DigitalDreams

Wow, that's amazing. Lot's of planning went into this, and it paid off.

Great idea for the sweets!

I was talking about the speed of the ride at the front-right that spins ;) Great display though. Would love to build something this big!

Great coaster build, and time-lapse video! I think the ride at the front could do with being slowed a bit, unless you want all the riders to die ?

Some nice machines there. Wish I'd thought of the mini-bowling machine back when I did my shopping centre amusement arcade. My pinball machine used tubing cut-offs for the buttons...

Excellent. If parts like these existed back when I played with real LEGO then I would definitely have built one of these. I couldn't tell from the short video, but what's controlling the rate that the cars pause and then advance onto the lift hill?

Thanks! Project took around 6 months, although at least half of that is optimization (for rendering on less than ideal PC), render preparation, trial renders, and then the final renders which weighed in at around 200 hours. Thanks!

Thanks for all the kind comments. I added a few more images to the album, including some cross-sections. I'll add this MOC to my list of things to build when I win the lottery

And more importantly, if you get the cars up to 88mph, do they disappear back to the future?

It's one of those program features filed under "cunningly hidden". Or perhaps it's "fiendishly disguised", I get the two mixed up

Perhaps I've misunderstood your problem with MLCad, but if you're talking about the default colours on the Colorbar Toolbar, you can right-click on any of the 16 colour squares and replace them with any colour you want. I imagine most MLCad users use this to replace the old greys with the new, and I also removed something else (possibly pink?) to get (dark)tan in there too. If it's of any use to you for LDView, there is a javascript-based LDView parts list re-sorter that I wrote years ago.

Thanks Eggyslav. I think providing the builder puts in the effort to ensure the model is valid (parts, colours, structure, and where possible, dynamics) and is properly rendered then digital models can be excellent. Part of the problem was always the screenshot quality of LDD which didn't even show the separation between bricks, combined with the lack of technical skills many (understandably) have (fortunately not a problem for a software engineer like me), but things are certainly improving these days compared to 10 or 15 years ago, in part probably due to the LDDtoPOV converter. In any case, going digital was the only way I'd ever be able to afford to build my models (most of which are huge by LEGO set standards). Still waiting on that lottery win... Funny point about the signs - two of the colours pass through the sign to the other side where they also form part of a letter on the rear, the other colours are single sided. I used separate colours to keep track of it all whilst building but decided in the end to leave it that way because it looked good. I guess I was somewhat lucky with the length of the two words and the alignment on the rear. It's explained on one of the images, but the point of the hatch was to allow escape from a wing if the core was ablaze. The original concept was to put staircases at the front of the wings, but I didn't like it and ended up with the hatches where the concept is that you throw down a chain ladder to the ground. My concern was simply that this probably wouldn't pass fire regulations, but then if you're about to get burned alive that chain ladder will be a huge relief Thanks Blackbird. Total 60894 parts, including approx. 10k bricks, 4k slopes, 10k plates, 26k tiles, and for all those round structures over 3k hinge-halves. Thanks LegoModularFan. Unique shaping was certainly high on the list of design criteria. As for the colours that you don't like the original concept was to have the wings and support stanchions in a mix of red and orange with the central core a mix of yellow and black, with the multi-coloured approach intended to make the museum more kid-friendly. Although the stanchions looked good in red and orange I struggled to get the overall mix of colours to work well together, and limited part/colour availability (especially on the slopes and curved parts) left me wrestling with constant colour tweaks until in the end I decided to go with the more reliable mix of blue/grey/white/black. I agree about the foliage. I originally intended the grassy base to be about 8 bricks high with lots more plant and water features (and maybe even a hedge maze), but the brick count was getting too high for me to render on my ageing PC and I've run into some serious personal problems and wanted to get this finished and posted while I still could. Thanks koalayummies. Most of my MOCs are massive, which was really the whole point of getting into digital builds (built lots of real brick small stuff as a kid). There certainly are some challenges which put what I do beyond certainly the more typical digital builder, usually in relation to trigonometry calculations (fortunately I still remember my soh-cah-toa stuff from high school trigonometry ), and also complexity with trying to deal with such a large model in software. There's a lot of critical dimensions here, especially in relation to the offsets/angles for the circular sections, and for the overlaps to deal with the awkward 60 degree placement of the wings. On this model the stupidest little thing that would have taken next to no time in real bricks ended up taking an entire day. Around the rocket exhibit there is a semi-circular glass barrier connected to two straight glass barriers. The straight ones are stud-aligned and connected to the floor. The curved section (which could be built and then bent into shape in 10 seconds in real bricks) couldn't be achieved with the same angle between all hinged sections and given the way the software works I absolutely have to calculate all angles if I want the end of the hinged sequence to land properly on a stud. It was even worse on my Spaceship model where even more angles were needed at the front of the wings. Often with too many simultaneous equations to solve involving sin/cos/tan I've taken to just using a spreadsheet with macros to iteratively nudge multiple angles until the calculated offset error reads zero (or as close as it doesn't matter) implying stud alignment. I've even been known to lay out lots of post-it notes on the floor and shuffle them into position to get an understanding of how many hinged sectioned are needed and the approx. starting angle. As for the PC, you might be surprised. I'm building these on a 15 year old PC running XP with 1.5GHz single core and 1GB ram. Of course, it takes a bit of skill to get them to render on that Thanks Digger of Bricks! On the original paper sketches and mockup I was going for a blend of futurist and brutalist, although I arguably softened the brutalism with the rounded windows on the wings after I concluded that long repetitive rows of small square windows on the wings was going to look a bit unfriendly and not let in enough light, so I kind of see it as a blend of two styles now. I'm always interested to see what phrases people come up with to describe architecture styles

