anothergol

Hi, No hatch possible, unless you would sacrifice the nice slope made using the 2 large slope parts, because they're the only ones that have the correct angle. Also, a properly centered hatch wouldn't even open to a nice place, because part of the room under it is used for structural strength. Of course, you can still attach a minifig torso & pretend it comes out of a hatch. I see the LBG scala dishes have indeed increased in price, and quite possibly this MOC was partly responsible for it. But you have 2 options here: -DBG dishes, cheaper but won't look as good -larger dishes that the design also includes, not as a workaround but because the Hoth version does have larger dishes. 2 other parts have also become quite expensive and I also provide workaround designs.

Yes, base is wobbly, and it's quite normal the way it's built. Also, the connection of the bikes to the base is kinda an illegal connection, since it can't be fully pushed through (because of the wheels). But well, it holds. I've just finished building this. I was waiting for a little price drop to get it. And if you believe that 35eur was a high price for this small set, that's not even the price for that set in Belgium, no. In Belgium Lego is asking 40 FRIGGING EUR for this. So I got it for 30eur, because for me it was already a significant discount. And it's still no way near the price it should have been, so I would not advise anyone to get this for more than 20eur. Other than that, yeah it's a nice set. Obviously a little repetitive since both bikes are the same, but it's a good set with a good amount of prints (which in no way justify the price IMHO, nor does the license of an average sequel to a very old good movie).

From my limited knowledge, AO is "fake", as opposed to radiosity, but more pleasant to the eye for everyone. Can you really achieve this fake result with radiosity? And with the added bonus that it's much faster, no?

These features are a waste of time btw. Mecabricks' latest renders are hard to tell apart from real pictures.. except for the silly fake fingerprints & scratches that give them away. Even more silly knowing that everyone taking real pictures tries his best to avoid fingerprints & scratches. Stud.io's beta renderer has weathering as well, and it looks so silly, it makes no sense. Part defects like injection points, or LEGO writings, yeah that can certainly add realism, I guess. But that's something else. As for adding parts, that's why I like Stud.io, it's now rather easy to add custom parts. But then the problem is that most parts are low-poly & in no way designed for HQ renders.

I don't know, all I know is that I'd most likely buy a minifig-scaled AT-AT. I wouldn't hunt for 10k parts to build one, but I'd certainly buy one, especially for 200 bucks. It's no different than the latest MF, IMHO (& I'd have preffered to get Marshal Banana's one, btw). It's a chore to build, but it's even worse with Technic sets. The latest MF may have a sturdy structure btw, most of its decoration is rather fragile & it's more or less a MOC in that regard. I can only speak from my little experience at Rebrickable, with 2 MOCs being near the top for some time. It's pocket money, let's say it pays for parts, it's nice to have, but I really can't imagine anyone making a profit from instructions (unless you really undervalue your time). Or maybe with modulars, I don't know, since most of the stuff at the top are modulars. But interestingly, quite some of the top MOCs there are alternate builds for existing sets, which confirms that people are ready to buy new models, but much less to bother gathering parts from a ton of different shops, for too much money. But even if there are MOCs that have sold 10x or even 100x better than my top ones, it's still not in the realm of profitable (are there really paid Facebook ads for LEGO instructions?). I'd definitely buy a couple of those planes. Plus they do look like what the chinese would market. It'd look odd as LEGO sets, plus they'd probably see them as war-related anyway.

