mcphatty

Just a small update to this modification, I've added the first Phantom as an extra build! This little ship is oddly proportioned in order to match the size of the Phantom 2 in the set, most of it is taken up by the cockpit area but I did manage to include some storage inside and folding wings. As with the Phantom 2 mod, this shuttle can dock with the 75357 Ghost set (with the same very minor modification to the roof) and also my modified Ghost. Parts are around £15, some are a little less common than I'd usually settle for but I think were essential for the iconic shape and limited colour in the build. Free instructions and parts list are in a ZIP file on the Rebrickable page.

Absolutely awesome, the more I stare at your photos the more I love it! First things first, the ship looks perfect, beautifully smooth with the odd stud or bar for texture and some really clever use of pieces like those Technic panels either side of the cockpit. Great angles too and I really like how you've built the light/dark grey patterns. It's all excellent. On top of all that the interior is amazing, the contrast between the hidden mechanical detail and clean open areas is bloody satisfying to look at and I really want to know how you sqeezed all that in and gave the ship enough strength sit so comfortably on that stand. I guess I'll have to buy the instructions! Superb work, it's a real triump! Any chance of seeing some photos of it next to your excellent Rogue Shadow?

The Ghost modifications are complete! I've added instructions to the Rebrickable page, along with a ZIP file so the Phantom or Ghost mods can be done seperately. The instructions go through removing some external sections, describing which to disassemble and which to keep intact, then how to mod the ships. Overall the mod requires 550 extra parts (costing around £35) plus the parts from the removed and disassembled sections. https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-161011/ron_mcphatty/the-ghost-phantom-ii-set-75357-mod/#details

Hi all, here's a quick modification I did to the Ahsoka Ghost & Phantom set. I really love this new set, it's a really well proportioned build and fairly faithful to the ship we all love, but as with most big ships it's lacking detail, the underside was ignored and wasn't keen on the look of the Phantom, so I had a go at improving things. As alwats Instructions for the modified Phantom are on Rebrickable and the 550 extra pieces will only cost about £35. Big thanks by the way to PiXEL-DAN for letting me use the stickered and printed pieces he made for his own Ghost mod, they add so much to the Studio renders! Here's some renders of the modified ship, I'll replace these with photos as soon as I can. The original structure is still in there, removing exterior parts to start the mod only takes around 15 minutes and almost everything I've added is surface detail. Several of the sections are completely rebuilt, like the docking rings and roof, and some like the main top panels just need some tiles and wedge plates to be added or rearranged. The underside of the ship has a lot of parts added, partly disguising the Technic Brick structure but mostly adding some simple slopes as well as the signature lower-body shape. I wanted to keep the main structure of the shuttle so that it still docked with The Ghost, I couldn't quite make it work without a small modification to the roof of the ship but I made that change as easy to do as possible. I've tried to improve the Phantom's overall proportions, the back half doesn't look as small compared to the front now, the top fin is two plates lower and the front end is two plates narrower to make the shuttle look a little longer. I've reused most of the stickered pieces but left off the 2x3 tiles from the back adding a larger patch of colour with wedge plates instead, however it would be easy to swap back in those original stickered tiles.The Phantom can still hold a pilot and by removing some of the brown seat pieces even Hera can squeeze in the cockpit! It remains oversized compared to The Ghost but is much smaller looking than the original build.

I've added some photos to the original post, plus here's a few with the minifigures! The poncho and apron are from @thebrickway, his are the first custom made minifigure parts I've bought and I'm really pleased with how they look.

@bdestena You've done a great job lowering the top of the X-Wing rear, those boat plate pieces are perfect for keeping the panels in place. Thanks for the pictures, I've been planning to do the same so I'll give this a try

Here's my attempt at making up for the shortcomings of the T-6 Jedi Shuttle set 75362. I went to town with extra pieces (530 so far!) and added a lot of bulk and detail to both sides of each wing, along with some extra thickness and detail for the hull and cockpit. The wings are double-sided, studs facing out both sides too, held back-to-back with brackets. They're surprisingly solid and hold together well for a bit of swooshing, and with all the extra pieces the set now weighs an extra 160g so has a really satisfying feel to it! I also added a vertical stand that has a few gaps for minifigures. I've put some free instructions on Rebrickable, it's tricky to show off both sides of the wing but hopefully these photos and renders give you an idea of the substantial bulkiness of the new wing. Here are the renders from the original post...

@Aeroeza Your nose mod is excellent! The angled panel you added to the original side panels is a great piece of building, really great job sealing all the gaps up. Looking forward to seeing the finished product, have you built it for real yet? My nose mods, landing gear stand and R2 are all done, I don’t think I’m going to do anything else to this set. Free instructions are on Rebrickable, see the zip file for the nose and R2 stuff.

I really like Yoda’s little Starfighter in The Clone Wars, but I didn’t like the old set and the new one didn’t do it for me either… so I rebuilt it. This modification/alternate build uses only pieces from 75360 (none of the extras), the cockpit ‘ball’ is bigger and rounder, the wings are shorter lower and set further forward and the spring-loaded shooters don’t work. Or maybe I should say BUT the spring-loaded shooters don’t work? Anyway, I think I’ve improved the proportions a bit and it’s a pretty solid build. If you’re interested free instructions are on Rebrickable

I got around to taking some photos of the stand last week and have edited them into my original post. Here's my modified UCS X-Wing on it's landing gear stand, pride of place in our living room (for now!). Free instructions for the stand, X-Wing modifications and R2-D2 are on Rebrickable.

