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This is one of my first projects, one of hopefully many. If you’ve read my “Introduction” post, then you can understand what exactly I am trying to do.
Basically, this is a large scale city MOC that I want to build from mostly donations by communities, and that will eventually all go towards charity.
I am currently in the process of pinning down the exact way that the donations and charity will work, and if anyone can help me, or if you just want to know how it might work, please look into my “donations” post***.
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Update
This has now changed to a TEAM build. I am looking for anybody with experience willing to lead the project, and anybody willing to help build. You must live somewhere near Chicago to be able to meet and help build. This is only to see if there are any people willing, and not an agreement or anything like that. For more information, see the update at the bottom of my main post.
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So onto the meat!
What is it exactly?
It’s an 11 foot x 13 foot mini-fig scale Lego downtown city, complete with building interiors, streets, 6x6 block area, and filled with features.
There is also a second “phase” (see original post for more details. see below for this specific project.) where the city is under attack by aliens (including alien monsters), and the military and a secret underground force are trying to stop them.
(The second phase is optional, and is yet to be decided if it will be included).
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How did this start out?
I started out just wanting to build a city that was based somewhat on the city of Chicago. I wanted skyscrapers, along with smaller corner café type buildings, and have a bunch of different areas. It went through many planning phases with different sizes and I finally came to a set layout with everything I wanted to put in it. The entire piece is 11 feet by 13 feet and the tallest building is 6 feet tall. It all sits on a painful number of baseplates.
There are about 52 buildings within a 6 x 6 block area. There is a highway of sorts, a river, a park, and a “lakefront”.
There is an industrial district, a market district, and a business district.
There are 5 towers, the largest of which has 19 floors.
Here are a couple more angles of the city.
You can see the lakefront here, along with the river mouth, the skyline, and the industrial docks.
This would be the main downtown area. It includes the two corner shaped buildings, and possibly another bridge across the river.
A lakefront “highway” runs along the front of the city, and through the industrial district.
You can see the light poles all along the way, as well as the bridge, skyway, and angled section.
This was one of the hardest parts for me to do, as I am using the tiling method for roads, and so the roads are very thin and don’t have many options when it comes to angles. Through the pain of fiddling with the LDD program’s rotation tool, I got the road to sit on a separate baseplate system on-top of the main baseplates, and connect the walls to either end. The road and central column aren’t actually connected to anything, and are just held in place by the outside barriers. Unfortunately, this method also means that I was left with ugly bumps at the cross points.
Here you can see the hotel entrance. I know, the exit isn’t very logical, and I forgot to cut out a piece of the central area for them to get to the opposite side of the highway. This is one area where I was going to ask for help on, as I had no ideas on how to create the curved driveway. You can also see the building footprint in the top right corner. That is the museum, and it has a courtyard in the back there (second picture).
Here you can see the industrial district docks. There are 3 buildings here (one small one in the top right under the bridge). The docks would extend out from this area. You can also see the “skyway”, though it is not finished as I was limited to LDD pieces. The basic points of support would be roughly the same size and location though.
Here you can see the “shops” area, where all the high class stores, apartments, restaurants, and businesses are located. The street is split, with a decorative center (with trees and stuff).
This continues through to the lower section, with a market area, sized with corner café buildings. The right side is comprised of corner café buildings, while the left has slightly larger buildings (because of the slanted road. I will get to that).
Here you can notice part of the slanted road, the stairs, and to the right, a smaller side street going through a building tunnel.
This is one of the main streets, and is slanted at 2 points. Basically, the road is built on a baseplate and the hangover end is attached to a hinge allowing it to rest at an angle.
The river divides the downtown area in half. Here you can see the highway bridge with the sidewalks along the way. These sidewalks would be extra wide and include trees, decorations, or lampposts.
At the other end of the river is the tunnel building. It is a 5 story building, with a 2 story bridge over the river. At the left is the connecting building, with its own smaller “bridge”.
Inside the bridge are glass floors that allow people to view the river below. From the bottom, more windows sit to let viewers take a look at passing boats. This was an extremely fun part to build.
The river curves along the way, cutting from one city block lane into another, and causing the 2 corner shaped buildings to exist. Another bridge could be placed at the bottom end.
At the “curving point”, there are a few more details. First, there is the angled wall (I really built it a stupid way. I was up to the morning working on it so my mind was acting up). Then there is a “pad” area. This could serve one of two purposes.
