Jump to content

shiftaltcmd

Eurobricks Vassals
  • Posts

    22
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by shiftaltcmd

  1. Swebrick has a timeline, is this what you're looking for? Page 9 in their Magazine. https://www.swebrick.se/infoblad/2018/swebrick2018_high_a4.pdf
  2. Don't spend too much time on it. Many of the lego colors are impossible to match with traditional four-color CMYK. You need to use a professional photo-printer with more colors to stand a chance. They come in different versions from 6 to 12 colors. I haven't been able to find correct color values on the net, so for me it's a lot of trial and error. People might have guessed the color values and then published them as the "truth". Even if you get the correct values, no one has published what color space they have been using. European CMYK differs from American CMYK. sRGB differs from Adobe RGB and so on. Some websites uses Pantone color values. That could work but so far I have not been able to trust them because of errors. And they don't provide any information if it is correct information from Lego or guess work.
  3. What's the difference between Brick Fanatics mag and Blocks mag? More than the size, Blocks ≈ A4. Brick Fanatics ≈ A5. Some of the people involved are the same. Which one would be the best for an AFOL?
  4. The best part is to find the perfect tree (and not to be discovered stealing it). The most dangerous animal in the deep dark forest is the snow-snake.
  5. Can you hear mommy calling? Don't eat yellow snow! Don't lick the lamp posts!
  6. Really nice trains! Glad that I could help with the stickers. For the first version of the signs on the sides I used a photo and only changed the numbers. It looks ok in a larger format but it's a little bit messy in small scale like Lego. For the second version I found a better photo and an original drawing. I drew the lines and replaced the colors with a dark grey and brass. It looks better, cleaner, in a smaller scale. The fonts I found were quite good but the distance between the characters had to be adjusted. Especially for the numbers. For example "G" and "R" are not spot on but close enough. The stickers are made on a professional UV-printer on transparent vinyl. First I put a layer of white, that way the sticker can be placed on any colored surface. The transparent vinyl makes it easy to cut and trim. Sometimes I print directly onto the lego-pieces but here stickers were better. Fonts, colors, logotypes are usually not that hard to find. Many companies have some kind of graphic manual and with a little bit of research you can usually find it. www.brandsoftheworld.com, www.logotypes.ru and wikipedia have a lot of resources. On wikipedia I always choose the svg-file if possible. With SVG it's very easy to scale and change the colors. Sweden is a very open country and a lot of information is in the public domain, free to use. The railways used to belong to the state but now we have a lot of private companies that makes it more difficult to find good information. For car traffic it's still possible. Fonts, colors, signs … all is available to download. Now I have all of the swedish traffic signs in Lego-versions. https://www.transportstyrelsen.se/sv/vagtrafik/Trafikregler/Om-vagmarken/Teckensnitt/ https://www.transportstyrelsen.se/sv/vagtrafik/Vagmarken/
  7. Most inks are waterbased. Dont soak the prints more than necessary. Right paper is essential.
  8. They can handle a lot of abuse. The smaller ones can handle almost anything. I have put five on top of each other, I could stack them higher, but then I need some side-support. I don't want them to fall down because someone/something bumped into them. The big one for storing cc-buildings or mocs on baseplates is quite sturdy. The one that I have for the Monster house I put a 30 pound / 15 kg computer on top of that. No problem. I wouldn't hesitate to put one on top of another. But not more than so, it will be to high. Forces from the top is no problem. It's forces from the side, a push or a bad road. Put the storage next to a corner or a wall to give it some support from the side. And it can handle a lot of abuse. There are no places to buy them at the moment. If there is interest I will look into the possibilities of (mass)producing. Or I could publish the drawings and anyone can make their own.
  9. A medium-sized one. 3 x 2 feet, 90 x 60 cm.
  10. Thank you. Depends on the interest. I don't want to cut them all manually. With a machine doing the cutting a minimum series is about 200-300 of the same box.
  11. I made them myself
  12. Loose elements I store mostly in plastic trays. These ones are for storing and transporting sets and mocs. Getting an overview of minifigs etc. Great for armybuilders, put the army on a baseplate instead of ziplock bags.