Hi everyone, I've been playing with luminous materials in Studio and have tried to replicate the kind of basic global illumination style HDRI lighting I used to aim for in Cinema 4D. Below is the result, the first render is my lighting with Intensity in Studio's Render menu set to zero and for comparison below that is the standard Mechanic lighting with Intensity 2. I think that by getting rid of the default illumination and effectively turning off the HDR sky in Studio the model looks less overexposed, especially the upward facing surfaces which instantly lose the bright, sterile white reflection. The darker model means the highlights stand out a lot more, and since studs and edges are reflective there are plenty of nice highlights to look at! I also added some illumination in the scene, the white parts around the edge of the landing pad and in the upright light are luminous soft white and there is a bit of glow coming from the engines. I rendered these with transparent background and added a coloured backdrop and some noise in Photoshop. It's not a realistic image by any means but I think it'd a decent improvement, it's certainly helped my renders blend in with my photos on Instagram profile. Here's the Studio file of the lighting arrangement (_HDRI Lights by Ron_McPhatty.io) if you'd like to to give it a try, remember to turn the "Illumination" option in the Render window down to "0" before clicking render. To achieve the lighting effect I arranged a heap of large plate pieces into rings, angled them at downwards to aim at the subject positioned in the centre and positioned a few luminous panel spotlights directly above to give extra shadows and highlights. Other lights can be toggled on and off by Hiding/Showing the parts groups, so it's possible to light objects slightly differently for example all light from one side to give the impression of a bright planet. Here's how it all looks in Studio... Here's a few more examples with different models. I hope the idea is useful, any suggestions to help me improve the set up would be great, and feel free to use and abuse the lighting set up if you like it and I'd love to see other models rendered in this style.

@JabbaTheHatt Graet mods! That keychain R2 is perfect, thats such a good idea, very well done! The wider wings look noticably better and all your other little additions are very worthwhile, I especially like how you've swapped the wedge brick arrangement on the sides of the nose tip, that looks a lot better. I wanted to add the dual moulded helmet to Luke too, I've been looking for a spare on eBay and Bricklink but the price has shot up astronomically, might have to do a swap with my old 75218 set. Nice mods sir, well done

I've been working on some modifications to the 2023 UCS X-Wing in Studio. My main aims were to increase the slope angle of the top surface of the nose and to build a stand to display the X-Wing on landing gear, I also swapped the nose tip parts for light blueish grey and got rid of those horrible white flippers on the laser tips. The landing gear feet and doors are built into a a thin flat base which the X-Wing rests on top of, aligned by the rear gear and supported by a column of bricks that poke up into the ship's display stand hole. The X-Wing set doesn't need to be modified to sit on the stand so hopefully it'll be useful to anyone like me who wants to display the under a coffee table. It can also be moved, the UCS plaque positioned on either side (or not at all) and the X-Wing can be lifted away very easily. Free instructions are on Rebrickable I also built a detailed little R2 to display with the X-Wing. Like many others I wanted to reuse the old 30611 polybag head part behind the X-Wing's cockpit, it's slightly too big to be the right scale but personally I prefer it to the too-small minifigure. Big thanks to Jan Woźnica, who goes by john_carter and is the behind the Tale of The Space Age Lego Ideas set, he kindly let me alter and use his very clever R2-D2 design. He brilliantly positioned 1x1 Round Plate with Bar pieces at 45 degrees between two 4x4 Round Plates, taking advantage in the gaps between studs and anti-stud notches underneath round plates, allowing an open stud piece to securely connect to the end bar poking out of the 4x4 circle. You can find his excellent original here and I created a seperate set of instructions for R2 (also on the X-Wing mod Rebrickable page). I'm really pleased with how the mods turned out, it's great (for my marriage) to be able to display such a big set under a coffee table rather than taking up huge amount of space with the s-foils opened. I really like seeing the ship with the wings closed with the added bonus of the weight of the top pair making them appear fully close. I hope the stand proves useful to some of you, thanks for looking!

@ChemicalWorld I think you might be right about the 2x8 plate everyones moaning about. I've got a few big tiles to try to replace it with but I'm not sure they'll have the strength that the 2x8 plate provides and I don't think theres room to reinforce from behind. We'll see though! Out of curiosity has anyone looked at reducing the height of the top of the back of the fuselage? It should be lower than the top of the cockpit, I'm gonna see what I can remove to shave some height off.

@ChemicalWorld Good to see that the polybag R2 head looks good on the new X-Wing! You're right the size does work, ideally it would be a little smaller but it gives a much better overall look than the regular minifigure. I had a similar idea, I haven't built the set yet but I've got the R2 head on a new body that I plan to display with the ship and I'm working on a stand with built in landing gear that the X-Wing can rest on top of. I'm also going to angle the top surface of the nose, I'll have to test that on the set as, and I want to make a the nose tip light grey and one brick narrower. Here's a WIP render and some instructions for R2-D2 in case anyone's interested. Huge thanks to john.carter (designer of the Lego Ideas Tales of The Space Age set) for letting me use his R2 body as a starting point, his genius placement of the Bar with Plate 1x1 piece at 45 degrees is what made it all possible, steps 9 to 11 of the instructions show how his clever solution connects the legs.