Aanchir

Is it any time you try to use the decoration tool, or only on minifig parts? If it's only with minifigure parts, it could be that the graphics requirements of showing the full options palette is just too demanding. Maybe see if it gives you the same error when trying to decorate part 30261 (which has just one decoration option). On a related note, does this happen only with a particular mode? Is the Paint Bucket tool on DesignByMe mode (which works about the same as the decoration tool in other modes) able to generate decorated minifigure faces without difficulty? These would all be useful things to know. Also, it'd help to know what settings you have for your preferences. Possibly turning down or turning off some of the optional graphics like brick outlines, high-quality rendering, and advanced shading might make it work. I can't offer much more advice than that, since I'm not too knowledgeable about the technical aspects of the LDD software.

As far as gifts are concerned, a box and instructions add a great deal of value, hence why DbM puts so much emphasis on holidays in their marketing. For personal use, though, it generally depends on the MOC. One thing that bothers me is that you can't even see the options for designing a box unless you go as if to purchase the model. Since I've never purchased anything from DbM, I can't attest to the quality of the box art or variety of the options. A box design you put a lot of creative thought into will be more valuable than one where you select a cookie-cutter design to overlay a picture of your MOC on.

LEGO could indeed change their traditions with names at any time. What I find implausible, though, is that they would have a reason to change the names to corrupted English words rather than straightforward words, but would put off that change for the whole early 2012 wave, not implementing it until the wave after that. If they have a reason to change up their traditions, then they'll make that change promptly, not keep going with what they had been doing previously when there's over half a year before the next wave's release. This, of course, only applies in the preposterous circumstance that the sets for next year's summer wave would have been assigned names and numbers by this point, which based on what I've heard about LEGO's design and release cycles simply wouldn't happen.

That chick is simply adorable. I shared a link to this topic with my family, and hope they find it just as awwww-inspiring as I did.

The Haz-Mat guy's suit thing is pretty big. It should be easy to identify. I've never heard of the collectible minifigures being so thoroughly ransacked, and I hope that doesn't become a widespread problem. I know it was sometimes an issue with the collectible packs in the BIONICLE theme, which probably explains why the packaging for the collectible minifigures is so sturdy.

...In some cases. Some newer or more obscure parts like certain Hero Factory parts can actually be cheaper via Pick-A-Brick than via Bricklink. For your model, Bricklink would probably be a cheaper option.

A lot of people don't like the Jet-Copter because its wings use the big plane/space shuttle wing pieces, which many people consider an overly-large and specialized part. I personally think the Jet-Copter's pretty awesome, but for some people any piece larger than 6x8x1 is a bad part and enough for a set containing that part to be completely ignored.

It's still the same color as in Indiana Jones sets, 226 Cool Yellow (BL's Bright Light Yellow). Keep in mind that any color will have variability within it, although colors that vary especially obviously will be perceived as quality errors (and to an extent, that's exactly what they are). Also, some colors have their formulations adjusted slightly over the years, although TLG generally tries to keep the differences imperceptible or near-imperceptible unless the color is an entirely new one with an entirely different MaterialID.

Also, the reason for the price discrepancy is that one's a brick and one's a plate. The larger and heavier one obviously costs more.

LEGO has re-assigned old set numbers to newer sets, but not recently and not often. And furthermore, the list has so many things against it being real in the first place, like the aforementioned fact that it lists both winter and summer 2012 sets. I don't even know if LEGO would have decided on the set names and numbers for summer 2012 this early on. Some of the names sound really plausible, but others sound especially fake. For instance, the fact that every ice villain name listed is spelled unusually doesn't at all match up with any traditions established by Hero Factory. So far, the only names to be slightly-corrupted English words have been XPlode, Fangz, and (arguably) Waspix and Scorpio. The names listed for the ice villains sound gross (although I'm sure a lot of people feel the same about many HF or BIONICLE names) and have no logical reason they'd need to be spelled like they are (since most are non-copyrightable).

Oh, okay. Sorry I misinterpreted what you said-- it sounded to me like you were saying digital MOCs in general weren't deserving of topics. Just to be on the safe side, am I correct this time in interpreting your comment if I suggest that you seem to think a digital MOC isn't worth posting if it's this simple, since digital MOCs allow for so much more complexity? If I'm understanding your comment correct, then even so there's no problem limiting yourself to common or already-existing pieces. I personally use LDD to compensate for being at college-- I only have sets from a few themes up here at college, for instance, so if I want to create a LEGO City MOC I might use common parts that exist and which I may even have, but which I don't have on hand. This has the added benefit that you can potentially go back and build the MOC in real life to see if it works as well as it seems to digitally. That doesn't at all make this MOC a masterpiece, but we can't just turn down topics just because MOCs aren't outstanding. On the contrary, helpful feedback could allow the builder to improve their MOCs and make them more substantial in future topics.

