Mylenium

Eurobricks Knights
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Posts posted by Mylenium


  1. 15 hours ago, TeriXeri said:

    Even with the best intentions, or seemingly harmless as copying pictures of LEGO parts or figures from an existing database, it's still stealing if done without permission.

    Yes/ No/ Maybe. We can agree that it would open up a whole can of worms, but it's not per se "stealing". But that's a discussion for another time...

    Mylenium

     


  2. 12 hours ago, theDeanoRama said:

    Is there a better instruction builder than stud.io's out there?

    LPub, but it's quirky and has a quadrizillion bugs. Also your model has to be organized pretty well beforehand, since apparently it isn't integrated into an actual construction program and you have to go back and forth. Sometimes seemingly trivial changes to a model can cause the whole instructions to be changed and then you spend a lot of time fixing those issues.

    12 hours ago, theDeanoRama said:

    I am creating essentially 3 sub models that come together in the last three steps.

    There always has to be a master model. In the simplest scenario this would be the first model you build and the others being submodels. There is no need to ignore anything since the program will simply generate the steps and you don't get to see anything of the other models while working inside a submodel. It just needs to be logical from an actual building perspective, which may require to include redundant steps for sub-sub-assemblies or such, since you can't jump across different submodels. Other than that of course nothing stops you from simply merging three separate PDFs after they have been generated or create your instructions in a page layout program like the free Scribus or an office program like Word based on rendering out the model as images. Whatever suits your workflow best...

    Mylenium


  3. I don't care for all the fluff. It's way too time-consuming to maintain digital collections, be that commercial offerings, MOCs or one's own parts repository. And I consider myself pretty immune to all that nostalgia stuff, since I only took up the hobby eight years ago. What you propose would do zero for me and as already pointed out, there are enough sites that already do it. Of course that doesn't preclude you could do it better, but I'd need much different reasons to visit such a site. A constant source of frustration are for instance the unsophisticated search functions on these sites, which mostly rely on what's built into the underlying CMS/ blog software, so a meta search engine that maintains its own database with extensive tagging, verbose descriptions, a reverse image search and other "intelligent" functions (not necessarily real AI) would be helpful for instance even if it merely links to other existing sites. I'm sure there could be many more other such scenarios, with the point being that a new site really should resolve shortcomings that others have, not add to the pile of redundant functions.

    Mylenium


  4. 20 hours ago, Ben S said:

    What is your criteria for deciding whether to keep a set built or use it to get loose pieces to build?

    Basically none. I enjoy building, but I don't necessarily want stuff to stand around and catch dust. I live in a small flat, anyway, so it's impossible to keep everything around forever. The exception from that rule are a few animals when I think they're really well done or just cute, a few things Star Wars and items like the Super Mario Piranha Plant that have a deeper meaning to me such as in this case reminding me of the fun I had in my Super Nintendo days. Most other models have to go eventually. I'll keep them around for a few weeks to show them off to friends or family, but then they get dismantled and the parts funneled into my repository until I may need them for something else.

    Mylenium


  5. 15 hours ago, JesseNight said:

    Sure I understand the focus is mainly kids... But AFOL generally tend to have a way bigger budget to spend, even if the group itself is smaller. It might differ per world region and per decade, but I've seen plenty of kids who owned no more than 2-3 big sets in all of their childhood, while I see some adults buy 2-3 (or even more) within a few months aiming at a big MOC project they wanna build.

    Turnover beats revenue/ grosses. The no. 1 rule of all retail business. That's basically all that matters. And given that many small sets are produced in the millions vs. only a few tens of thousands on most bigger sets, that sure carries weight. Yes, of course, we all could anecdotally cite situations where we were jealous of someone carrying multiple 200+ Euro sets out of a LEGO store, but it's probably nothing compared to the wider market. The example that stuck with me is when a few years ago LEGO revealed how many UCS Millenium Falcons were sold in Europe. It was only around 10000 at that point. Now consider that these packages have actual higher manufacturing cost due to the sheer number of pieces, the elaborate packaging and manuals, are mostly hand packaged and so on and weigh that against what you can earn with them, given the numbers. Point in case: The profit margins very likely aren't as impressive as people may think and not above what you can make with the same number of pieces automatically packed into smaller sets. Beyond LEGO of course charging a premium compared to competitors I would imagine that their grosses across the board balance out and they don't cash in exorbitant amounts on some big sets. And you don't even need to be too skittish about the numbers or the age demographic. There's tons of users who will buy multiple packages even of cheap sets, which offsets the reduced income. Just think about some Star Wars battle packs of which some users have bought 20 or 50. Or stuff like the upcoming Forest Animals: Red Fox (31154). Even I, despite my limited finances, plan to get at least two of those as do I for some other sets. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that LEGO don't need to sell big sets to make their billions of revenue every year.

    Mylenium


  6. 9 hours ago, decemberssecond1 said:

    What do you mean by fads? Like, a popular style or subjects? What are some characteristics of fads that are out now?