Thanks Wesley for your kind comments. There's a lot I like about this architecture too, but I have to confess to not being entirely happy. The strange shape made it a pain to light in the renders due to a great number of shadows. Not sure about how legitimate the proposed fire escapes from the wings would be in real life. I also ran out of room and didn't manage to include a service elevator. As for the rocket, I suppose the museum owners craned that one in from above before adding the dome :) The rocket was originally supposed to be dead center with a circular viewing barrier but then I had the idea of merging it with the glass-fronted elevator car so you can ride up the side of the rocket!

Full Flickr Album contains many more images, all with descriptions.

Greetings! LEGO Research Labs 62000-brick commercial complex featuring offices & laboratories, various function, service & utility areas, stairwells, elevators, gardens, and parking for 106 cars plus additional spaces for motorbikes and bicycles. More pictures: https://www.flickr.com/photos/71148741@N05/sets/72157691350419425 Slideshow / Zooms:

Thanks for the comments guys, and for noticing how much effort was put into this :-) I like the space invaders too, Wesley. I had been wanting to use something from an old computer game for a while, so as soon as I decided this build was getting a bit of a spacey makeover the space mural and the space invaders were two of the first things that came to mind. There's also numerous Star Wars and Star Trek references in there - probably only chance I'll ever get to use some of those SW parts on a build since I don't normally build stuff like that.

This is a fictional space-themed LEGO shopping mall complex named "The Spaceship" due to the shape of main building resembling a spaceship. If that naming idea had come sooner I would probably have designed something that actually looked more like a spaceship, but the idea only came to me more than halfway through the project when I saw what shape the building was taking so I just used the idea to name and style numerous parts of the model. The model uses approx. 175000 parts and 258 custom sticker designs and measures 3810mm x 3493mm x 519mm (13.3m² footprint). It features 30 shops, 218 car parking spaces, 500 minifigs, bank, post office, library, cinema, amusements, restaurant, foodcourt, admin/security office, service access, maintenance areas, escalators, functional elevators, toilets, ice rink, gymnasium, boating pond, custom brick-built road layout, and real LEGO lighting in most of the main building and ice rink. The design attempts to be as functional as possible by providing convenient car access, separate rear public transport access, and separate rear service vehicle access to all shops on the first two levels, as well as multiple entrances and fire exits. It also attempts to be wheelchair/buggy friendly as much as possible using a mixture of stairs, escalators, ramps and a glass elevator. The main glass roof can be removed in two halves, as can the roofs of the gym, the wing shops, and the rear section, the latter of which reveals the battery packs for the LEGO lighting. There's also manual cable winders on both the customer and service elevators. I managed to get the water tank in too but had to forego the boiler room - despite the size of the build I found myself running out of space. The massive size of the model caused numerous problems, especially due to buggy software and PC limitations, so I had to reduce the intended length of the mall and forego a few other features too, but it's still by far the biggest model I've built. It probably should have taken around 6 to 9 months to complete, but due to personal and technical issues it ended up taking more than 2 years. This virtual LDraw model was built using MLCad software and rendered with LDView (sadly it's too big to render with POV-Ray), with additional construction, graphic and animation support via the use of PHP, LDraw Sticker Generator, LDraw txt2dat, LDraw LSynth, ImageMagick, Paint Shop Pro, GIF Movie Gear, IrfanView, PNGOUT, AviSynth, VirtualDub, and ffmpeg. Even had to use Excel to write macros to compute the precise angles needed for the curved window walls on the wings, which were too difficult to compute on paper. And no, I don't intend building it for real! Links: Flickr (lots more images) YouTube (looks better at 720 resolution) The video contains still images and many flyby sequences which give a better impression of the model by restoring some of the 3D visual cues lost due to the non-raytraced renders containing no shadows. Excuse the length of the video and number of images. It's a REALLY BIG model, and 25 images just wasn't going to do it... This is my first post here, and may well be my last! - during the uploads of the more than 200 images the PC terminally died and the remainder of the uploads and this post had to be done from a Raspberry Pi.