Randal

So it's like that, is it? XD I'll try to reverse engineer it, as I never know what angle I need. >_> (I'd totally give you full credit though. I'm not like THAT. I always mention when models are not mine.) btw, that ship looks like a bat diving with it's wings tucked close. I think that's what I like most about it.

That stuff is awesome, Shroud. Your bot blows my humanoid mech out of the water. Also, do you mind If I use this ship of yours in a comic some time? Here it is, by the way...

wasn't the challenge to have all bricks attached to something? your 2x1 plate between the anchors for the air-horns is free floating. Oddly enough, it doesn't need to be, because the binoculars will fit on a stud. you could have bridged that gap with a 1x4 plate and placed the binoculars on either end of it.

I'll have to remember that. I'm always needing those to be upside down. I wish they'd make an inverse cheese wedge.

Thanks. I guess after I stumble through it I come out okay. =B

I immediately clicked the moment I get out of the store and voted before I saw "when i get in the car"... which is usually the real answer. I just assumed they would be one and the same. Actually, I guess it really depends on the size of the set. Small sets in car, big sets first thing at home.

for mortar, you can use (non universe mode) the last brick color available on most bricks, which is kind of a cream, it has a nice aged look. also, for the bricks themselves, i'd alternate between dark brown, orange, red and dark grey, put them all over, I'd also use a combination of as your whole wall or in places with and other earthy colors as the brick face. The bottom of will show through and appear like aged mortar. the flat plates in either orange, that dark red or brown will look good and break up the color. These days it's easier to get bricks to look uniform and walls built with motley bricks tend to look old.

Randal Graves from Clerks

Bif Naked, Bluebird

It's my understanding that you will possibly be able to port them into Lego Universe when it comes out, which in my opinion is cooler, because then you can drive/fly/float them like you never could with your own lego models.

I use picture backdrops, but since I use them in a comic strip, I have to be careful that they are either public domain or i have to get permission to use them. (or process them to make them mostly unrecognizable from the original.)

Heh. I share it every time I post. The banner in my signature is a link to it. =) Incidentally, if any of you have LXF's you'd like to see in a comic, I will certainly review them for consideration. And if used, you'd get to see your name as contributor in the artist notes. If you look at some of the models I've used, some of my more detailed ones end up looking not so good in the comic (like my battle mech you may have seen elsewhere in this forum). The fewer lines the better, though that is only a general rule, and there are always exceptions to the rules. Two of my favorite comics use individual bricks... =3 To leave comments, you have to join Drunk Duck. (Which is free, but still...) If you don't feel like making a reader account just to say "Ha! that was funny" or "God, you suck!" you can always leave those comments here at Eurobricks, either in this thread or by personal message.

I know there's a lot of webcomics made with Lego bricks, but the only one I've ever seen that uses LDD is mine. Does anyone know of any others? I'm going to assume not, since before the mod, it was pretty limited. I'm excited to see how much more I can do with the Lego Universe brick palate. I like using it because I have the freedom to make my own backgrounds or use public domain images or just my own gradients as backgrounds. At one point I made modular building pieces to make background buildings, but they're on my computer that died. Next time, I'm backing up EVERYTHING. =B

I actually like the oversized face on that head. I have used it in a few comics. The Castle Guard helm not fitting is annoying. But now with the mod, I have access to other knightly helms, so hopefully it's not that big a deal.

someone mentioned my wishlist adds, but they say the squeaky wheel gets the grease... Importing decals/skins, custom or otherwise. Movable flex pieces like hoses, nets and chains. This would also allow the use of sails and capes, I guess. I forget what someone called it, but the ability to have neighboring bricks adjust to help seat your current brick. This would have really come in handy when I built some technics tracks. It would be nice if they added artificial gravity and to have pieces that rotate without friction, like say track treads, to align in a natural way when you hit the gravity button... or something. I think this exists, but it's very buggy and difficult, as i got it to work sporadically on the excavator bucket, but to have it when you move a joint connected to another joint, they all move to accommodate you. this is especially frustrating when trying to re adjust minifigs. And speaking of the bucket, it would be nice when you placed mindstorm cords, pistons, gears and such, that once placed, the cord ends find a logical placement and materialize (this would help people who build things like this, then come to find out they placed something too far apart for the cord), the gears turn and the pistons be adjustable. An option to toggle on or off the ability to see every brick instead of a smoothed out surface. Darker transparent pieces. Antialiasing for screenshots. Adjustable resolution for screenshots, or just overall better export support. Adjustable lighting in the screenshot viewer. Numeric rotation (and fractional to the thousanth decimal). and for universal ball joints, snap rotation for each axis. (which could be color coded, for children *and adults* to better comprehend) there's probably more, but that's all I can think of now. ((Also, if you're reporting problems, the castle guard helm (the original style from the original yellow castle, which I had as a kid and it was awesome.) doesn't fit on a minifig head. The hermione wig fits on a head, but not when it's on a torso...))