  13. My serie of Lego-storage made with corrugated cardboard I like working with corrugated cardboard, cheap, strong, light-weight, easy to work with, recycable. I used a special one with a white and brown side. Putting the storage together you can choose which side will be the outside. No glue or staples. The storage is lasercut to a perfect shape and snap together by itself. (But with the laser you will have a burnt smell for a couple of days.) Minifig and landscape storage Four versions of minifig storage. Could also work for low landscape modules. The storage has a perfect fit for a 32 x 32 baseplate. During transport there is nothing inside the storage that can move. Strong enough to stack them on top of each other. I have had 5 boxes full with minifigs stored on top of each other. It's possible to choose between front and top opening. A high version that will fit a mounted knight or a cave troll, and low version that fit a minifig with a spear (not halberd). If you want to see what's inside the box it's possible to make a cut-out and put in a plastic-window. Vehicles I have made two versions so far, both versions fit two vehicles. 6-wide or 8-wide. The height and length is enough to house large trains. The same principle as above. Corrugated cardboard with a tight fit. During transportation the content should not be able to move inside the storage. Building instructions Once again, an exact fit. It's better for most instructions to lay down instead of standing. The corrugated cardboard is strong enough so you can put boxes on top of each other. CC and Moc storage An exact fit, no movement during transportation. You slide your build on to the bottom half, no need for lifting. Close the front. Put the top in position. The top half can be cut to almost any height. It is possible to put the storage on top of each other. But then the bottom one has to contain something that gives a little bit of side-support, or put storage in a corner. A CC-house is ideal (not like the Monster house below, which is 32 x 24), the walls of the house will support the storage so it doesn't skew. The Town Hall was really impressive to put inside the storage. The storage can be unfolded to save space if it's not in use. I'm also trying out a larger version that can house 48 x 48 baseplates. It will need a thicker and stronger corrugated cardboard to support the extra area/volume/weight.
  14. My new Lego-storage in the updated Lego-room I'm combining storage with a surface to build on. It will fit most of my building pieces. Bricks and plates will be stored separately, there are too many of them. It's made from fibre-board, the same kind as Ikea uses but without the outer coat. I will paint it later. Inspiration comes from Ikea Trofast. I let the hardware store cut the fibreboard to the exact size and put it together myself at home. I got some left-overs of the fibreboard, I cut them to thin stripes and let the storage containers glide on them instead of buying special ones. The table-top is an Ikea work-top. Fibre-board ≈ 30€ Cutting ≈ 10€ Work-top ≈ 45€ Screws ≈ 3€ Cross-brace ≈ 2€ Total ≈ 90€ Storage-containers 0-5 € each depending on size and brand. I'm also using plastic trays that used to contain candy. I get them for free from the local shop. Above there is a small shelf. It's supposed to house pictures but I'm using it for minifigs. The depth is 8 studs. I'm using the collectible minifig stand so I can only have two rows of minifigs. Maybe change that in the future to be able to have three rows. And a couple of small Lego inspired containers. The room itself is about 3 x 4 meters.
  15. Reading the discussion I believe there are still some things to consider and to look at. Sorry for the big images but it's easier to see the details. The look and feel will be different between pad printing and inkjet. See images below. Inkjet will give a blurry, rasterised look. Pad printing have a cleaner solid look. Compare the print on the scarecrow and the flower. A inkjet print is made by millions of tiny drops of ink. Pad printing is more like the old potato print that you might tried out at school. Inkjet mixes 4 colors: cyan, magenta, yellow and black to get the whole range of colors. Pad printing uses one specific color for each pad (spotcolor). The torso of the scarecrow have five colors, black, green, yellow, brown and tan.) It's possible to get close enough with inkjet. The apple is good enough at a small distance. Only at close-up like this you can see the imperfections. The solid black prints that I made works the best. Only one color is needed which minimizes the need of mixing colors. In pad printing each color that you add, will also make the total cost higher. Not only that you have to make more pads, there will also be more errors and more copies that you have to throw away, simply because they are not good enough. Inkjet, you have millions of colors to choose from, no extra cost. But it is difficult to exactly match colors. With pad-printing you can choose