WIP: Large model downtown city Part 2

[alienwar9]

Hey,

back in march I had posted my design plans for a large scale city that was supposed to be a "community build" with donations towards the project going to charity. Since then I've done some work...a lot of work.

The donations idea is completely scraped, and currently I'm working to try and get a fundraiser where the model can be auctioned off to companies and most of the proceeds go towards charity. But unlike last time, I'm not going to open my big mouth describing how it will all work because most likely, things will change.

For example,

• I wanted to see if there was any organization as a part of TLC that could work with me on this...not at all. They already have strict standards and rules, which just so happen to rule me out. YAY.
  

• I then looked into The Clinton Foundation (which is the charity I most strongly supported) and found out they have their strict rules and don't work with what I'm going for.
  

• I looked into charity fundraiser companies, but once again, they mostly support the actual charities and fundraisers they hold rather than people who want to hold fundraisers for charities.
  

• online auctions? most items are far below this one's price point and it doesn't seem easy to get company or corporate attention (cause very few people have space and are willing to buy something THIS BIG).
  

So its time to make more phone calls, look into other charities, and maybe see if there is a possibility of getting it donated to a children's museum/hospital/care center/school etc.

Why not just donate it? Because I can't afford to donate a $20,000 project, to be blunt and honest.

But enough about that. I want to explain exactly where I am in the project itself.

The Project

Note:This picture is a photoshop of pictures of the 3 parts of the city and done crudely.

After months of hard work, I went back to check some pictures from my initial design layouts and found out that I had reached the 1 year anniversary since I started this project. Since I am pretty much finished with the visual concept design, I decided now would be a great time to post where I have gotten in a year. It may seem like I haven't done much, but remember I am also studying hard for a degree and trying to scrap together money for this thing. I decided to move it to the LDD section as so far, it only exists in LDD.

After my march post, I decided to completely rework the layout. Everything I had from the initial build was ripped apart (in LDD) and used as ghost parts for the new build. I drew up design layouts to include angled streets, accommodate subways and El-ways, and restructured city blocks to be more realistic and include multiple buildings. I added an entire island to become the "new city" where hotels, beaches, restaurants, and condos were located, and stretched the city in length. Since Universe mode was unlocked, I had a lot more possibilities also.

I started building test buildings with actual windows and doors to get a more realistic view of what everything would look like. I built SNOT roads instead of tiled roads, and re-sized everything. I added multi-height roads, built test builds for opening bridges, built the main subway station, added the EL-line, made street-trolleys, created a second river between the island and mainland, re-built the raised highway, and started building more accurate versions of buildings to get piece count down. I found out almost every SNOT road would have to be custom, and not copy/paste.

Price

By the time I got to 7 or 8 buildings and accurately calculated the average price of a road section, I found out I was way over budget. My initial budget was $15,000. I was at $20,000. I cut out the island. I built some more, used LDD manager and Wanted Bricks to get an even more accurate price estimate, and found out I was yet again over budget. I had given myself an increase to $20,000....I was at $30,000 price tag. So I cut entire roads and rows of buildings. My current and most accurate estimate is at $22,000. This includes a reasonable average price per piece on bricklink, an allowance of $800-1000 for shipping costs, and a small over budget buffer. I'm hoping I can get some deals on bricklink, considering some of the order sizes I'll be making. (more like praying every second).

The funny part: this doesn't include "phase 2", the destruction version that I really badly want to do. But, if at the end I can work a little harder and get some money together, I will build phase 2 and then auction off those parts separately. For more info on "phase 2" look at my old city post.

Current State

Once everything was settled to its reasonable size, I finished the rest of the buildings, built some of the extras mentioned above, and measured. It is 9 feet x 20 feet, with a small middle section that is 10 feet in width. The highest point is around 78 inches, or 6 1/2 feet. The table that everything sits on is 2 feet tall.

Through painful effort, I managed to get LDD to put the entire base together to measure. With the current level of detail, the city is broken up into 4 parts (the 3rd and 4th were sometimes stable together), as LDD cannot handle everything together. I am trying to get a hold of a really powerful computer to test if I can get everything together. I will be breaking up the city into probably 8 parts and finalizing everything, though if I include baseplates I might have to break it up even further (unless LDD 4.0 fixes that issue and COMES OUT!)