It could be just a regular platform; letting underground facilities or docks use it. Or, go along with the “second phase” and become a secret extending “hover launch pad”. The hydraulics were placed underneath to allow the pad to raise up and down; and a vertical take of vehicle would come out the door from the underground base.
Here you can see a dock area that leads up to the main roads. Just a little detail I wanted to add.
The city is divided into 2 sections, and upper area, and a lower area; where the lower area is actually about 13 bricks lower than the rest of the city.
The roads are in a grid form, with the two areas connected by the slanted road.
Most roads are 3 lanes wide, and 1 way. I didn’t want the roads to simply be 2-way single lane roads like most baseplate roads are. This is 24 studs wide, with the middle lane being wider than the outside two. I have yet to figure out if all roads will be the same, of if I can get some roads to be both way, 1 lane smaller, etc.
I want to fully fill each building and the streets with activity, so there are a lot of interior pieces to be used. This is an example of a rough estimate of one of the taller skyscrapers (second tallest). As you can see in the earlier example, each floor is created for a different purpose: apartments/condos, stores, offices/businesses, penthouses/luxury condos, sky decks, and maintenance floors. Each set of floors has a different height (and brick height number). There are center columns within the buildings where the stairs, elevators, and facilities are located. The elevator area has enough room for 2 elevators, and extra space for equipment, structuring, and inner workings.
The base of the building has two main entrances on either side, plus an extra space for a store or restaurant in the front. The rear has either a security entrance, or service entrance (depending on what building it is).
The lobby includes the central structure, the store, bathrooms, security/service room, and lobby entrance areas. The two elevator entrances and stair entrance can be seen here (I still have to figure out a door system for the elevators). The front store (4th picture) has 2 levels: the counter, and the second level area for eating or keeping store items. (Yes, a fig won’t hit their head walking up those stairs…I checked).
I also quickly came up with a little elevator system with the LDD pieces. I’m sure with a little time a better system could be made, but I think it looks pretty cool. The piece would sit at the top of the building, with the round white knob on the outside (blending in). A lever could be pulled out of the round knob, and the whole unit pushed in to disengage the lock. The string would run around the two wheels and down the center, and pull the elevators up and down with the spin of the knob. The two pipes would run alongside the elevators (for looks).
I also built a “mock” building to test out an idea I had. This would be building number 5. I wanted to create a round entrance to a building, and not just a 45 degree face. I already have (and found) better ideas for implementing a round entrance, but this is what I came up with. It is supposed to be a high end retail store, with 3 tall floors, and an open entrance. The side walls are a bit odd, and I couldn’t find a right color for the pieces next to the side entrances (gold and grey, ick).
The tile-work is also a bit weird, but once again, this was 4 in the morning after 16 hours of working on the layout, so I was a little out of it.
Here you can see the oddly placed windows. Those would go over the entrance door, much like the CC fire station window.
Here is the second floor. You can see the open ceiling entrance, with the glass railings. And once again the weird tile work. An odd thing happened with this though. I was building the floor, when I noticed that I had built a white cross in tiles. I had no idea how that happened, but it’s just something that I noticed afterward.
Here in the final picture you can see the height that the building would come to, and try to imagine what it would look like (sorry for making you imagine. I didn’t have time to finish it).
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The idea for buildings was so far:
1: skyscraper
2: federal/government building
3: bank
4: parking
5: high end store (above)
6: shopping mall (with Lego store
)7: skyscraper
8: hotel
9: TV/radio building
10: library
11: high end condos
12: mixed
13: skyscraper
14: skyscraper
15: modern art styled business building
16: theatre
17: restaurant/club
18: museum
19-21: mixed
22-24: mixed
25: hotel
26: pub/bar, houses/apartments/motel, stores
27-29: stores and houses
30-33: restaurants/stores
34-36: stores/houses
37-41: mixed
42: Corner Café
43-45: houses
46: Warehouse (secret operations)
47: electrical stations
48: mill/factory
49-51: shipping docks
Some other ideas for what would be in the buildings are:
Hospital
Police station
Electronics store
Clothing stores
Pizza place
Nightclubs
City hall
Movie rental
Pharmacy
Post office
Gun store
Sports store
Business headquarters
I had a few extra plans like for a street underneath the higher level (like wacker drive), that would go under the bridge (making it a double deck bridge). I couldn’t find a good place for it yet though. Another thing I was thinking about was either a subway system, a rail system above the streets, or even a tram/trolley system (or a mixture of them). Finally, with the taller buildings, I wanted to see if I could build them so that they could open like a book, instead of having to take each floor off.
