Hello everyone,
Thank you very much for all your kind messages, it is really nice from you !
I will try to answer to everyone:
- Chilis: I can bring it out on IDEAS but there isn't even a single doubt that this won't be selected by LEGO to become an official set, mainly because there are way too many pieces.
- Johnny1360: Actually I didn't detailed the searching and building process, but no, I didn't use ANY plan, blueprint or so!
As I wanted the plane to look realistic, of course I had to look at pictures of the (real) one, but that's all. The "funny" thing is that, when I really needed to have a measurement (particularly when it came to proportions), most of the time I measured things on pictures by sticking a measuring tape directly on my screen! And I didn't always have my computer with me, which means that in a lot of cases I measured things on my PHONE screen, with a measuring tape!
Thus, I used to work using a "ratio", a kind of chart with 4 colomns : size in real life, size in cm on the picture, size in LEGO, number of studs in LEGO. Finding Boeing 777-200's official sizes was also tricky for some reasons, but mainly because it's not always precise and it changes from one source to another. For very small details though, I sometimes worked on softwares such as Paint to use another ratio, this time measuring it on pictures by counting the number of PIXELS!
I was aware that, even though I tried to be precise, this way of working was still full of approximations, and might lead to some proportions/size problems, but strangely enough, not really!
One thing I also used a LOT was the Wikipedia (you see the approximation ) "Boeing 777" page. But, once again, that helped, but it was quite limited. Anyway I tried to make a mix of all these sources and to find the best compromises, everywhere.
The thing that was the hardest to measure/calculate was ANGLES, mainly for the tail. I set up a whole new system of measurement to find its good placement and inclination. If you're interested, I think I still have funny pictures of that process.
Also, I want to say that I used measurements on the main parts of the plane (let's say for spacing the doors correctly, for example) in order to have a realistic model, but I didn't do that everywhere, for 2 reasons: there are some parts that you just can't reprodruce with their realistic size/proportions in LEGO (the windows, for example), and also because I wanted the keep a part of "freedom" in the building (and additionally because sometimes only, trying to be as accurate as possible wouldn't result as the most eye-pleasing solution).
- Koalayummies: building it at a minifig scale wasn't my first goal, all the more so since, unlike my model, minifigs don't have realistic proportions, but I'm actually glad it turned so, and my plane is convertible!