Building the entire city from scratch would have made my head explode, so I decided to borrow ideas, designs, and almost exact builds from other MOCs and pictures. For anyone I might have borrowed from, Thank You! Everything I had to take from pictures, so it wasn't a piece of cake copying a building MOC from a single front facing picture. I also did some design mixing where I took elements from multiple MOCs and merged them into one building. I added some of my own ideas, and came up with what you see. For some of the buildings where I could not find any previous MOC that fit what I was looking for, I decided to go to real life examples (oh the internet). Those were some of the most fun, and hardest to build obviously. For the sake of getting a visual concept design done quickly, I had to make these shortcuts. I needed to see if the aesthetic of the city flowed, and if the colors and styles of the buildings didn't clash. I think for the most part, everything worked out, but I have to study the look of everything some more to make sure. I might move some buildings around, change some colors, change some styles, etc.

If anyone can point out some areas that can be made better, or any problems or "ugly" patches, please help me out. Note though that some buildings I took more time with than others, so some buildings are plain. They are not finished at all.

As for the buildings that I borrowed a lot from, I will be reworking them to be more original, so to be fair. I don't want to be a copy cat, just inspired. The one building that is the hardest will be the tallest. It is very close in design to a building built at the Lego store in downtown Chicago, and it looks so beautiful that I really don't want to change it. I don't know what I should do.

Pictures

If you look from the above picture of the whole city, these pictures go left to right.

Here is the first section: the industrial area, old town, docks, and marketplace.

You will find:

• street trolley

• raised highway

• "San Francisco Style" angled streets

• a few Lego modular buildings (cafe corner, etc)

• beginning of bridge and road to island (island not included )

• chemical plant (building with black tube) and power station

The Middle Section is the main downtown area and park.

Many of the buildings here are very rough builds, or gutted so LDD doesn't crash. Stuff in this area includes:

• diagonal road

• 3 bridge outlines. 1 double deck bridge

• "wacker drive" road underneath tall building

• dipping road beneath highway

• El-line w/cross through building

The Right Section is my favorite, the business downtown district.

This Section includes:

• diagonal road

• 3 bridge outlines. 1 double deck bridge

• "wacker drive" road continuation

• underground parking garage

• river dock

• river gate entrance

• tallest building

• my favorite, red and black building

• subway with above ground entrances

Finally, here is a shot of the whole base layout of the city, without buildings.

And...

Here is my brickshelf folder once moderated for some extra pictures of buildings, a wire-framing concept to final build of the EL-line building, a screen-cap of LDD as proof that it ran, and some extra stuff.

I will try and get higher resolution pictures up to a flickr account hopefully. If anyone wants better pictures of something just ask.

I also will be getting pictures of the subway, double deck bridge, fully built versions of buildings, the island, previous versions of the layout, SNOT roads, and a list of what buildings are posted soon.

The size and overall layout are final, and the first of 5 tables for the whole model is built.

So you get an idea of real life size, here is a picture of 1 of the tables.

[Mrlegoninja]

Wow! Big indeed! Nice work.

[prateek]

Great progress. Too bad you can't get any help on this donation thing.

[DLuders]

Since you live in the Chicago (USA) area, did you talk to the Lego Town MOCcers at BrickWorld? Are you part of a Chicago-area Lego Users Group (LUG) that will help in the future "Team Build"? I think that your city layout is VERY REALISTIC; there are parts of New York City that look just like that.

At this point, I recommend starting to build one of the buildings/modules with real bricks (using your available funds), and when folks SEE the real thing, they can increase their enthusiasm for the project and maybe you can get donations of money/time/bricks. As it is, people may be intimidated by the SHEER SIZE of the project. 110 x 240 inches (2.8 x 6.1 meters) is HUGE! Folks may even be afraid to look at parts of your LDD .lxf files, because it may crash their computers.

This may be a multi-year project that could become reality WITH PATIENCE. As the "Great Recession" eases, organizations may again resume their charitable donations. Start building what you can afford, and then keep plugging away at it.

[Superkalle]

Absolutey amazing work. It's great to see what you've been working on all these months.

How many bricks are there in the complete model?

[Zerobricks]

Simply amazing! Would you mind sharing the LXF file, so we can inspect in detail?

[alienwar9]

Thank you everyone!

To answer some questions,

the piece count so far is around 117,000 but I'm guessing off the top of my head (I did calculate it somewhere once but I can't find the papers) that it will end up closer to 150,000 (really rough guess).

