Blakbird

Up to over 2000 parts and starting to look like a truck.

I don't have the file for the GT yet, but I will do renders when I do. And then the Acura of course.

I thought it happened the other way around. I can always change the picture. And of course his later models still need to get added.

There are three things we know for certain about Lox: He builds fast He's into cars He likes red

I did not know about that. I wonder what happened? I have his Terex and also his gimbals MOC. He also did a magnificent space ship recently. A really talented builder.

Give it time. The HoF updates lag behind the posts and can sometimes take several months to catch up. Maybe some awesome renders will help you.

12 hard springs.

1725 parts now.

For the first time ever, I don't actually have the sets from this year and am not sure when or if I'll be able to afford them. I can put up the rendered pictures but it is hard to have an opinion without having actually built them.

A few renders:

Very nice interpretation! An excellent use of newer parts to achieve the same effect, and it has the same good, clean lines as a real Akiyuki module. Nope, I see some 9L black beams in there that Akiyuki also used.

Very nice! Works just like the 8226 Mud Masher but a lot more stylish.

Made some progress. 1112 parts now, but still a long way to go! I am starting to get the impression that this thing is big.

Not only is the video one of the best I've ever seen, the MOC is incredible as well. I love the brick built anti-aliasing on the number "2".

Since the AC-50 model does not connect to Mindstorms and therefore does not need to work with a NXT or EV3, you only need to connect to power. I think you could probably skip all the fancy resistors and just make a straight through adapter for this application.

Someone has recently brought this old topic to my attention again, and I've realized that I never finished writing about the animations. (Also some of the links had since broken which I've now fixed.) I did all this animation in POV-Ray which has very limited animation abilities. You need to make all frame changes a function of the variable "clock" and then increment that variable. You can't rotate around an arbitrary axis, only about the origin. So each group of moving parts needs to be put into a submodel with the rotation axis at the origin, then the equations of motion for each need to be derived and entered manually into the code. Definitely the brute force way to do this kind of work. Here is the code I came up with to do the collective animation: //helicopter crap #declare spin=0; #declare lev=((-cos(clock)+1)/2)*45; #declare lev2=lev-15; #declare levy=40*(cos(lev2*0.01745329252)-0.9659258263); #declare levz=-40*(sin(lev2*0.01745329252)+0.2588190451); #declare lev3=lev*2; #declare lift=-lev3*12*8/360; #declare bl1=57.29577951*asin(lift/40); #declare lev4=57.29577951*asin(lift/160); #declare quad1d=57.775+lift; #declare quad1e=(1600-400-pow(quad1d,2)-3600)/(-40); #declare quad1f=-quad1d/20; #declare quad1a=pow(quad1f,2)+1; #declare quad1b=2*quad1e*quad1f; #declare quad1c=pow(quad1e,2)-3600; #declare quad1y1=(-quad1b-sqrt(pow(quad1b,2)-4*quad1a*quad1c))/(2*quad1a); #declare quad1y2=quad1d-quad1y1; #declare alpha8=-(50.09205-57.29577951*acos(quad1y2/40)); #declare alpha9=57.64167-57.29577951*acos(quad1y1/60); #declare quad2d=48.048-lift; #declare quad2e=(1600-918.9386-pow(quad2d,2)-1600)/60.628; #declare quad2f=quad2d/30.314; #declare quad2a=pow(quad2f,2)+1; #declare quad2b=2*quad2e*quad2f; #declare quad2c=pow(quad2e,2)-1600; #declare quad2y1=(-quad2b+sqrt(pow(quad2b,2)-4*quad2a*quad2c))/(2*quad2a); #declare quad2y2=quad2d-quad2y1; #if (quad2d<66.0972) #declare alpha11=12.5051-57.29577951*acos(quad2y1/40); #else #declare alpha11=12.5051+57.29577951*acos(quad2y1/40); #end #declare alpha6=-(77.00163-57.29577951*acos(quad2y2/40)); #declare quad3d=60.168+lift; #declare quad3e=(3600-429.401-pow(quad3d,2)-6400)/(-41.444); #declare quad3f=-quad3d/20.722; #declare quad3a=pow(quad3f,2)+1; #declare quad3b=2*quad3e*quad3f; #declare quad3c=pow(quad3e,2)-6400; #declare quad3y1=(-quad3b-sqrt(pow(quad3b,2)-4*quad3a*quad3c))/(2*quad3a); #declare quad3y2=quad3d-quad3y1; #declare alpha7=66.72592-57.29577951*acos(quad3y1/80); #declare alpha10=-(61.57813-57.29577951*acos(quad3y2/60)); Then here are the rotations and translations I applied to each group using the above defined variables: //lever rotate <-lev,0,0> //link1 translate <0,levy,levz> //link2 rotate <-lev3,0,0> //link3 rotate <-lev3,0,0> //link4 rotate <lev3,0,0> //link5 rotate <-lev4,0,0> //link6 rotate <0,0,alpha6> //link7 rotate <alpha7,0,0> //link8 rotate <alpha8,0,0> //link9 rotate <alpha9,0,0> //link10 rotate <alpha10,0,0> //link11 rotate <0,0,alpha11> //collective translate <0,lift,0> //rotor1 translate <0,lift,0> #if (spin=1) rotate <0,-clock*57.29577951,0> #end //rotor2 translate <0,lift,0> #if (spin=1) rotate <0,clock*57.29577951,0> #end //blade1 rotate <bl1,0,0> //blade2 rotate <0,0,-bl1> //fixed1 #if (spin=1) rotate <0,-clock*57.29577951,0> #end //fixed2 #if (spin=1) rotate <0,clock*57.29577951,0> #end To see if actually worked, you need to run the animation with enough frames to see the motion and then go back and try to troubleshoot any errors. There were a lot of them. In the end I rendered from 0 to 2π radians in 40 increments to create the final animation. I never did get around to doing the cyclic animation. It was going to be several times more complicated than collective and the next shiny project came up and distracted me. These days, the whole thing could probably be done much more easily with one of the kinematic tools now available.

Started the LDraw:

Work on the LDraw file has begun.

I think the answer can be illustrated by comparing a cell phone camera to a DSLR. Why does anyone use a cell phone camera? They suck. True, but they are simple and convenient to use and it takes skill to use a DSLR and get the best results. It's the same with LDD versus LDraw. I've been using LDraw tools for far longer than LDD has even existed, and therefore I find LDD completely unusable. That's not an exaggeration, I can't do anything with it at all. It doesn't work like a CAD system, it works like a building system. Which you likeis a matter of preference, but I find CAD much more intuitive, and I can build far faster in MLCAD than LDD even though it is not relational. And I'm talking about complex, multi-thousand part Technic creations with crazy angles. Suum cuique The benefits of LDraw are that I can do whatever I want. I can put parts wherever I want whether the code thinks it works that way or not. I can open up a part and modify how it looks, add a stud, paint a portion of it silver, or cut it in half. I can synthesize flexible parts, or copy loosely linked parts along a path. I can add building steps, hidden parts, buffer exchanges, and the list goes on. But all of this took a considerable investment in time to learn.

Oh, sorry about that. I did not realize the instructions were photo sequence. Maybe I will be the one to build the LDraw file then!

To me the most iconic Mack is the DM 3/4 cab:

If you'd be willing to share the LDraw file with me, I'd love to make some renders.

The author's personal problems have no impact on the accuracy of the site.

Wow, that's some really high resolution imaging. Probably won't be a standard LEGO diagnostic tool for most people though.