howitzer

Design considerations on a house MOC: where to start?

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As a child my favorite themes were City and Technic, and now that I've exited my years of darkness, I've been contemplating of making a scale model MOC of my own house. I'm new to architecture and house building (childhood builds don't count) so I'd like to ask if you had any guidelines or tips on where to start and what things to consider before starting the design process properly. I'm going to make a CAD model first, but even there I'd appreciate some helpful advice before spending countless of hours on reinventing the wheel.

My house is a pretty typical single family house, and I thought about making it in minifig scale, is that feasible with reasonable amount of parts? What about landscaping around the house, it's built on a small hillside so that also needs to be built to some extent. Any tips on this? Then there's roofing (although I have an idea on that), windows, wall textures, furniture, etc. to think about, though not everything needs to be solved right away but can be iterated on later. Some things like doors or wallpaper is probably impossible to replicate in any accuracy, but I'm ok with that. For details I'm mostly looking for ideas for the basic parts, like making an internal wall with different colours each side (is it possible to make it thinner than two modules?), or nice-looking external wooden paneling.

So, where to start?

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Have you looked at any official lego sets to see about how large a given piece count can be? modular buildings are a couple thousand pieces to create enclosed buildings with interiors in a minifigure scale. the interiors sometimes feel cramped but IMO the scale looks great from the outside

What's the hillside look like? I've seen houses where there was just a slight slope in the backyard, and houses where the backyard was so steep it needed terraced. it could mean really different things for the piece count.

 

i've got this set floating around as an example of a freestanding home with way fewer pieces though:

https://brickset.com/sets/4996-1/Beach-House

Although if you're investing in a dream-build of your real home, you might want something more intense. You can probably make a pretty good facade of a house with under a thousand pieces? might only get up to thousands of pieces if you get ambitious with textures and interiors and stuff.

Edited by corasaur
thought of a possibly relevant set

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18 minutes ago, corasaur said:

Have you looked at any official lego sets to see about how large a given piece count can be? modular buildings are a couple thousand pieces to create enclosed buildings with interiors in a minifigure scale. the interiors sometimes feel cramped but IMO the scale looks great from the outside

What's the hillside look like? I've seen houses where there was just a slight slop in the backyard, and houses where the backyard was so steep it needed terraced. it could mean really different things for the piece count.

 

i've got this set floating around as an example of a freestanding home with way fewer pieces though:

https://brickset.com/sets/4996-1/Beach-House

Although if you're investing in a dream-build of your real home, you might want something more intense. You can probably make a pretty good facade of a house with under a thousand pieces? might only get up to thousands of pieces if you get ambitious with textures and interiors and stuff.

Thanks for the insightful reply! The house is indeed situated on a slope, where the frontside is just shy of one story higher than the backside. The yard is terraced but it wouldn't have to be, it's not that steep slope. The house itself has basement and two stories above it, with 4 bedrooms, 2 kitchens, large living room, two bathrooms, and a number of rooms in basement like carage, laundry room, sauna, utility room, etc. There's also attic and a number of closets and such. In my dreams I'd indeed include full interior walls and most furniture so I'm guessing it will easily make into thousands of pieces, but I'm wondering if it will make into five-figure number?

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31 minutes ago, howitzer said:

Thanks for the insightful reply! The house is indeed situated on a slope, where the frontside is just shy of one story higher than the backside. The yard is terraced but it wouldn't have to be, it's not that steep slope. The house itself has basement and two stories above it, with 4 bedrooms, 2 kitchens, large living room, two bathrooms, and a number of rooms in basement like carage, laundry room, sauna, utility room, etc. There's also attic and a number of closets and such. In my dreams I'd indeed include full interior walls and most furniture so I'm guessing it will easily make into thousands of pieces, but I'm wondering if it will make into five-figure number?

oh, i was picturing the land curving up behind the house because there were so many houses like that near where i grew up. I guess if you wanna include the basement you'll have to figure out what the set area around the outside of the basement will look like. Might have to build a hill wrapping all the way around the base to conceal the basement level? or let the basement be visible in cross-section from the front? or have a plain surface on the front of the basement that just looks like it's a stand for the model?

I'd be a little surprised if the thing broke 10k pieces.