special colors like metallic. You can also have colors that are more saturated than CMYK-colors. CMYK-colors are transparent, light passes through the ink and reflects from the surface beneath the ink, that's why you will always have the best result while printing on something white. (Some inkjet printers have solved this by adding white to the traditional CMYK-colors. First you print a white layer, and afterwards the CMYK-colors on top of that.) With pad-printing the colors doesn't have the be transparent, so you can print on darker materials. It is almost impossible for an outsider to exactly match Legos colors. Every website I have visited have been useless. There are many websites that presents RGB and CMYK values for Lego colors but they make no sense. There are different kinds of RGB and CMYK, so without telling which one the numbers are pointless. It's like saying that I caught a fish that was 25. 25 what? 25 inches, 25 centimeters, 25 pounds, 25 kilogram … ? I used the Pantone values from the Peeron color list. I don't know if those values are the correct ones from Lego or if someone else tried to estimate the correct values. Anyway I took the Pantone values and converted them into CMYK according to the ISO-standard (Europe). I discovered that many colors are impossible to reproduce correctly with traditional CMYK-print. Mostly they are too saturated or too bright. Compare the image below. The upper row is colors created with RGB-values (RGB are for example the colors that a digital camera can capture or a screen can show.) The lower row is how these colors will look like in CMYK-print. If you try to print that image the upper and lower row will come out as identical. You can see that it's mostly the bright saturated colors that are impossible to match. Green and orange are among the most difficult. Other colors like browns, greys, sands are a delicate mix of all four CMYK-colors. Very difficult to keep the balance. That's why Lego uses spotcolors like Pantone (there are other industry-standards, RAL is common for cars and architecture, NCS is popular in Sweden …). You use spotcolors to be more consistent in production. It's better than CMYK (but still not perfect, Lego have problems being consistent with some colors.) Yes, I know there are photoprinters that has a wider color-range. For example Epson and Canon makes brilliant photo-printers with 6-8-10-12 colors instead of the usual 4. But I haven't seen any flatbed UV inkjet printers with photoquality like that. But maybe in the future. I would choose pad print to large runs. Inkjet for small runs. Anyone that has any good closeups on the Comicon special minifigures, they might be borderline then it comes to economy. Many of the comicon minifigs seems to use 2-3 colors. Cheaper and easier to produce compared to the Scarecrow below. I also do prints on vinyl. In many cases that's easier and better, especially with transparent vinyl. Transparent, no white paper edge and I don't have to match the background-color with Legos color. Even Lego themselves do this on their stickers. And no bricks are hurt in the process.
  16. The mac version will be out on the 21st of February! http://www.macgamestore.com/product/2666/LEGO-The-Lord-of-the-Rings/ http://www.feralinteractive.com/en/news/357/
  17. Movies mostly. I prefer animated movies because they are more of a caricature than real life and Lego works better as caricature than trying to look real. Scale is a problem. The minifigs are too wide compared to the height, more like a hobbit or a dwarf than a normal human being. The dream-project would be like the Brick testament but with Middle-earth instead. But it has to wait until I get filthy rich. And comics, but they are not easy to translate into Lego. Lego minifigs are usually to happy, to cheerful. The clean simple lines of Herge seems to be impossible to turn into Lego. Asterix, Lucky Luke, Disney, Spirou is also to difficult. The characters are so specific, it's even difficult to turn them into movies. Much easier with superheroes that can hide behind a mask or costume. Blueberry is to dark and dirty, like Clint Eastwood. Valerian might be possible. In my opinion that would be more interesting than Star Wars. I'm not that found of cars. But half of my mocs are cars. Because of the rest of the family and the challenge. You cannot do the fun things all the time, sometimes you have to do the necessary things as well. I'm not so good with 3D, so Lego comes as very good practice. The next step will be to do more things which involves different kinds of mechanics. I used to live close to the place there Christopher Polhem lived, father of swedish mechanics, about 100 years before the swedish industrial revolution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Polhem I have to learn the new toys at my work, why not use them for custom Lego-things, 3D-printer, laser-cut, UV-printer with white and gloss. At the moment I'm experimenting with printing on cloth and then cut it with the laser.
