ReplicaOfLife

Well done, especially the interior. You have a great eye for detail and how to realize it in Lego. The 'Spaghetti' scene is brilliant!

Thanks, Kristel :) btw, have you stopped your blog? I always enjoyed reading it, both for your own work as wll as all the other stuff you featured.

Thank you :)

Thanks you guys, much appreciated

It's finally time for me to present to you my newest MOC: The Sideways Building Designed between September 2016 and January 2017, this MOC has roughly 4500 pieces. The building's name is a bit tongue in cheek and references the fact that most of the frontal facade is built using elaborate SNOT techniques. 1x1 bricks are used sideways and offset by exactly half a brick's height to the ones above and below to create a new kind of masonry effect. The basic idea was this: This technique was not easy to pull off and made the design and build very challenging. But without further ado, here are the pictures - More images are, as usual, available at flickr. The intensive snotting on the facade also leads to the absence of the usual 'stripes' that separate the individual floors of modular buildings (where tiles and plates are used at the top & bottom). Still, my building is fully modular, as this picture shows. The floors can also be interchanged freely (except for the roof, of course). The only parts of the front facade built with studs on top is the bottom-most layer of bricks, all windows, and most of the roof. Everything else has studs facing left, right, towards you or even downwards. This also creates weird offsets - the left and right windows on the upper floors are offset by 2/5 the width of a stud! (or 3/5, depending which way you look at it...) A closer look at the masonry detail. View from the back - this is built the old fashioned way with studs facing upwards. Let's take a look inside. The left hand part of the ground floor is taken up by a pizza parlor. It has two tables for patrons to sit, but it is mostly aimed at take-away (and possibly delivery). A young couple is enjoying their pizza. Pizzas are baked in a stone oven. On the other side, there is a travel agent. As usual, the walls are decorated with posters showcasing possible travel destinations. Moving up to the first floor. A couple lives here. Behind the living room, there is a small kitchen (the wall inbetween was removed for this photo). A look inside their bedroom. The green door leads to the bathroom. A picture of that can be seen on flickr. Moving up to the second floor...The owner of this flat had the wall separating kitchen and living room knocked down to create a combined living room and kitchen. The center counter with two bar stools looks very inviting. Seems like the cat found something on the floor... Note: More pictures of the second floor apartment are available on flickr. Moving up one final time, we take a look at the stairwell... As attics go, this is actually still pretty orderly...except for the giant cobweb in one corner. Apparently, someone also used the attic for his painting at some point. That's about it Again, more pictures can be found at flickr. Looking forward to your thoughts & comments! Cheers!

Excavator pieces: https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=3314&idColor=11 https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=784&idColor=3 Check your bricks bin, maybe you'll also find https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=3317&idColor=3 to attach them to. I've never seen the short red hoses. But I think the weird red piece to the right (above the round brick) is Lego, too. Think I saw that someplace. No idea about the red part in the center.

Great work, brilliant detailing throughout!

Sold. Will get this at least two times.

Brilliantly executed! Funny moment: When I saw the picture of the roof, I initially thought "Why are there microscopic tanks driving around up there?!". Then I realized they're propably supposed to be birds

That looks like some insane snotting in there. Must be one hell of an intersting build!

Nice write-up, and thanks for the honorable mention It was an interesting read, and you managed to put a lot of ideas and principles into words that I subconsciously look or strive for when seeing or creating MOCs. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having buildings that largely repeat the upper floor design more than once. Especially if the building has more than three floors, or goes for a more american, flat-roofed design (think old town houses in New York, for example). Actually, I think trying to give every floor a unique design is something where many builders go wrong, as they neglect the vertical aspects of their build. The second and third MOCs you posted fall into that category.

Nice building, I really like the facade design! The interior details are well done, too

Well done, especially the interiors. The detail throughout the shop is amazing! The apartment is well-done, too, though I feel the living room/kitchen area feels a bit empty.

Very nice! Pictures could be a bit smaller, though, some of them wildly exceed standard monitor resolutions which makes it hard to really take them in.