    Not up to speed on the latest "fads", but e.g. when "The Mandalorian" first came out there were loads and loads of MOCs for the Razor Crest, Grogu/ The Child and his crib, other vehicles and props, many of which seemed to be motivated by commercial interests and/ or ego stroking about being the first, not necessarily the builders' own fandom. Rinse repeat for other movies TV series etc.. Even when LEGO bring out a set there's often about a dozen MOCs/ MODs only a few days later with everyone trying to "fix" what they perceive as wrong or a shortcoming, usually for big expensive sets more than small ones. You can really observe these waves rippling through the communities...

    Mylenium


  7. 21 hours ago, decemberssecond1 said:

    How do you go about finding the right bricks for specific details?

    Simply knowledge and experience. You have to have built a bunch of sets with diverse elements plus you should at least know where to look for specific parts on Bricklink.

    21 hours ago, decemberssecond1 said:

    How do you come up with techniques to make complex or organic forms?

    Again experience, but combined with a good grasp of engineering and design principles plus a lot of experimentation.

    21 hours ago, decemberssecond1 said:

    Do you like to design or sketch first before you build? What are your tips for effective LEGO sketching?

    Occasionally, but I don't do "LEGO sketching". It's one of the most critical principles you get taught at any arts/ design school: Consider the medium and pick the right one, but don't let your creativity be limited by it. If you're too specific you lock yourself into a certain mindset that prevents you from exploring alternate solutions because you're trying too hard to make your (potentially flawed) design work.

    21 hours ago, decemberssecond1 said:

    When you first started building LEGO as an AFOL, did you prefer to recreate things from real life and media or design things from the ground up? What about now?

    I don't do "real life". Trying to re-create an object like a Polaroid camera or a vehicle as an exact replica couldn't be any more uninteresting to me. Instead it's about abstraction, reduction and/ or freely exploring ideas and designs. For the rest you can buy enough sets already to put another model on your shelf to catch dust.

    21 hours ago, decemberssecond1 said:

    Do you find that you are more inspired by techniques or ideas?  As in, is it  more common for you to find a cool technique and make a build around it, or have an idea for a build and come up with techniques to make them work?

    Ideas come first. Even when I was more on the engineering side and did Technic I always had to have a concrete use case to even get started. Of course not everything turns out as expected and quite generally I'm a lazy builder whose projects often end up unfinished, but at least I always had good intentions I would argue... ;-)

    Mylenium


  8. 10 hours ago, JesseNight said:

    But with the features BL offers, why would anyone still use PAB?

    Some people don't know better and eventually even the biggest BL vendor will run out of stock. Different priorities. PaB basically guarantees you that within a specific period you get the parts, but only from a limited selection. Not that it works particularly well in practice, but that's a different story. And you need to put it in perspective: We as LEGO nerds may be willing and able to put up with the usability nightmare that is BL, but many others won't. Different strokes for different people...

    Mylenium


  9. On 2/8/2024 at 2:02 PM, SpacePolice89 said:

    Maybe we could ask that person about the codes on the review boxes?

    Doesn't seem to be a factor these days. All review sets are regular sets as far as I have seen (not myself, just on other people's sets). Otherwise I would concur that they are probably specially packaged items. Someone once explained on a blog that before there was the LEGO Ambassador Network review packages were handled by conventional marketing agencies and for a long time they even had to return the sets. It would therefore make sense they'd mark them specifically so they didn't end up in shady places. Also keep in mind that this was long before they had their big packaging and logistics facilities and production wasn't as automated. So some poor soul probably had to package these by hand months before the actual production runs/ street dates.

    Mylenium


  10. A lot of nostalgia, for sure, be it from real experience or just looking at a different era with rose-tinted glasses. There are a few other factors, the crudeness of the models itself being one. There's a certain appeal in simplification just like with certain art styles. The other thing is of course that it was a lot more complicated to produce this stuff back then. Discovering a new element from a new mold or even just a new print would have a completely different impact because you knew how hard it was to pull off. This also affects perception overall because the market as a whole was simply different. I remember this well from my scale modelling days at the time. There wasn't a new model coming out every day. Stuff was shown at the Nuremberg Toy Fair and other such shows and that was basically it for the rest of the year. These days it's literally an endless stream of new releases which makes each individual item a lot less significant. And for LEGO it's pretty much the same. With a few hundred new sets coming out every year it's a whole different story compared to perhaps thirty to fifty sets each year way back when...

    Mylenium


  11. 23 hours ago, MAB said:

    When they purchased bricklink, they said they wouldn't compete with sellers on the site. It would be detrimental if they did. For many parts they are more expensive and have poor turnaround times. And the narrow range of parts they stock means they wouldn't be able to fulfill many wants lists.

    They couldn't if they tried. It makes no sense at all from the "How to run a big company." POV. They'd lose insane amounts of money.

    Mylenium


  12. On 1/12/2024 at 8:49 AM, firefabric said:

    There are a lot of experienced builders here, so I would like hear your expert opinion as I recently had my first experience of feeling like someone crossed the line of 'being inspired by' with one of my MOCs. It's not about which is better or worse, I would just like to understand if my feeling is founded or not.