Why? It'd end up as 200 bucks, it's doable. Keep in mind that while LEGO had troubles keeping up with the demand for the MF, its ripoff was easily available. & yes of course it can't apply to ALL MOCs, a choice has to be made. Judging by the quality on Ideas, I would even reject 95% of the projects, before even considering guidelines & possible demand. But between the rare Ideas projects (which are also different beasts, as LEGO considers them as just ideas & won't mind redesigning them) being produced & the big lot of good MOCs out there, there's still a big gap. If I take a look at LEGO's Flickr, there are a couple of good MOCs per day. Remove those who aren't interested in sharing, that's a couple per week. I believe the market is there, it's not big but big enough, & it's not a market LEGO itself could touch, or would even be interested in. And let's face it, those Lepin clones won't stay there forever, MOCs will replace them and it has already started. To cash in what btw? There is no market for instructions. I can't imagine a MOC being made for money. Of course that also means that a MOC only has to hold "for the camera", which is another problem (but it didn't prevent Xinbao from producing Kaneda's bike which requires glue). Unless you're talking about Ideas project, there yes many are just adding crap projects around licenses they know people will vote for. But MOCing in general is a hobby that can only cost money. Still, I hope I'm wrong and that collaboration is about doing stuff *for* MOCers, like producing parts in requested colors, them being distributed through Bricklink. I'm fed up with Bricks&Pieces making things much harder than they should be, with stuff being there that no one is allowed to buy.

The renderer in Stud.io is indeed very promising, currently the best after Mecabricks's. Also keep in mind that its renders are a little dull, and that you'd better photoshop afterwards. IMHO it's still missing some key things: -depth of field -camera angle -most importantly: primitive substitution, & support for high-res part library. Right now primitive substitution can be more or less worked around, and I'm sure it will eventually be added. But the high-res part library was designed for POVRay, I don't think it's any compatible. I hope for a generic high-res part library. Some parts render *very* bad on close-ups, compared to POVRay renders. -easy lights You also forgot LDDToPOVRay btw. Even though it's still POVRay, its settings & renders are rather different. I'm pretty sure that POVRay renders could have been better, especially with radiosity as mentioned. But I believe that a big part of the quality has to do with ambient occlusion, which isn't in POVRay AFAIK.

True, & the best "LEGO set" I ever bought.. was by Xingbao. I believe it will eventually happen that you'll be able to easily buy MOCs as sets. But I don't much believe it will ever have any link with LEGO, neither as "publisher" because the best MOCs can't follow LEGO's too strict guidelines, especially for sturdiness, nor as "parts provider" because gathering parts for a MOC costs way too much for the casual builder. Not even counting that LEGO wouldn't associate with anything not kid-friendly. I believe it will eventually happen, but through Chinese manufacturers. Well it has already happened for a few MOCs, I'm pretty sure there will be companies streamlining the process in the future. Let's take the example of Powerpig's MOCs (https://www.ecwid.com/store/powerpig/#!/My-First-Console-Sprite-Edition-2-0/p/56661923/category=15326690). Who wouldn't want a mini NES MOC? As a 5 bucks polybag, it'd sell like crazy. But as a $50 kit? Of course he has to manually do everything, but I'm pretty sure that the price of the genuine parts he has to collect, is a too big part of the price of the set. There is just no way this kind of shop could become mainstream without a chinese manufacturer involved IMHO.

I'm thinking of 4 possible things: 1. integration of Bricklink in LDD, to pretty much give us back the "buy your creation" the LDD originally had, but in a way that works. But that'd be strange, since it would be conflicting with Stud.io which now does exactly that. 2. integration of Bricklink in Ideas, to "buy this MOC" straight from the Ideas page. This is the most likely to me. However these are nice concepts that can't really work, I don't much believe in automated BL orders (which Rebrickable has too) without added ease to reduce costs, like "this part is only a filler, can be any of these", or "this part can be any color", not to end up with 50 different shops for a little MOC. 3. Bricks&Pieces becoming a Bricklink shop. That would be amazing, since let's face it, B&P will never work properly. However that wouldn't fit the name. Well, "designer program" could mean something to help designers design. 4. something I've suggested in the past, and I so HOPE it's this: a way for BL buyers to vote on recolors/new parts, pretty much the Lego Ideas of parts. This wouldn't fit the name either, but everything is there for this to work, as BL already has color wishlists, so Lego can already know the demand. Oh quality is there (resin printers), even better than Lego since such parts won't have injection marks, & can have shapes that you can't produce using single molds. But price will never compare. It's amazing how resin printers have reached 500 bucks. The process seems tedious, though. Not as straighforward as with FDM printers.