Hold on. So if you build a model on a LEGO CAD program and in real life, the one you built in real life will be creative while the one on the LEGO CAD program won't be? Seems a bit fishy. Many of the models here could be built as real-life vignettes, even if they had to use customized parts to do so. How does that make them more creative than this MOC is digitally, when the bricks behave almost exactly the same way whether in LDD or in real life? Anyway, this MOC is OK, but there are a couple things that bother me about it. First of all, the backgrounds are generally very simplistic. Part of the idea of a vignette is to see how many details you can cram into a single scene. So, for instance, mosaic floor tiles might have made the temple scene more dynamic, a rock face with fewer large flat areas could have made the tomb more appealing, and some more advanced building techniques could have made the buildings in the "entering Jerusalem" and Last Supper scenes more exciting to look at. Additionally, I would have liked it if more of the stuff was done using better part choices. For instance, the Crown of Thorns on Jesus's head when he's on the cross is just edited on, when in a previous scene you quite brilliantly use the barbed wire piece for the same purpose. Although it would be difficult to get the crown of thorns situated on Jesus's head when he's on the cross, it could surely be done. I also feel the palm leaves people are waving as Jesus enters Jerusalem could afford to be larger and more straight in shape. This piece could maybe have worked with some type of handle built onto the back so people could hold it. Overall, the final vignettes end up looking rather hurried, but the scenes are expressed well enough that it's clear what's going on, so they do their job. Keep up the good work!

Lovely entry, but I feel like it needs some bad guys! The boat is well-designed, but there's nothing specific in the set for the heroes to be doing. Even boats in the City theme tend to have some form of action-- if they're a fire boat, they can have water cannons for fighting fires, if they're a police boat there can be a criminal to pursue, and if it's a fishing boat there can be a fishing pole with fish or a shark. In an action theme, it's especially important that there be some sort of action going on, but here most everyone is either relaxing or operating the boat, and the only possible adversary is that crocodile. I love all the details including the smokestack and the texture of the deck. But the overall emotions evoked by this set don't feel a lot like Pharaoh's Quest.

I can hardly see how electricity has a color. In many photographs you see of lightning, it looks red or purple. If anything, white would be a realistic electricity color. People made this same sort of argument when we had yellow and orange Toa of Stone, and it didn't hold much water then, either. It should also be noted that there's no reason transparent yellow or transparent fluorescent green couldn't show up in a future version of Mark Surge. After all, Stormer 2.0 has transparent bright orange, of all things. And weapon colors don't necessarily have to match any color in a set's color scheme-- three of the 2.0 Heroes have transparent blue 4M beams, and Surge is the only one of the three to actually have any type of blue in his color scheme. Anyway, something I thought of that would be cool would be an ice-themed villain who uses the new flame piece from the second-wave villains in transparent light blue and white (or some similar combination). You could throw some of Strakk's armor pieces on there for good measure-- after all, it's a piece without any obvious BIONICLE stylistic elements. No idea what sort of setting or situation this would work best for, or what sort of theme the heroes of such a wave would follow-- maybe something similar to Ice Planet, with chainsaws, heat ducts, and a lot of glowy orange goodness.

I love the use of the Series 2 Ringmasters' whips to create that thin, vinelike look for those strange flowers. I think other parts of the temple could have benefited from trying to evoke a similar branching look. For instance, this piece could have potentially been a powerful choice. Still, the solid white look you went for is still effective and kind of mirrors the silver stag emblem on the Series 3 Elf's shield. One thing that bothers me is that the temple is taller than the trees. With a temple this fancy, you'd expect it to be a little bit more secretive. Thus, increasing the height of the trees could potentially improve the overall look of this MOC. Great work on the lush undergrowth, too! It really makes the whole forest floor a lot more exciting!

That would be an amazing theme. Although I don't know if a kraken-based design would work for Surge. Blue is no longer water!

On a related note, my LDD Decorations file (you may have to scroll down a bit) contains every decorated shell from the second wave besides Jetbug's. This includes three that do not appear in DesignByMe mode: Fire Lord's, Nex's, and Stormer's.

