Mylenium

Not really to blame on LEGO, but the complicated retail market here in Germany. Too many products competing for shelf space in relatively small stores. That and several retail chains have gone down the drain in recent years, either going bankrupt or massively reducing the number of their physical stores. This of course would affect physical availability of product. Other than that LEGO are just suffering from the same old issues that also affects product availability: Convoluted internal logistics, weird release dates, not enough production capacity, lousy web shop, questionable "exclusive" releases in their own stores and with select retail partners and so on. You could find any number of additional reasons, but suffice it to say that indeed buying some LEGO sets at times feels like more work than it possibly should have to be... Mylenium

Indeed that's the point. Nobody needs another lighting set with hair-thin wiring that tangles up and can't be controlled. That and of course we really need "good" lighting with controls for brightness and color (temperature) as opposed to those overly bright, cheap kits you can buy currently. Mylenium

This perhaps? https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=35044#T=C Mylenium

Well, in most 3D programs you would simply enable global illumination and tweak the materials accordingly, but I honestly have no clue on how to modify Eyesight/ Cycles material presets. It should be possible, though, given that it's all XML and you can export node setups from Blender... Mylenium

Yes, you would have to create an emissive material, but that in itself would not really "glow". Just not how optics work. "Glows" are either based on haze/ fog surrounding an object or lens artifacts. So even if you had the material, some post processing would have to happen. As for your PS issue, simply work smarter: Create an RGB matte or custom pass based on your model, meaning either assign a distinct color to your glowing parts that you don't use otherwise and can easily extract using color range selections or channel operations or create a duplicate of your model in glorious black & white (or for that matter other contrasting colors) from which selections and mattes can be gathered. You know, compositing how we used to do it 25 years ago... Mylenium

Again a bit too much on the steep price side to be worthwhile, especially since outside the horses it doesn't offer anything special. Mylenium

I like how it looks, but the price is insane, especially when you consider that it's mostly built from panels and those dang elongated bricks instead of conventional pieces. Just doesn't feel right in terms of what value you get for your money. Mylenium

Outside generic info that is too obvious to escape public attention like what @deraven linked to I doubt you will ever find exact info on what LEGO actually use. At the very least you will have to do some deep, deep digging on the B2B web sites of BASF, DuPont etc. to find out what their standard products are and what additives are recommended. At the end of the day it's likely that LEGO are using the same stuff that everyone uses and don't have a specific custom ABS mix or anything like that. Mylenium

I don't think you can do this easily in Studi.io. Interestingly you could do it in LPub 3D by manipulating the camera and scene scale properties in the script. Anyway, as a long-time 3D artist here's a trick for you: Place some other objects around the model at known distances. We used to sometimes place invisible cubes around stuff to get "fit to viewport" functions to cooperate (back in the olden days, when redrawing a screen took several seconds and you couldn't swoosh around in OpenGL). In your case you could likely place some 1x1 tiles or round studs at fixed positions in each of your models to force the automatic camera calculations to produce an equal zoom and FOV. With your large models the should appear merely as easily removable pixel dots or disappear entirely upon rendering. Mylenium

Pretty much depends on the scale of the scene, what the animals are and how big they are. I for instance can't quite understand why LEGO isn't using this little guy more and producing it in all colors. Same for the "rare" seagulls and some others. Larger animals are okay to be built from bricks and can look quite nice, though when looking at the Fluffy triple-headed dog from one of the new Harry Potter sets I'm not too sure about that. So I guess it's still a matter of how well they have been designed. Mylenium

It looks lovely! :-) Mylenium

But not at that quality level.... That's what? A bunch of stock rigs? Quick low quality render settings? Paying the voice-over artists probably consumes more of the budget than the actual visuals. Most LEGO animated series look pretty kack and I doubt that any single episode cost more than 100000 bucks and garbage like Friends is probably even cheaper - a lot. I mean some episodes of Paw Patrol look better and not to speak of slightly more advanced stuff like Miraculous or Star Wars... Mylenium

That's a very relative term, though. Even Ninjago is technically just cheap filler programming for TV and I'm not sure whether it actually contributes that much to boost sales. At least here in Germany it's running at obscure times on third-rate channels, so the chance to even get to see it is limited unless you really proactively comb through the TV guide and take the time out of your day to sit down. Mylenium

Back then a "good" series cost much more to produce than LEGO had to spare and the media industry was quite different then. It's as simple as that. Unless you had the goodwill of some exec from one of the big studios/ media companies it was simply not feasible. Producing such stuff is easy, but paying for distribution and syndication a whole different exercise. And well, let's be honest: A lot of LEGO's IP back then was quite odd with little merchandise potential. In an oversaturated market dominated my Transformers, He-Man, Turtles and the like it was inevitable that Galidor would come across as just another copycat/ rip-off and LEGO was in good company with many failed series of that era. One could go endlessly about this and belabor that point, but suffice it to say that until the early 2000s it may just not have been the right market and the right time for any of that to go anywhere.... Mylenium