Great build through and through, and an interesting subject!

Nice & imaginative mod! Well done!

To be honest, I find these to be very disproportionate in relation to a minifig (at times comically so), especially with regards to height and length. But then, pretty much all current Lego vehicles look way to big. But I guess this is a compromise that has to be made in one way or another. But to answer your question: The modulars - a least the older ones - are pretty grand in their exterior design, so while these cars are still a bit on the large side, they work alright with them - especially with your XXL versions.

Don't really consider myself an expert yet, but I've designed all my MOCs in LDD before building them irl. Usually, I have a principal idea in my head what the building should look like, including some design elements I'd like to use. Then I start with the ground floor and work my way up (though with my newest building I started with an upper floor - but the whole building evolved around a new technique for building the front facade I came up with and wanted to try out). I often change my plans as I go along, especially when I find that something doen't work (either visually or technically). I've also taken up building prototypes of smaller sections to check wether what I designed in LDD works and is stable enough in real life. I also usually lay low on colors (not too many in one build, as the result usually looks cluttered), and try to use repeating patterns (window placement, variations of similar design elements) on all floors.

Not made by Lego = not worth my time. Seriously, I like what others do with custom train stuff (e.g. large driving wheels for steam locomotives, driving rods etc.). If I ever got into Lego trains, I'd very likely get some of those. Pretty much everything else I've seen so far seems rather unnecessary to me - especially stuff like contemporary firearms and minifig accessories for contemporary soldiers/armies. I'm very happy about Lego's stance on these matters and hope they continue to leave that niche to their lesser competitors.

My thoughts exactly. I would love to learn more about the design stages each building went through, and where the inspiration came from. It was also great to see more of the original design of Green Grocer. There've been a few small pictures arounbd for years now, but seeing it up close now, I have to say, I like the released version a lot better. In contrast, Market Street looked much better with the original red color scheme.

Wow, this is absolutely superb! The outside is really, really great, and the interiors are chock full of amazing details and also show some out-of-the-box thinking with great part usages (e.g. the whip on the rocking chair, or the car-doors as cloth). Love it!

The interior is amazing! A police station is on my bucket list of MOCs to do, and this certainly gave me some nice ideas. It must've taken some time to accumulate all the printed and stickered pieces from different eras used in this build! The exterior shows some nice ideas, and for me each floor works pretty well on its own. But if I may offer some well-meant advice: The building as a whole could use some more consistency in its design. Each floor uses a different window style and placement, and the second floor shares no design elements with the first and third floor. You used tiles to evoke brickwork on the first and third floor, but the second floor uses two kinds of profile bricks for texture. That looks kinda odd, like the second floor was inserted into the building much later on. But anyway, for a first attempt at a modular MOC, this is good! Keep it up!

Very nice! As others pointed out, this would work well with the smallish newer modulars like DO or Brick Bank (if you put it next to the Wash Salon). And the nice part is, it just works! There've been so many attempts at modularizing the Creator Town Houses, and a lot of them unfortunately don't work because the proportions are wrong. Kudos to you for avoiding that trap :)

Whoa, cool, I hadn't even known that they made window frames in sand blue now. That's a real nice color alternative I'll definitely have to use sometime :) The building looks nice, if a bit plain. The area above the shop windows with the 2x1 profile bricks could use some work, maybe a shop sign or an awning or something. Otherwise, this would look real nice on a street of Pet Shop styled houses! I used to not like creating interiors, too, but it's grown on me...to the point where I spent an extensive amount of time designing them for my next modular, even tiling the floors of all regular floors for the first time (not the attic, though). And it pays off, having created it all in LDD and now building it for real is something I truly enjoy

Nice first modular! The ice cream shop could use a front wall & door. Or at least something to properly shield the workers from the environment There is. There's a stairway visible at the back in the third picture . The Parisian Restaurant and the Assembly Square both feature exterior staircases. And it's propably about the same height as the Pool hall in the Detective's Office.