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Ayrlego

[COR - Mar FB2] Moore House, Mooreton Bay (LDD)

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Establishing the new settlement at Jameston was proving much more difficult than Mooreton Bay had been. Although they had landed in January, the settlement had yet to have one completed building. With so many new settlements, colonists were not as available as there were in the early days, especially skilled workers. The longer distances also hampered logistics. So it was a mixture of annoyance and secret relief when Major Dirk Allcock was summoned on a fast ship back to Mooreton Bay with Colonel Andrew Howe, who himself was struggling under similar conditions at Port Woodhouse at nearby Garma's Key. 

Mooreton Bay was much the same as when he left it, although the streets were teaming with new faces and new buildings were encroaching on the skyline. It was hard to believe that this town, which had recently been recognised as a Large Town under the Colonial Ministries designation scheme, was little more than a few small huts a year ago. It was then Dirk noticed the large building that dominated the entire settlement, built on a rise overlooking the wide expanse of the bay. It was the site he himself had reserved for the seat of the government when he was mayor. Frank Greenway, his convict architect, had been drawing up plans when Dirk left for Jameston earlier in the year. Clearly construction had just been completed, and for a moment Dirk was quite speechless.

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A couple of days later saw Dirk in the square in front of the building, which had been named Moore House, after Corrington hero the late General Sir Charles Moore, who the settlement itself had indeed been named for. Today the wide expanse of the square was full of soldiers, more soldiers than Dirk had ever seen on Alicentia - two full battalions in fact. The left battalion was made up of redcoats, two companies of Grenadiers and a company of light troops. The battalion on the right was different. The men wore the same style of uniform as the redcoats opposite them, but their coats were a burnt orange colour. The troops were Mardierians, and this was the reason Dirk had been summoned.

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You may recall that recently Terraversia had come out and declared against the Mardierian Crown. This did not sit well with all the population on the island, including some of the army. Lieutenant Colonel Anthony deLucca was one such man and deLucca commanded a battalion of Mardierian troops. When the declaration of independence had come, he was forced to renounce his oath to the crown, along with his men to avoid massacre. However on the first available occasion he had fled, attempting to join Mardierian forces on the Isle de Medio. Blocked from this endevour by blockading Eslandola and Garvian ships, he had managed to smuggle an officer into one of the Mardierian forts with a letter for the Mardierian commander. Much to his horror, the officer had returned ashen faced and with a stinging letter from the commander. As deLucca and his man had renounced their oath, the commander viewed them as irreversibly tainted by the horror of republicanism. Fearing a trap, he had refused to entertain the idea of deLucca joining the garrison and had furthermore declared him and his men traitors to the crown, and persona non grata in all Mardierian territory, on pain of death. Harassed by the Eslandolan Navy, deLucca further fled eastward until he reached Mooreton Bay, where he had a distant connection to the Mayor, James Hume. Hume, not sure how Her Majesties Government would react to so many foreign troops, had immediately contacted The Cocovia Governor for advice and Captain Jonathan Cooke had referred the matter to Colonial Ministry. Moving with a speed that is only possible from the well oiled machine that is Corrington bureaucracy, orders had been dispatched recalling Colonel Howe from Port Woodhouse to invest the Battalion into the Corlander Army as the Queen's Mardierian Legion. The Legion would serve in the colonies, indeed it was decried that no QML soldier would be allowed to ever enter Corrington as a member of the army. deLucca had readily agreed, keen to serve his adapted nation.

Before the ceremony Dirk too had a surprise. Orders from the Army Board had been received and he had received a brevet commission to Lieutenant Colonel. Separate orders from the Colonial office had also appointed Lieutenant Colonel Allcock as Governor of the Paradise Isles - as the Celestia/Cascadia region had become known. He was to return to Jameston immediately and continue to oversee the development of that settlement, but also the settlement of Port Woodhouse. Colonel Howe had been recalled to Bellson. But before returning home, Dirk was to attend the official opening of Moore House.

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The opening was a great success. Here Dirk and James Hume discuss matters while overlooking the ballroom. Colonel Howe can be seen talking to several gentlemen who look suspiciously like visiting Oleon VIPs. Several other recognisable figures can also be seen.

Designed to impress upon all who saw it with the full might and glory of Corrington, Moore house was a monument to the Empire and a sign that Corrington was here to stay. The ground floor contained a huge reception area/ball room, with grand staircases leading to the second floor. Here the house divided into two wings, the Red Wing and Green Wing. In the Green wing the settlement council sat to deliberate on matters of the settlement, while in the Red Wing government lawyers meet to review settlement laws and debate disputes in the interpretation of said laws. Lastly the top level of the grand house was the residential wing. Although containing no permanent residences, a number of large rooms were kept for VIP visitors to the settlement, together with a central dining and lounge room.  

 

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Licensed as a Royal Cultural property in Mooreton Bay: footprint = 10 368

I ended up having to do two separate builds as LDD froze every time I attempted to add the interior to the full model. Seriously, I don't know how you guys who build big in LDD do it. The program must have crashed at least 30 times towards the end of this build!

The overview model totals just over 15 000 bricks. The house itself was inspired by this photo of a building in Sydney Australia, built in the 1800s and since demolished.

After much frustration with the piano I cheated, and used the excellent design found here.

The QML are to represent the battalion of troops I won as a result of Ch5A - many of you will see the loose historical parallel I have made with the KGL.

As usual, C&C welcome! Enjoy!

