Chapter 1 · walkthrough
Your first wall
Start from a new panel and finish with a gable end of a small cottage: two storeys of windows, a door under a brick arch, a stone band, corner quoins, a chimney stack and an oval date stone, ready to cut.
1Choose the scale
BrickIT! opens with one blank panel, 99 × 80 mm, in stretcher bond. Before you draw anything, pick your modelling scale from the Scale list 1 at the top of the window: OO (1:76.2) is the default, and the list runs from full size and 1:12 dolls' houses down to Z gauge, with Custom… for anything else.
The scale sets what a brick and a course mean in real life, so the real size of your wall is shown under the preview as you work (for example W: 6.86m H: 5.71m). The mm/m button 2 switches those real-life figures between metric and feet and inches.
Everything you type into BrickIT! is in model millimetres: the size you will cut. The real-life figures are only there to check against your drawings or photographs.
2Set the bricks and the bond
Open Brick Settings at the top of the left-hand column. A brick is 3 mm long and 1 mm high in OO, which is right for most British brickwork. Joint is the width of the mortar line: leave it at 0 to let the laser's own cut make the joint.
Choose the Bond Pattern. Here are the three you will use most, as the preview draws them:
The list also has English and Flemish garden wall bonds (you choose how many stretcher courses come between header courses), header, stack and monk bond, stone - ashlar blocks, random and coursed rubble, random ashlar - and Plain for rendered walls with no joints at all. Stone walls are covered in chapter 8. For this cottage, choose Flemish Bond.
Offset courses for corner matching shifts the bond by one course. Tick it on one of two walls that meet at a corner so the bricks on the two faces interlock as a real corner does.
3Size the panel
In Panel Dimensions, type the Width and Height in millimetres. For a gable end, the height is to the eaves, where the slope starts; the gable is added on top in the next step. We use 90 × 45 mm.
The width snaps to whole half-bricks (1.5 mm in OO), so the bond finishes neatly at both ends, and the card tells you how many bricks wide and courses high that is. Taper leans the sides in towards the top by up to 5°, for chimneys and battered walls.
4Add a gable
Tick Enable on the Gable Wall card and open it. A Simple, Triangular gable is what most houses have. Define it by its Height above the eaves (30 mm here) or by the roof's Angle.
The other choices: Semicircular (an arch top, for viaduct infill panels), Asymmetric (north-light) for a saw-tooth roof's end, unequal eaves heights, and Multiple (north light roof) for a whole row of north-light gables. For Dutch and crow-stepped gables, see chapter 7.
5Put in the windows and the door
Scroll the left-hand column down to Windows & Doors. With nothing selected, the card describes the next opening you will add:
- Choose the Type (Window or Door) and Shape (rectangular, circular or semicircular).
- Type X and Y - millimetres from the panel's bottom-left corner to the opening's bottom-left corner - and its width W and height H. X and the width snap to whole bricks (half bricks in Flemish bond) so the bond meets the opening cleanly.
- Pick an Arch Type - none for a square head, or flat (jack), segmental, semicircular, elliptical, Tudor and three kinds of Gothic - and whether its Voussoirs are brick or stone.
- Tick Add cill below opening for a stone sill, and, on a square-headed opening, Add stone/concrete lintol above opening.
- Click Add Opening.
For the cottage we added two ground-floor windows (15 × 15 mm at X 12 and 63, Y 6, segmental arch, with cills), a door (12 × 21 mm at X 39, Y 0, segmental arch) and two upper windows (15 × 10 mm at Y 31, square heads with lintels and cills). The bricks stop round every opening, and an arch's voussoirs are counted and drawn for you.
6Change an opening
Each opening is listed under the card's buttons. Click one in the list (or click it in the preview) to edit it: the card says Editing: W1, and anything you change applies straight away. Click + New to go back to adding.
- Move it: drag it in the preview, or use the arrow keys - each press moves it 0.5 mm, or a whole brick with Shift held.
- Copy it with ⧉ in the list (or Copy), then move the copy: the quickest way to make a row of matching windows.
- Delete it with × in the list.
- Keep it for later: 💾 Save puts the opening in your Opening Library, to use on any panel.
If an opening - or its arch, hood mould or lintel - rises above the top of the wall or into the gable's slope, the card says so in an amber note, for example "Its arch rises 1.2 mm above the top of the wall. Move the window down, or make it lower or narrower." The card lists every opening that does.
7String courses, quoins and a chimney stack
These live in the right-hand column, above the export buttons. Click a card's title to open it.
A chimney stack drawn here stands on the wall's top edge, as on the apex of this gable. Its oversailing courses and pots are made as separate card parts and shown in the 3D window. A stack that rises through the middle of the roof is made differently, from an internal wall - see chapter 5.
Bands, cills, lintels, arch heads and quoins are engraved on the brick panel. To make them stand proud, the Detail Layer (relief) exports them as parts to cut from a second board and glue on where they are engraved - see chapter 4.
8Engraved marks and decal areas
Marks & Decal Areas, under Brick Settings, adds shapes that are engraved, never cut: a + Rectangle, + Oval or + Line for medallions, date stones, recessed panels and fixing marks. Positions are millimetres from the panel's bottom-left corner. We put a 10 × 6 mm oval date stone in the gable.
A + Decal area is different: the bricks stop at its edge, so a printed sign or advertisement can lie flat on the wall. Its outline is engraved unless you untick Engrave outline.
9Check the drawing
The toolbar over the preview helps you check your work:
Rulers along the top and side, in model millimetres.
2Dims draws the panel's size and each opening's size and position on the preview; a small menu chooses which, and can show them in real-world scale.
3Zoom out and in (or hold Ctrl and scroll over the preview).
4⬚ fits the panel in the view; ⊞ fits everything; 1:1 goes back to 100%.
Now save your work with Ctrl+S. A BrickIT! project is a single .bpg file holding every panel and setting.
Where next
- To cut this wall straight away: Cutting it out.
- To give the windows reveals, or add more walls of the building: Layers, reveals and front layers.
- For sash windows, doors, mullions and tracery: Windows and doors.