I don't care where it is put. I just want help finding some good construction ideas for pumps and pipes and making a steam engine look believable.

this is cool. I make a comic using LDD, but their minifig decals are sorely limited. I'm in desperate need of things like this. I could post them as layers in my editor and use the perspective tool to apply them to the figures.

My favorite is not an official theme, Though I would absolutely love for it to be. Steampunk. When people cannibalize all kinds of history and technics sets to make some awesome gilded-age inspired 'Jules Vern on steroids' monstrosities. It even has it's own sub-theme, where people make Star Wars versions, like The Millennium Falcon, TIE Fighter or Naboo Starfighter. I don't have a favorite individual official theme, I just like sets that have a lot of detail and are generally fun to look at and build. There are sets in almost every theme that embody this. It doesn't matter if it's technic or PoP, Atlantis, city or space. I'm really happy with the sets that have come out in the last five years, they have really stepped up the complexity and there are some beautiful sets now that leave a lot of older sets in the dust.

I'm working on some Lego Steampunk stuff (I'm amazed this isn't an official theme) and was looking for ideas on pipeworks and such. Right now I have an airship in progress and I'm trying to conceptualize the steam engine. I have some killer steamboat stacks and two deriggibles made from rigid rigging and upside down airliner pieces as the gas bags, linked by metal trusses to a viking ship body. The pic posted is the rigging, body and air bags. the 'metal' bits are different colors because I don't know if I want to go forward using steel or iron structure, as well as copper or brass fittings.

Thank you. I'm glad you liked it. I made this image because my comic strip is too limited in format to show this mech properly. I used it in two comics and was disappointed how it looked both times due to the format limits. As for your question, part of it comes from being a traditional artist who also loves Lego, so I have an eye for how to block a shot, make a lifelike pose, etc... The editor I use is GIMP (not the greatest, but it's free) and the effect I used is an artistic filter called cartoon. I used another filter too, an edge filter, but i forget which one.) The model is on my laptop that is currently FUBAR. I need to get a vista boot disk to get back inside it. =(

Here is a mech I designed. The background is a NASA image from the Mars Lander. The image is enhanced to make bricks more visible and in other pictures I've done it can really make the chrome pieces pop. http://fc02.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2010/114...lcalrissian.png

I need to download some of these LXF's. there's bricks in some of them that I don't have, as I started out with version 3.0... I downloaded the first one with the pharoh's tomb and got so many new molds that I almost passed out. I'd been wanting a pith helmet and rifle and... all kinds of bricks from that set. I was jumping around like a kid on christmas. Actually... if you guys don't mind, I'd like to be pointed out to a thread with outdated LDD bricks, or if you didn't mind, post the ones you have that are no longer available here or in a new thread. (Snakes! I have snakes now! and aligators!.... sorry.) Edit: I just found the information about expanding my LDD to the Universe edition. This has me so excited I'm having a hard time focusing enough to actually modify my program. Seeing some of the stuff you have all posted using this has me hardly able to concentrate. This is awesome. Edit to edit: I have made many existing sets. I will not post some of the ones I used in here as they are part of my comic and don't fit the standards of how you have asked them be displayed here. But if you would like to see them, as I have edited them and brought some of them to life, you are welcome to click the link in my sig. *most of it is safe for work, but a couple or three are not.* I use a photo editing tool to edit the bricks so they stand out more. (I get asked by LDD users why my ldd pngs look different from theirs.)

I would actually like to propose this to the LDD team, as I use it every day to create a comic strip... I would like sets of brick models that you couldn't otherwise get with the regular free version as inexpensive downloadable upgrades or plugins. I feel a small reasonable fee would offset the cost of rendering these bricks and supplying them to us. There are a lot of recent and current bricks that are not available. One of LDD's biggest downsides is its anemic variety of minifig pieces. It's downright pitiful. I would also like the ability to make any brick any available color, even if it means that using that color disables the purchase feature. I would like that when you upgrade to a new version of LDD that it doesn't remove access to bricks from previous versions of the program. Luckily after I upgraded, and lost some of the older bricks, I still had the older version on another computer and was able to make files with discontinued bricks that I can import to my current build if I need them. Certainly I'm not their ideal user, but my comic contains some original builds (as well as modified versions of official builds). A few of them decent enough that (if people wanted) could be purchased from Lego, so it's not like my unorthodox use of the program is a total loss to them. =B