left a grey-brown plateau with a green corner; on the right a wider view with a green plain on the left and the same massif on the right

Left: what the search frames, all plateau. Right: one zoom step out and a little west, and the plain gives the mountain something to rise from.

Fine bricks bring out the valleys

Open Bricks and move Brick size from Coarse to Fine. Coarse cuts this view into 29 × 23 studs and the massif into a white-capped blob. Fine cuts it into 83 × 67: valleys run into the escarpment, and the Kaiserstuhl gets its own outline as an island in the plain.

The build takes the middle 32 × 32 studs of whatever is on screen. At Fine that is about 38 km square, from the Rhine plain to a few kilometres east of the summit.

The same view in coarse and fine bricks side by side; the fine one shows narrow valleys and a small island of higher ground in the plain

Same view, two brick sizes. Look at the escarpment's edge: Coarse draws it as a few big steps, Fine as valleys.

Height factor 2 makes it a mountain

Height factor sets how many plates the tallest stud in view gets: ten times the factor. At 0 the map is one flat layer, a poster in bricks. At 1 the Feldberg stands 10 plates tall and the plain two. At 3 the massif towers over everything and the instructions grow to 28 steps, against 19 at 2. Take 2.

Four brick renders of the same plate at height factor 0, 1, 2 and 3; the relief grows taller and casts longer sides from left to right

Height factor 0 to 3 on the same 32 × 32 plate. Under each, what one plate stands for and how many build steps the instructions take.

The rule fits in one row of studs. A stud holds one height for about 1.2 km of ground, so the summit's 1,493 m arrives as 1,381 m, and 1,381 m divided by 20 plates is 69 m a plate. The legend under the export says the same: 1.2 km a stud.

Diagram of one west-to-east row of 32 studs: a dark line for the ground height, orange stacks of plates under it, outlined in groups of three as bricks, and a dashed line for the same row at height factor 1

One row of the build through the summit, drawn from the heights and plate counts on the app's own bricks. The dashed line is the same row at factor 1: half the plates, the same shape.

Four questions asked of one terrain

Colour by decides what a brick's colour means. Elevation asks how high. Land cover asks what grows there, and the Black Forest turns out to be one dark block of needle-leaf forest with yellow patches of open grassland on the high tops. Country draws the Rhine as the border with France, and Switzerland along the bottom. Imagery averages the July satellite picture under each brick. Keep Elevation for this one.

Four versions of the same brick map in a two-by-two grid: an elevation ramp, a land-cover map in pink, red, green and dark olive, a three-colour country map, and a dark green satellite version

The same view, same heights, four colour modes. The relief never changes; only what the colour answers does.

Snapping to colours you can buy

Turn on Preview brick colours under Colour. Each brick swaps its gradient colour for the nearest of the roughly fifty matte colours Gobricks makes. I match them by how different two colours look to the eye (CIEDE2000): the catalogue is sparse, and a colour that looks wrong on screen looks wrong on a physical brick.

Two exports of the same plate side by side; on the right the plain's smooth greens have become three distinct greens and the summit is plain white and light grey

Left, the colour map as drawn. Right, what you could order: the plain's gradient breaks into three buyable greens.

From screen to object

Everything you can take away sits under Downloads, below the map, once you have ticked the terms.

The Downloads section: a folded Terms row, then full-width buttons for Brick map (PNG) and Isometric view (PNG), a grey caption about the footprint and the build steps, then Building instructions (PDF), 3D model (LDR) and Order these bricks (Gobricks) with the affiliate note

The Downloads for this map. The caption under the two pictures is the build in one line: 32 × 32 studs on four 16 × 16 plates, 19 steps.

Brick map (PNG) is the picture at the top of this post, with the scale and colour key under it and my signature in the corner. It holds bricks only: the basemap tiles are OpenTopoMap's, and not mine to ship inside an artwork. 3D model (LDR) is free and holds every brick in place, which makes it the part list too. Order these bricks sends that model to Brickwith, Gobricks' own shop, where every part is listed with its price; the caption under the button says that it is an affiliate link. Isometric view (PNG) shows the same pieces standing on their baseplate, seen from the south-east, each in the colour you would order.

The designed instruction sheets are the one thing sold here, as a PDF at one flat price; the Building instructions (PDF) fold-out links a finished World kit you can leaf through first.

Other controls, one line each

Basemap is the map under the bricks on screen. It never goes into a download.
Continent and Country under Basemap drop every brick outside the region you pick.
Build the whole extent builds every stud on screen instead of the middle 32 × 32.
Limit to plate size cuts the build to a plate of your choice, and Coordinate frame fills its bare studs with a printed map's black and white border.
Map layers paints rivers and lakes, built-up areas, glaciers, salt flats, reefs or the equator and tropics onto the bricks, from Natural Earth. Lakes lie flat at their shore, rivers sit a plate below the land.
Change colour map → Custom takes four colours of your own: deep and shallow water, low and high land.
Buildings stacks real building heights on the terrain: Frankfurt's skyline, brick by brick. Build from → Photo builds from a picture instead: A pink staircase in 530 plates.

Your turn

Open this exact map and change one thing: drag it west over the Vosges, or set Colour by to Land cover and build the forest instead of the mountain.

Then send me what you made. I'll ask before I show it anywhere.

Next: Brixels → real Gobricks build, from this download to bricks on a table.

krshI27

karoshirt