  18. The page tries to be intelligent. It tries to forward me to a page that doesn't exist. But I can go the shop, than change region to US (maybe more countries will work as well) and now I can see all the splendor. I believe a average user would use the back button. Colors, a matter of taste I guess. Images, I would prefer more real Lego-shots. I'm not so found of the flexible minifigs. Arms and legs can be positioned any way you choose. It's fine with games but for me Lego is about building. On my iPhone I get a message that I have an old browser. (I have one of the most modern browsers) Useless message, better to explain that I'm lacking Flash and give some advice on what browser/Flash I should update to. Links like See more, Go, Click here ... are pointless. Links should have better names. Of course picture heavy and using Flash, I wouldn't like surfing with 3G. Now I'm on a 10 mbit wireless. If I decide to surf without images, too speed things up a bit. The image-descriptions are totally useless. It's been in fashion for some time to have a big picture at the top of the page. I'm not that found of that. That means that my first action is usually to scroll down. I guess it gives a nice first impression but for the people who visit the website often, it's only annoying. The shadows, transparency, smooth corners gives it a modern look. Verdana is a good font but maybe not the most exciting one. Helvetica as a backup font, Helvetica is too neutral and bland. I hope they have improved the search-engine. A totally different thing is why some of their building-instructions are way to dark/saturated. On some it's almost impossible to see anything in the dark areas.
  19. Haven't seen the movie but the minifigs looks brilliant!
  20. Thank you. I was so proud then I fooled a couple of guys on the Land Rover forum. They thought it was the real deal and searched for the box-number. The box-number is actually my brothers car number plate. On the swedish Land Rover forum his friend was amazed how look-a-like the minifig was. Land Rover forum with more pictures and the box.
  21. What colors are the original from TLG? RGB or Pantone? If it is RGB we need to know what kind of RGB, because it comes in different flavors (color-spaces). The values in the lists are of no use if we cannot tie them to the correct color-space. RGB we have AdobeRGB, AppleRGB, sRGB, ColorMatchRGB and ProPhotoRGB (in Photoshop) CMYK, we have European (Fogra), American (SWOP) and Japanese. CMYK, less of a problem because some of the Lego-colors are impossible to print with traditional CMYK, a printer with six or more colors is needed. I took a random color, Blue/Bright blue. CMYK values: 100/47/0/0 RGB values: 0D69AB or 13/105/171 Pantone 393C Pantone is a standard so I will use that as a base. Photoshop will translate Pantone 393C into: sRGB 0/70/173 Adobe RGB 0/71/169 ProPhoto RGB 50/54/147 Apple RGB 0/52/160 Colormatch RGB 0/51/160 US Sheet coated 100/65/1/0 US Web coated 100/76/8/1 Europe Fogra 27 99/74/0/0 Europe Fogra 39 100/70/5/1 Japan Coated 100/71/3/0 Very far from the numbers in the list. My screen is probably showing colors slightly different from yours. But you can see the difference between the colors. I used different color-spaces but the same numbers. All of the RGB-colors are 13/105/171 and the CMYK-colors 100/47/0/0. They are all quite different from Pantone 293C. Isodomos and Shadows RGB-color is very similar, identical, to Adobe RGB and sRGB (the two most common). But far away from the Pantone color. Screens and printers can be calibrated. And with some adjustments of the list we can get very close to perfection. After that the only problem is TLGs inconsistency.
  22. Hello from Sweden I've been a member on Swebrick, almost since the start in january/february 2009. And now it's time to take another step. Left the dark ages a couple of years ago. I can't say that I'm into any special themes yet. But I bought two Medieval market sets. Haven't been able to build that many MOCs yet. Mostly helping my son (6 years), his interest varies quite a lot, but we are concentrating on: city, space, pirates and knights. My christmas-gift for my brother, a special kind of Land Rover. More at: G4 Challenge owners club My house, also my first LDD-design. The garden wasn't finished on this photo. Herbie, TLGs VW Beetle with a different color-scheme (my sons favorite car, no one is allowed to touch it): Wall-E, something quick and dirty. To combine Mindstorm 85277 and the motorized bulldozer 8275 was simply to much money. I'm in the graphic design industry and shiftaltcmd is a common tool for shortcuts in Adobe software (if you're using macs). Realised that I a have a lot of cool toys at work that can be used in customising Lego. So hopefully I will start doing more of that (time is very limited). 3D printer and lasercut. (Cutting cloth worked like a charm, very nice edges on the fabric). UV-printer, prints on cloth and vinyl. That would also give my Lego-pieces some UV-protection. The printer also have white color and gloss. Using transparent vinyl, it's good to first make a layer or two with white before adding the other colors. We can also print on cardboard or thin well, up to 1.5 mm thick. But hopefully we will get another printer that can print on thicker materials, 5 cm or 2 inches. Then I would be able to print on bricks and tiles.
×
×
  • Create New...