At the moment I am kind of hesitant to share the LXF files, since this might be an auctionable model. And I highly doubt that most people can open the files without LDD crashing. AND all the sections you see in the pictures in their form DO crash (I cannot save them, I can only get screenshots in LDD). I will most likely never post the whole layout LXF though. But, once I start finalizing buildings and blocks, I will probably put up separate parts and buildings.

If anyone wants to see anything specific though I will gladly make an LXF file and post it.

Unfortunately I did not get the chance to talk to any town MOCers at BrickWorld (which was one of my main missions when I went there). I ran out of time as I wanted to see everything first, and didn't realize there was soooo much to see. This project has since my last post returned to its original form, where instead of a "team build", I would mainly build and fund all of it.

I suppose in a lucky way, the amount of time it will take to build this corresponds pretty well with how long it will take to acquire the funds, aka a little more than one and a half years. With the designing, calculations and piece shipment, and actual building, along with the possible "phase 2", working a job to pay for everything, its a reasonable time. I want to get at least the main build done in time for BrickWorld 2012.

But like I said, please let me know of any requests for more pictures or small parts in LXF files. Otherwise, I'll be working on my next post tomorrow.

Thank you again for all the compliments! It truly inspires me so much

[Randal]

If I had a bigger processor and more ram, I'd ask for the lxf's so I could have lego backdrops in brick. I do okay with what I've got though. These are impressive in terms of scale, time spent and attention to detail.

[Aethersprite]

This is just amazing. I would love to see this in real Lego form. Keep up the good work! Good luck finding a sponsor.

[CommanderFox]

Wow, that is one Big model!

It must have taken you alot of time to build that on LDD.

Great job, and I hope you find a charity.

CF

[spyrak]

I like the city very much and so much detail in it.

May I have a copy of the LDD file please.

Please send the the city LDD file to dylan.wilson3@ntlworld.com.

thankyou

How much power do you need on your PC to make a city that big using LDD software?

and for rendering and also generating instructions when using the LDD software?

[DLuders]

@ spyrak: By clicking on Alienwar9's profile, I could see that he has not been active on Eurobricks since Aug 31, 2012 (5-1/2 months ago). Nevertheless, I had collected his LDD .lxf files and have just e-mailed them to you (9 MB total, mostly in ZIP files). He WARNED us that many of his his LDD files involve 30,000+ virtual bricks, so your computer may crash!

[spyrak]

@ spyrak: By clicking on Alienwar9's profile, I could see that he has not been active on Eurobricks since Aug 31, 2012 (5-1/2 months ago). Nevertheless, I had collected his LDD .lxf files and have just e-mailed them to you (9 MB total, mostly in ZIP files). He WARNED us that many of his his LDD files involve 30,000+ virtual bricks, so your computer may crash!

thankyou very much

[sokolean]

Hello there,

I have got the lxf file for alienwar9's parking garage, but it seems that something is

not correct with the spiral build for the cars to ride up, I think there's a fault in the construction.

Has anyone of you guys tried to actually build the garage?

I am new here, my name's Marc and I am from the Netherlands. Where can I introduce myself here?

Regards

Marc

[Masta' Blasta']

Amazing!

[sokolean]

What do you mean?

[Superkalle]

Please note guys, that the initial post is over 2 years old and the file and model may very well be outdated.

@sokolean - you can introduce yourself here.

[Masta' Blasta']

Please note guys, that the initial post is over 2 years old and the file and model may very well be outdated.

@sokolean - you can introduce yourself here.

I can't believe I failed to notice that. Still, this is a very impressive layout.

[Superkalle]

Still, this is a very impressive layout.

That is true

[Savonarola721]

On 2/10/2013 at 9:12 AM, DLuders said:

@ spyrak: By clicking on Alienwar9's profile, I could see that he has not been active on Eurobricks since Aug 31, 2012 (5-1/2 months ago). Nevertheless, I had collected his LDD .lxf files and have just e-mailed them to you (9 MB total, mostly in ZIP files). He WARNED us that many of his his LDD files involve 30,000+ virtual bricks, so your computer may crash!

I would really love to have some of his building in my ldd collection, I have a few of them but I do not have the hotel and the tall yellow skyscraper. 

Edited October 23, 2017 by Savonarola721