    I'm with @MAB on this one. If you want to ruin your day by feeling offended then so be it, but otherwise there's no substance to it, not legally, not in the abstract sense of what constitutes art and interpretation. I'm not saying that it doesn't suck, but it's really pointless to even waste a second thought on it. If you were to apply this attitude, professional product designers could be upset all day for finding Chinese rip-offs of their work in dollar stores. It just happens all the time these days. And if you want to open that can of worms: When it comes to copyright issues, there is rarely ever any discussion about "acceptable". It's all handled in absolutes and you would have to prove every tiny bit of it. It's pretty much binary. Either you have infringed or you haven't.

    1 hour ago, MuscoviteSandwich said:

    For me personally, If there is a similar design, I generally try to look at similar models with a set of criteria that one would use to evaluate work for fair use.

    Pretty much irrelevant. Those rules don't even apply universally inside the US, much less outside of it. There is no such thing in the EU and our Finnish friend would have a hard time falling back on this. That's why the situation is so complicated. It all hinges on how much of a "Live and let live" approach everyone has based on the individual laws and regulations regarding art and its interpretation, freedom of speech and expression and EU copyright and trademark laws.

    Mylenium


  13. Anything that has its own number is a separate element, not a mold variant. Deprecated element variants that are superseded by newer ones are listed as alternatives in the little box under the image of a part. BL may be confusing at times, but that part is actually pretty straightforward.

    Mylenium


  14. 11 hours ago, MAB said:

    Packing errors are rare

    Probably not as rare as one would think. I had two such occurrences in the last two years plus very recently one where a mangled part found its way into the package. It wasn't anything important and I could fix it by resorting to my own parts, but it would have been annoying contacting LEGO support again, especially since they've become very unfriendly lately about replacing parts. With that in mind it becomes a mere function of statistics. If I can be hit by such mishaps in relatively short succession then there are many more out there. This also gets further confirmed by many reviews (on reputable German and English sites) I read this year also mentioning missing or wrong parts. If I remember correctly, one of them was in one of the Sonic sets missing a whole half of the "ball" and also getting a weird Technic part instead of it and the other was some plates in the UCS Razor Crest gone AWOL or being wrong. I'm sure if I were to re-read all the articles I would find even more. Therefore, while it may not be an overwhelming number of packing errors/ missing parts/ damaged parts, it is at least significant even when set against the millions of parts and tens of thousands of sets produced every day. I'm not going to argue that there would be a way to avoid this completely, but based on how LEGO explain their own handling of these things it should be nearly impossible and that's the part that kind of puzzles me. A piece that isn't even in the set inventory should not randomly appear in a box.

    Mylenium 


  15. 21 hours ago, Ozorion said:

    Is this quality control issue vastly exaggerated or should I expect a lower quality of the current sets compared to the Lego I played with when I was a kid in the 90s ?

    Pretty much irrelevant. The overall level of issues is the same, it's just different types of issues. Are they exaggerated? Perhaps, perhaps not. If you're unlucky you can indeed end up with a set full of problematic pieces with ugly injection points, misaligned prints with not enough opacity, poorly printed instructions, messy parts colors and clutch power deficiencies, but the same set from a different production batch could not expose a single one of those same problems. And ultimately that in and of itself is the largest issue here: The inconsistency. LEGO really need to work on that. That famous "Forrest Gump" quote applies: It's like a box of chocolates and you never know what you get.

    Mylenium


  16. Yeah, LEGO's awful in-store design biting them in their butts. Stealing is probably not an issue, but the models clearly suffer after a week of being poked by everyone. A lot of them aren't even under glass and just stand openly on those cube pedestals with an employee doing guard duty. I remember the Eiffel Tower looking pretty wrecked here in our store after a while...

    Mylenium


  17. They have their rules and elements that are invisible are basically a matter of "Be glad it isn't Coral!". They'll use whatever they think is good. I do get their point of making things more accessible and easier for occasional or new users, but yes, it often feels unnecessary.

    Mylenium

    9 hours ago, Alexandrina said:

    the colours are remarkably consistent in the instructions year-on-year

    Not really. Even in the same year the colors vary heavily. You can literally see how different instructions are printed at different times on different machines/ at different facilities. In fact even the PDFs often already show this, suggesting that their color management is all over the place or non-existent.

    Mylenium


  18. 5 hours ago, Classic_Spaceman said:

    I certainly hope not! Beyond the marketplace, BrickLink’s catalogue is an invaluable resource for the LEGO community; losing it would be devastating, since rebuilding it entirely would be virtually impossible. 

    Well, one could only hope that they keep separate databases for the actual catalog vs. the sales stuff. Otherwise BL is a typical case of the horse having gotten too big to ride and also gotten old...

    Mylenium


  19. Unlikely that you'll be able to pull it off. To my knowledge e.g. the Scala/ Belville Pink isn't in a single 1 x 1 element, only 1 x 2 plates and a few others. I'm pretty sure that would apply to most other colors as well. You'll be lucky to even get any element in a given color if only it is rare enough. After all, some colors have been used in one or two sets only way back when...

    Mylenium