NathanR

Nice mix of sets! My money is on the Clockwork Aquarium, the Legend of the Binoicle, and the Winter Chalet all passing the review. Though my personal favourite would be the Planet Express ship (assuming it came with Minifigures of at least Fry, Bender, and Leela).

I would suggest to add a few 3x3 plates with rounded corner (part number 30357) at various points in the column. This part matches the curve of the 2x2 round corner bricks, but allows connections to the side walls. Or, if there is enough space, you could use part 18980 1/2 circle plate 2x6.

Wait... so does this mean Freemaker adventures is considered cannon? Because that would be awesome, Return of the Return of the Jedi was brilliantly interwoven with the events of the movie.

I have experience with Blender, but not so much with animation and certainly not with something as complex as animating technic models. For getting started with Blender, I'd recommend you visit the Mecabricks website. They offer a free Blender plugin (and a paid-for advanced plugin with extra features like scratches on the bricks, and slight colour variations), simply export your model from the Mecabricks website as a .zmbx file and import into Blender. Each brick is imported as a separate object, but you can group multiple objects together to work with a group (like two wheels on a shared axle). Animation in Blender works using keyframes - you define key positions at certain times in the animation, and the computer fills in the rest of the frames in between. Just about everything can be assigned a keyframe value - position, rotation, scale, etc. So for a rotating wheel, you define one keyframe at time 0. Rotate the wheel 360 degrees and define another keyframe at frame (say) 24. Then the wheel will make one revolution a second. You can adjust the interpolation mode to define how fast an object moves from one keyframe to the next, e.g. does it start moving immediately, or does it slowly increase in speed. You can learn a lot about the animation process from the blender documentation here: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/animation/keyframes/index.html The only downside of the Mecabricks Blender plugin is that it is geared around creating photo-realistic images. Don't get me wrong, it looks fantastic, but the materials are so complex that rendering takes a long time per frame. Even with reduced quality and the new AI de-noise features, my own attempts at animation take about a minute per frame, or 25 minutes per second of animation. So you'll need either a powerful computer, or you might want to look at creating simpler, more "cartoon-ish" materials for each brick colour. Using simpler materials would also allow you to use the EEVEE renderer, which trades some quality for super-fast render times (not quite realtime, but not far from it).

I agree. But since Lego have not updated LDD properly fo some 7 years, and they have just acquired Stud.io and bricklink, I suspect Stud.io will be viewed as the replacement of LDD. However, Stud.io (now Lego property?) is based on the fan-maintained (and currently independent) LDraw parts library. So I wonder what that means for the future of LDraw, will this also be taken over by Lego? There would need to be significant reworking of the software to use an alternative library of bricks, and huge compatibility problems if the .io format moved away from what is essentially the LDraw format.

Already supported Fantastic model, and nice to see that it includes an interior. Also, great work on the figure designs.

This could be brilliant, or terrible, but I don't think there is going to be any halfway point. I sincerely hope Lego don't interfere with the prices, as a lot of the smaller parts (like 1x1 round plates, technic pints, etc) are way cheaper on bricklink than buying direct through Lego Pick A Brick (or Lego's "Bricks and Pieces" customer service, which an awful lot of people don't seem to know about). A warning that a part can be bought more cheaply direct from Lego would be a nice addition, but that's about the only change I'd like to see. Lego are also not keen on third-party bricks being sold on bricklink, but where will the limits be? What about the sale of Lego bricks with custom prints? Or 3D printed parts? Or chrome platings? Or custom stickers? Or custom reproductions of official Lego stickers? I am also curious about Stud.io and the future of digital Lego building. LDD has not been properly supported since 2012, so will Stud.io become the official replacement? Will development of Stud.io continue under the ownership of Lego? And as Stud.io uses the LDraw parts library, what does this mean for the LDraw community?

@RoxYourBlox That's very interesting... So they have at least changed their stance and are open to the possibility of updating LDD. However, with Lego having just bought Bricklink, I'm not sure what that means for Stud.io. Will Stud.io become the official replacement of LDD?

I just got an error message "403 Sorry, Eve and the Turtle won’t let you view this page." With pictures of Eve and the little robot mech from the old Ideas ExoSuit.

@RoxYourBlox You may have some luck with the bricklink team, they are receptive to fan requests. But you're wasting your time with Lego, they haven't done a software update since 2012 and they haven't done a brick library update for over two years - LDD is basically dead as a dodo now.

I believe that the ABS for solid colour bricks and the polycarbonate used in transparent parts shrink by different amounts when cooling after being ejected from the moulds. So the windscreen could easily appear in new transparent colours, but to make it a solid colour they would have to make a new mould (This is why solid and transparent colour parts have different design ID numbers) This Batmobile looks fantastic, though I think the smaller GWP version might be all I have space to display.

Not if the software is well written. No offence to the developer(s) of LPub3D, but it is a poor design to have a temp file written to the HD for each submodel. With my Apollo 11 launchpad model (2k pieces per instruction manual), I found that even moving a part callout would trigger the rewrite of dozens of temp files to hard drive, when in reality only one command in one file would actually have changed. Even with an SSD, this locked the program for several seconds for me. All of these temp files should be maintained in RAM, and better organised into data structures so that you don't have to continually parse and re-parse the LDraw commands. This would also mean that steps at the end of the model can be processed in constant time, as opposed to the current method of scanning the entire file up to the current step.