 

Edited by Ayrlego

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Really cool build Ayrlego, I especially like that statue!  Four feet on the ground... he must have had a nice long life. :pir-grin:  (If I recall correctly, two feet: killed in action, three feet: died of wounds received in action: 1 foot... well, I really don't know what one foot would mean... :pir_tong2: )  All those arches on the front give the facade a wonderful look!  Great interior too!

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An excellent as well as a tremendously huge build, Ayrlego!  Very nice facade and statue (now we just need to get some bronze minifigs and horses in bricks! :grin:), and I'm really glad to see you tying in the challenge prize with your story here! :pir-sweet:

The interior, though, IMHO, is where this build really shines - the checkered floor works perfectly, and every floor is excellent in its own rite, but the top one is probably my favorite.  Great job with those huge beds, and that dining room is just splendid! :wub:

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Are you KB's brother or something? This puts all my LDD builds to shame. This build is amazing, and probably one of the best LDD builds I've seen on here. Not only is the outside fantastic, but the inside is equally amazing as well. I like all those soldiers and minifigures. Great to see Mooreton Bay growing so fast. Even when I joined back in January, it was smaller than it is now. 

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I can only repeat what has been said before - this is a great build with lots of clever details - absolutely worthy of a royal license!

The only thing I find slightly off is that the floors are just two plates thick, I would have liked to see around the same thickness as the part where the outer facade is attached to the inner wall. And I'd have loved to see some imperfections in the soldiers' movements - slightly different angles of hands/arms/heads/legs - this is truly annoying work, but adds a lot of charm, as it doesn't look so copy-pasted (and no, I'm not falling for that COR soldiers = perfect 'argument' :tongue:)

Maybe some helpful LDD tips - if you don't already know them:

Crashes of that tiresome software are a true nuisance - I could fill a lot of MOCs with all the progress I've lost over the years :grin: :ugh: Well, to increase performance, once LDD gets unstable you should uncheck the option 'outline on bricks' (under edit/preferences), this should give you a few thousand parts more to add. On the other hand, this makes building much more annoying. Also, try 'hiding' the parts (L) of your build you're not not working on - this should also boost performance. And before you save, hide the whole build. This usually gets me up to 30.000+ parts without too much trouble - if there are no flexible parts involved. If you use POV-Ray instead of bluerender, you can actually combine multiple lxf-files in one render. The trade-off in this case is that the rendering time skyrockets... especially with transparent parts involved... Using bluerender, you can change the direction the light comes from by turning the whole build in 90° steps, if you don't want to mess around with the scene.sc file (or create individual copies for each MOC). And that gap you have in the render between your overview build and the scene's 'surface' can be undone by slightly moving the whole build, in case there isn't a single plate somewhere stuck under the baseplate. And lastly, if using bluerender you move your builds 'over the horizon', you'll surely encounter the pinkish sky issue... unfortunately, there's no cure for that - just stay under the horizon as you did here, or you'd have to manually clear the sky :wacko:

 

Keep it up!

Oh... and welcome to the dark side :wink:

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1 hour ago, Kolonialbeamter said:

And lastly, if using bluerender you move your builds 'over the horizon', you'll surely encounter the pinkish sky issue... unfortunately, there's no cure for that - just stay under the horizon as you did here, or you'd have to manually clear the sky :wacko:

What do you mean by "horizon"? And how do you stay under it?

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Somehow I missed this due to the challenge deadline. My apologies! That is an impressive build, worthy of a royal property. (I'll have to spend some time looking at the architectural details. Much to steal borrow there.) Mooreton Bay has really grown up! And you've done an excellent job of creating a story to explain your challenge prize. Kudos, sir, and a :thumbup:.

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Here's a sample of that bluerender pink sky phenomenon/bug:

Spoiler

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Bluerender renders its baseplate and sky as two separate entities, by default they are both white. Starting at... I don't really know where and why (it may be related to its SunFlow engine)... everything above eye-level (= the sky) turns into this hideous color. Haven't encountered any solution to this. The standard workaround is to simply 'look down' on your MOC, even if only slightly, so you don't see the bluerender sky. The other option is manual color adjustment using something as simple as Paint.

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On 3/31/2017 at 8:38 PM, Kai NRG said:

 

I never heard that one Kai, very interesting. I tried to get the horse standing on it's back legs, but for whatever reason LDD won't play the game. (Also two feet would fit the criteria you give above for the character the statue represents!). Thanks!

On 4/1/2017 at 0:19 AM, Garmadon said:

 

Thanks Garm, I did debate about making the statue in bronze, as I have largely tried to only build in 'real' bricks. It was originally black, but then I figured, what's the point of building digitally if you can't bend the colour rules every now and then?! It was so very tempting at one point to give up on the interior, so I'm really glad I kept going! Interiors are definitely my least favourite part of builds!

On 4/1/2017 at 10:17 AM, Brandon Stark said:

 

Thanks Brandon, high praise indeed, although I'm definitely not in the same league as KB!

On 4/3/2017 at 7:37 AM, Elostirion said:

 

Thanks Elos!

On 4/3/2017 at 9:18 AM, Kolonialbeamter said:

 

Thanks for the detailed advice KB, there was a lot I found helpful here and I'm sure to be referencing this post many times in the future!

On 4/3/2017 at 2:31 PM, Capt Wolf said:

 

Thanks Capt Wolf! The forum certainly did get hectic there for a few days, it almost reminded me of the first challenge last year!

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