One thing I felt wouldn’t be realistic or feasible within the size and style of the city was any form of trains. I felt it would just take up too much space, though any suggestions or ideas that could work them in would be appreciated.
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The Second Phase
The second phase of this one is under consideration. I really badly want to do it, but I also realize that along with donation issues, it increases the piece and price count from an already high amount. Basically it would be an alien invasion scene. This would include all kinds of creatures that the aliens have, including a 3 foot tall monster, and possibly some smaller space ships. The monster would be about 36 inches tall and be holding onto the tallest building while walking around. Multiple different kinds of creatures would exist all over, along with piece built aliens. There would be holes and fires in buildings, people running everywhere, and a fully deployed military trying to fight off the aliens. This would include some tanks, apcs, humvees, a couple fighter jets, helicopters, and par-trooping figs from a plane. Also, since I had so many ideas for it, I wanted to build a secret military unit hidden inside the city, with the semi-futuristic vehicles and equipment that might come with that (including mechs of course). That would include the warehouse staging/vehicle construction base, the river pad, and an elevator system that would come out of an intersection. This would include advanced hover/heli vehicles, armored troop carriers, assault bikes, a hover tank, a few heavy duty mechs, and armed weapon suits. I was also thinking of a small network of underground bases. For the damaged parts of the city, I would have “plates” or removable and swappable parts like wall sections, trees, streets, etc that could be changed with the normal city so that you could turn the city quickly from model city to attacked city.
But like I said, this one is under consideration for obvious reasons. It would definitely shift potential auctioneers also. It is something I really would love doing, and would definitely make this model unique (an in my eyes awesome), not to mention give the whole thing a scenic and movie like feel.
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Finally, here is the Lego Digital Designer file for the layout, for one of the skyscrapers, and the high end store(includes elevator mechanism).
WARNING: The layout is huge, so only open it if you know your computer can handle it. It slows even my system down, and adding any larger piece (like a skyscraper) crashed it or crashed it when I saved.
Link to the brickshelf folder
Link to the hub post
Link to the donation discussion post
Link to the LDD issues post
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Where to next?
Well, other than the update (below), I am going to try and get the layout transferred to either MLCAD or SR3D builder and see if it can work there, as then I could sectionalize it, allowing me to actually work on it rather than having it freeze, crash, or not save. While I have issues with these other systems (it’s hard to get used to after LDD) I do need the extra pieces, colors, and ability for more complex piece connections. I’m then probably going to add in some of the street details, park, and extras. From there I’m going the “fill” in the buildings, putting up at least their outside walls to get a better sense of what everything will look like, along with picking the color schemes of the buildings.
Probably the last phase would be to add in the interior detail, but I’m probably going to wait on that one for the team (maybe just a few buildings).
And I’m probably at one point or another going to get distracted, start building some aliens, monsters, or forces, and end up doing a lot of work there (even though it might not be included).
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Update (cont)
Because of the group aspect, I am redesigning a lot of the layout, design, style, etc of the build. While many aspects will stay the same, building size, complexity, arrangement, will definitely change. I wanted to make the entire city more unique, diverse, and add depth and complexity to it. It needs to have more variety. Angled roads, different types of roads, different building sizes, a different lakefront with buildings on the other side of the highway and a beach, a bit more water in front, some surrounding roads possibly, larger city blocks with more buildings located in a single block rather than “1 building per block”, and maybe a more complex river are some of the changes I want to make.
Now is also a great time to give me ideas, as it will be a lot easier to implement them into the design rather than later.
Generally, I’m working more on the basic layout and what will be included in the city, so ideas pertaining to that would be the most helpful, but any other ideas are also more than welcome!
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Thank you for taking some time to look at my project (and thank you especially if you had the courage and patience to read everything!).
Please remember to let me know if you are interested in helping build or lead this project, or if you know of anyone who would be willing to. More information about that, and the other projects I have planned, is in my other post here. Information and discussion about the donation system is posted here
I look forward to reading any responses and working on this project with all of you! Suggestions are more than welcome (they are suggested). This is more than a team build. It is a community build, and I want to let everyone have a part in this.
And if you liked this, look forward to more work on this and my other projects.
(Oh, and don’t worry. I will be working on this regardless of how the team and donation system work out. It will just take a LOT longer)
Ok then. I’m DONE! (my fingers hurt)
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