I see. I've not yet used those parts, so I can't advise on that. however, it seems to me that you could do it with some Technic parts easily, just not as elegantly. Mylenium

We can agree on that at least. If LEGO's survival depended on their software ventures, be that apps, video games or even their web store they'd have shot themselves out of business a long time ago. I'm always baffled how a company with all the money in the world seems unable to hire some decent programmers or outsource their stuff to IT companies who actually know what they are doing. Instead it feels they pay such poor salaries that they can't attract any real talent in that department. Mylenium Funny how some people always seem to wax nostalgic about the good old times and the terrible situation LEGO was in in the early 2000s has been forgotten as have their many other crises before. I'll be the first to poke fun at some really moronic stuff LEGO do and how they seem to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, burning a lot of money in the process, but at the same time one has to acknowledge that as a business they are a stable corporation and that despite all the issues lately with quality of the bricks, poor availability and so on they still manage to dominate the toy market. However, the one thing that concerns me is that LEGO are at some sort of juncture and may turn into "just another con-glo-mo" as younger generations run the show and may place more value on revenue than core values. Especially in recent years there's that weird feeling that they monetize the hell out of their products, are extremely stingy about their IP and the old story of a family-friendly, family-owned business kind of clashes with reality on many other levels, too. Mylenium

The only valid connections are anything connecting to the bar (droid arms for instance). Everything else is a hack and what qualifies as an "illegal" technique quite likely. Perhaps it might be more useful to explain what you are actually trying to achieve, so alternate techniques using different pieces can be discussed. Mylenium

Oil reserves have grown significantly in recent years due to a) less overall consumption and b) massive exploration efforts. Yes, of course it makes sense on every level to switch to alternatives, but apparently natural oil is not as rare as everyone thought ten or twenty years ago... Mylenium

You have to think within the system and how those plates/ brackets and bricks with studs are designed to go together in specific orders, with additional plates inbetween if needed. What you have there is at the very least "off-label-use" and likely even an "illegal" technique. LEGO designers would never officially use it, I'm sure, as opposing plates are typically butted against each other and held in place by other elements built on top of them/ around them, without the plates actually being connected. Mylenium

Yes, it's logical. The stud is not on an even fraction of the raster. Putting them together like you do would cause an offset in the opposite direction, moving it completely off grid and preventing this kind of construct. The metrics of brackets are explained somewhere, but I can't seem to find the link right now. Mylenium

They never promised to completely replace everything and technically it won't be possible for some materials to rely on fossil sources. You know, formation of the molecule, length of individual molecule strands and all that. And using "natural" materials doesn't mean that they are necessarily more environmentally friendly. Nothing is gained if producing those materials consumes tons of energy and water or they decompose just as slowly as traditional plastic materials. That's the same thing as with electric cars for instance - you have to see the big picture and the overall footprint. Mylenium

Such stuff is typically handled by companies/ agencies specializing in product testing, not necessarily the companies themselves. They provide a pool of candidates that fit a profile and the company then picks whichever ones they deem suitable. No idea with whom LEGO are working, though. Very little and very few I would argue, given how obviously some products flopped despite allegedly having been tested. Of course they're always going to test completely new product lines, but it is my impression that they are not having a very broad basis. Also somehow a lot of the marketing feels very skewed toward specific groups, further making me think that they are missing a lot of beats by limiting the test groups too much. Hard to tell. You would have to know how early they are testing and whether there is time for an iterative approach, how many new ideas they develop in parallel and so on. I'm sure they have their graveyard of never released stuff, but at the same time I don't believe in massive piles of scrapped ideas. Their creative output is high enough to quickly fill gaps if something gets cancelled, it would seem. Mylenium

Simply use a 4070 brick laid on its back plugged to an upright same brick and set it one stud further in. Add another 1 x 1 plate on top as the spacer for the tile. A perfectly valid building technique. Mylenium

Fair enough, but I still disagree. The "advent of 3D printing" has been declared too many times, first way back in the 1990s when a laser-cured resin prototype piece cost 20000 bucks and took more than 24 hours to produce. This has bin flip-flopping back and forth way too much to have any credibility left in my world. Even in the last "big" wave 3D printing companies were dying left and right and the much touted proliferation in industrial circles just is happening at snail's pace in very select scenarios only, most of which are actually metal and ceramics related, not plastic/ resin. Don't get me wrong - 3D printing as such is a technology that's here to stay for many other uses, but I just don't see anyone even produce a full set of bricks for a small model when you can squeeze out millions of bricks with conventional injection molding for a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time. Mylenium

Since they're technically not "Modular Buildings", it's pretty much a moot point. The current toy shop is pretty good and though I never had it, I think the bike shop from five years ago would also be one of my favorites. Mylenium