If I were doing this, i guess I'd start with the front door, and see how long the front of the house needs to be to feel properly scaled relative to that.

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When I start a modular building MOC, I usually like to sketch out the general façade and identify which bricks I could use for certain sections - sometimes I also make tablescraps to come up with ideas, particularly the little details - they're harder to come up with on LDD. Ideally, I would then go straight into bricks but my collection is quite small, so I tend to use LDD to make it first.

I start with a general façade and add the floors second, then the walls. I often just build and rebuild stuff until it looks just right. When I do build in bricks, I find it's a lot easier as you can change things much more quickly. Also, what may seem like a great idea on LDD may not be structurally strong with real bricks (I learnt this the hard way!), so I would recommend always taking this into consideration if building with CAD.

On 5/12/2019 at 7:55 PM, howitzer said:

Some things like doors or wallpaper is probably impossible to replicate in any accuracy

Personally, I'd resort to custom stickers for details like this, but I know many people are against this...:def_shrug: Since I normally build from my imagination, though, I tend to use brick built SNOT techniques or just plain walls. (@snaillad has some great techniques in some of his MOCs; you should check them out for inspiration!)

On 5/12/2019 at 7:55 PM, howitzer said:

What about landscaping around the house

Depending on the gradient of the slope, BURPs or LURPs could be useful, if not I'd use slopes for rocky terrain or lots of plates if it's more smooth.

Good luck with your MOC - do post pictures of it when it's built!

Hope that helps :classic:

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10 hours ago, TheL390Man said:

When I start a modular building MOC, I usually like to sketch out the general façade and identify which bricks I could use for certain sections - sometimes I also make tablescraps to come up with ideas, particularly the little details - they're harder to come up with on LDD. Ideally, I would then go straight into bricks but my collection is quite small, so I tend to use LDD to make it first.

I start with a general façade and add the floors second, then the walls. I often just build and rebuild stuff until it looks just right. When I do build in bricks, I find it's a lot easier as you can change things much more quickly. Also, what may seem like a great idea on LDD may not be structurally strong with real bricks (I learnt this the hard way!), so I would recommend always taking this into consideration if building with CAD.

Yeah, my collection is also small, especially in the right colours, so I think I'm going to do a lot of CAD-modeling before trying with bricks. And yeah, probably I'll just have to start with the general outline of the building, to make outer walls, then inner ones for one floor and then adding the second floor etc. Feels like there's going to be a lot of trial and error though.

Quote

Personally, I'd resort to custom stickers for details like this, but I know many people are against this...:def_shrug: Since I normally build from my imagination, though, I tend to use brick built SNOT techniques or just plain walls. (@snaillad has some great techniques in some of his MOCs; you should check them out for inspiration!)

Depending on the gradient of the slope, BURPs or LURPs could be useful, if not I'd use slopes for rocky terrain or lots of plates if it's more smooth.

Good luck with your MOC - do post pictures of it when it's built!

Hope that helps :classic:

I don't think I'll use custom stickers, rather just go for a colour that seems closest to the wallpaper. Windows and doors are harder though, but with those I'll probably just have to settle for closest official part I can find, even if it's nowhere near similar. 

As for the slope, BURPs and LURPs seem too steep so it would probably have to be just normal bricks and plates.

Anyway, thanks for your comments, I'll probably start up the CAD soon!

 

 

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6 hours ago, howitzer said:

Anyway, thanks for your comments, I'll probably start up the CAD soon!

No problem! Good luck with your MOC! :thumbup:

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I’d first of all decide on the stud width and depth of the main floors, and then build each above ground floor as a simple square of 1 stud wide bricks, and use the standard doors as a guide to height.  Make a rough studio, or LDD plan of each floor to make a best fit for interior walls and from there, using photos as a reference, grab your real bricks and, I’d look at working in the interior walls, windows, stairs etc. It might be that you have to stretch out a couple of studs to get it to work in minifig scale, so this way it’s not a major rebuild of a base And subterranean parts, if you find on floor 3 that somethings just won’t fit. Once you have the rest of it build, work through the partially and totally submerged floors.

This method uses more pieces to start, but saves the annoying possibility of having to rebuild the whole thing.

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