Obviously, but most likely someone here around already knows something

Anyone has a clue what it's about? https://www.bricklink.com/v2/community/newsview.page?msgid=1105486

Around 16cm tall, thus 23m (with legs apart & hips at the top, thus it can easily be 24m). They even provide a tiny 13mm dude(tte) for scale. The same thing struck me for their AT-AT & AT-ST, it's very narrow, like weirdly narrow.

Talking about the AT-AT, I'm finishing assembling Bandai's AT-AT snapkit (detail is stunning), and I would advise it to anyone who's building/has built a LEGO one, because it's a great reference, and most importantly, it shows how the legs articulation works. I learnt things, for ex, I don't know if you knew that, but the pivot point for the leg isn't in the center, it's just where you put the small parabola in the back, that is the pivot. It also shows how the disks & bars move along with the leg motion, I don't think that can be safely replicated, but it's quite interesting. I was also surprised that the head only pivots at the end of the neck, the base of the neck only articulates upwards weirdly, and most likely they did it so that the "collapsed" pose can be achieved.

On a related subject, I had posted about 3mm fishing LEDs in another post here, a few weeks ago. I just got them, full details here below. It would be *technically* doable to build a *wireless* lightsaber. You'd have to fit a 2mm battery (they now exist) inside a handle, or let a 3mm handle "be" the battery, adding the rings around it. And then you'd need a small enough LED as well. Maybe someone will end up making them, but yeah, with these batteries it's definitely doable.

It's indeed not amazing, especially compared to this old brick-built MOC, the best ever made IMHO

for what it's worth,6225242 is now in stock, but that's about the only part in the list of what I'm waiting for

Autosnapping is best (by far) in LDD than in any other tool anyway. But what Stud.io has over the LDD is the bypass of autosnapping, the bypass of collision detection (which is inherently flawed in any tool because that would require ultrahigh precision models), and finer increments in parts relocation (that can be REAL pain in the LDD)

3 years later, the (most likely) final version, with instructions on Rebrickable. It was more or less ready for over a year now, I was just trying to find someone to print parts. It didn't quite work, so here it is, & the artwork is included so maybe YOU will be able to print them (or decals)!

It normally should look stripy & wavy, though. Hard to imagine the newly injected plastic mixing so well with the old one. No, from what I understand, Lego was using pre-colored granules before 2000, now they mix to create their own colors. They're simply sometimes mixing wrong. Wrong ratios.. or maybe their base colors aren't reliable.. or they simply don't mix well enough.

Oh I did (& only half were this dark, the others were proper LBG), but I know that Lego has no such official color

A new one I hadn't spotted. Yep, it's in DBG. It only took Lego 7 years (most likely because the metallic one was already close to DBG). Buyable (5 cents) Also this one didn't exist as 1x2 yet , & this recolor & this

..that was a joke

yeah but you also suggested a price (200$) that's the one of "pro" software that's only justified when you make money from it

I just got Lego's new color in set 75215: medium bluish grey.

I'm not "sharing my hate for your software" everywhere for the fun of it, in the middle of a discussion about tools & renderers I can either pretend that Mecabricks doesn't exist, or share my thoughts about it. It has the best renderer and a (IMHO) bad UI workflow, it's already half a compliment. Most other tools have neither good workflow nor good rendering (or rendering at all). And I also did write "& now Stud.io's new renderer apparently based on Blender's renderer". They're not hiding it (even though they say "their own engine" in places, which indeed sucks), I learnt that from themselves. And yeah I'm pretty sure a lot of what makes good rendering are in settings themselves, so.. good work, if they stole your stuff. I was gonna add, I'm pretty sure they could have just improved the settings on the POVRay renderer as well, but now I'm reading POV doesn't have ambient occlusion, which seems to be what Cycles overdoes & what makes the biggest difference (or is it just not enough radiosity? gonna make some tests).