@Toastie To be honest, Apple tech isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's not better than Windows, just different - different strengths, different weaknesses. It's also rather niche (despite the apparently insane popularity) with way more software available for Windows than for Mac. I absolutely cannot update my OS just yet, as I'm 3k bricks into what will probably be an 8-9k model in LDD. If I update to Catalina, I have to switch to a new editor, but there aren't too many options around. Mecabricks is stunning, but I dislike the "always online" aspect and the fact I don't get any files to keep locally - if (God forbid!) the website ever disappears, all my models would go too. Bricksmith is a nice, straightforward editor but it becomes hell to work with the moment you start building off-grid - with hinge bricks or ball-and-socket joints, you're breaking out the spreadsheets and doing trigonometry calculations to try and figure out how to place new bricks. I think that only leaves Stud.io, which is a pretty neat editor but feels awkward for me to use. Last time I tried it, it had higher cpu usage than LDD, ran at 10% CPU even when minimised and with no .io files open or any bricks in the current scene, and ran with about 50-60 threads (most MacOS Apps I have run on 10 threads max). II have had one MacBook battery severely damaged by running the computer under very high CPU loads for 30-60 minutes, so I have ended up a bit paranoid about only using very lightweight apps that don't overtax the cpu. Another consideration is for when making instruction manuals. I used to use LPub, but this is only 32 bits and will also disappear. The replacement LPub3D is pretty similar and under active development, but it is not nearly so responsive as the original LPub when handling large models (2-3k pieces, about a hundred subassemblies). So an update to my OS loses me my ability to make instruction manuals. So to keep going, I either migrate back to Windows (not really practical in view of considerations from my day job) or code an editor. The only real challenge there is figuring out the low-level 3D vertex data manipulation needed to import an LDraw brick. Constructing smooth surface normals, edge lines, removing duplicate vertices... all this stuff is usually encoded as part of the 3D object file, but it has to be auto-generated by any software parsing LDraw files and it's really not trivial. If it's not broken... there's no need to install an update!

Try making your own editor? I am not updating to MacOS Catalina until I have finished one last project in LDD. After that, I plan to spend next year teaching myself Swift, coding an editor, and using Mecabricks for Lego design in the meantime.

I'm curious, what gave it away? Indeed, I am making the TB1 launch bay, though it may be a very long time before you see the finished model - I discovered tonight that I've built the entire launch bay at the wrong size, and it needs scaling up by 10%. Of course, this means completely redesigning everything. Not something you want to find out after assembling 3000 pieces...

@Lyichir That's brilliant, I never would have thought of putting the snot bricks on the back of the slopes! It took me a while to figure out how to integrate it into my surrounding walls, so on the first level I've used a mix of 87087 and 32952. Should be pretty solid. Many thanks!

It does look and sound like it would be stunning. Unfortunately, there's no MacOS version available so I can't use it.

@M'Kyuun I must confess I have been put off most CAD editors due to the lack of part snapping, automatic rotation of groups of bricks, or doing anything with 3D rotation (it's always a nightmare once bricks go "off-grid"). I've had loads of ideas for building my own editor, but I keep getting put off by the complexity and low-level manipulation required for loading bricks from the LDraw library. Might I suggest you give the Mecabricks website a try? It's got the best and most user-friendly interface I've come across.

You might want to check out this topic One set has already been revealed. Interesting to hear about an orange McLaren, but are you sure it's not the (already available) 75880 McLaren 720s?

I need help with a small section of a MOC. I've created a rock wall out of a bunch of 2449 1x3x2 inverted slope bricks - I stack four of the bricks on top of each other, there are 18 columns of bricks, and each column is raised two plates higher than the last one. However, each slope brick is only attached by one stud, which is a very weak connection, and ultimately they will need to help support a large rectangular roof that will sit over the entire chamber. Any idea how I can connect all of the slope bricks together to form a strong, solid wall?

Looking in the background of the designer video, I spotted two versions of a brachiosaurus and a diplodocus (apatosaurus/brontosaurus?) on his shelves. Might have to try and reverse engineer them.

Personally I love stickers, I find applying them to be really therapeutic. It forces me to calm down and work slowly so that I do a good job. Though I must admit, the larger stickers get irritating (Star Wars UCS plaques, anyone? Those really are the stuff of nightmares and impossible to get right )

Depending on what parts you are trying to align, the hinge align tool can be quite useful. Also, you can manually type in angles of rotation (though if you use ball-and-socket joint, then the xyz rotations can jump around quite a bit) and use more decimal places than are shown by the program. Keep in mind that Lego has quite a bit of flexibility, especially with larger models, so possibly not everything lines up exactly on the real model - for example, when I tried to build 10030 UCS Star Destroyer in LDD, I found that the outer walls of the triangle frame actually bent inwards on the real model and couldn't line up correctly in LDD.

Wow, that is sheer genius!

The press release stated that the dinosaurs were 1:32 scale models. The T-rex was up to 40ft long (12.4m), so at this scale it should be 38.75cm, press release states the model is 40cm long. Close enough for me. I think the minifigures are only really there for playability, but they are roughly the right size (true minifig scale seems to range from 1:24 to 1:44?) I absolutely adore this set, it's got some interesting looking techniques used. I would have preferred if a few more dinosaurs could have been included, like the brachiosaurus, but I'll take what I can get. For sure this will be a day one purchase for me.