Did someone say colours? There's a huge number of LEGO colors, which are incredibly hard to keep track of. For building a collection, I'd recommend sticking to the current colors, of which there are about 60. This way your bricks won't be incompatible with those you're likely to find in stores. LEGO's color palette expanded gradually but without much restraint until they realized the problem they had around 2004. Since then, they've cut down significantly on their color palette, even though it's still pretty broad with a lot of colors that people rarely have in great quantity. Most of the colors you listed as remembering from your childhood have remained pretty much the same over the years. There are a couple other colors that have been replaced entirely, though, most significantly 25 Earth Orange (the original brown color) with the 192 Reddish Brown, 2 Grey (the original light grey) with 194 Medium Stone Grey (Light Bluish Grey, and 27 Dark Grey (the original dark grey) with 199 Dark Stone Grey (Dark Bluish Grey). These three colors changed in 2004 when LEGO first began to restructure their color system into something more manageable, and have been standard ever since. Other colors were also changed at the same time, but these tended to be more obscure colors that few people had in great quantity. As for basic bricks, I'd recommend buying sets from the "Bricks & More" line, such as this year's 5749 Creative Building Kit or, if you can find it, last year's 5508 Deluxe Brick Box which contains many very useful pieces as well as two minifigures. Since Bricks & More sets tend to have mostly basic bricks, they have some of the lowest price-per-piece ratios of any LEGO sets out today. The Deluxe Brick Box in particular has mostly basic colors, but it includes some more-recent and less-frequent colors like 102 Bright Orange (Orange, introduced in 1998) and 119 Bright Yellowish Green (Lime, also introduced in the late 90s/early 2000s). And it has a good mix between basic bricks and semi-specialized pieces like doors and windows.

It's not Trans-Neon Green, it's Trans-Bright Green (311 Transparent Bright Green, the new transparent color that made its debut in the Atlantis theme). Not sure if you own any Atlantis sets, but it's an amazing-looking color and IMO the color scheme is wonderfully dynamic. It should be noted also that it's not a windscreen color that was just made up for this fictional universe, either... see the image here as evidence that real-life submersibles use this color. Anyway, I love this entry! Despite being such a humorous concept, it's carried out amazingly well and looks like a genuinely D2C-quality design. I can't help but notice all the tiny details you worked in, such as a pattern on the sidewalk incorporating treasure key colors along with the transparent blue of the Portal. The treasure keys work great as tables in a glitzy restaurant, and I love the interior decorations! One thing I'd criticize is that the interior of the third floor feels a bit empty. Granted, floor space is a good thing, but it needs to be balanced out by additional details, which this lacks. Perhaps replacing the white tiles on the floor with a larger, more ornate mosaic carpet, or at least something to break up the rather boring floor texture. Also, the bottom floor is beautiful, but I feel it needs one of those little podiums with a "Please Wait to be Seated" sign. Another detail that would have been nice but not essential would have been a bar. A glitzy restaurant demands equally-glitzy drinks! But this detail might have required more floor space than you have to spare on the first and second floors. Overall, this is an incredible MOC with a lot of creativity behind it! Amazing work, and good luck in the contest (I won't feel the least bit ashamed if I lose to this entry)!

I've been goofing around with decorations lately, trying to find what parts have decoration surfaces that could have decorations in real life, but which don't have the correct decorations available in LDD. By putting the incorrect decorations into an LXFML, you get some unusual results! I used the latest version of LDD Manager to help pinpoint these parts. However, I noticed that when I search in the Brick Finder for the attribute "Have DecorationFaces", certain parts that can be decorated do not come up in the list. Specific ones I noticed include bricks 90638, 90639, and 90640, but the fact that these ones are not listed in LDD Manager in this category means that there may be others that do not have this attribute listed. It should be noted that of these three bricks, two of them were available in LDD version 4.0, although I do not know whether they had decoration surfaces at that time. The horse (75998) also is not listed as having decoration surfaces, although it has two-- one on either side of its face. I think that it would be really reassuring if you could double-check for other brick attribute oversights, including decoration faces as well as connectivity attributes.

Hard to make a flame much smaller than the "plume" one that's out currently. What size candle are you thinking of? A 1x1 round brick, or something even smaller? As it is, I think the only thing that might be smaller is this piece from the LEGO Ben 10: Alien Force sets, which admittedly would be cool in a transparent color. It's thinner than the "plume", but also longer, so it would probably look rather awkward on a candle sized to be held by a minifigure. Other sets just use 1x1 round plates on top of white 1x1 round bricks to imitate a candle flame's ambient glow. In my opinion, this works rather efficiently, as would this piece in Transparent Bright Orange or Transparent Yellow. You have to keep in mind that there's a certain size threshold beneath which LEGO probably wouldn't make any piece. And I wouldn't want an incredibly tiny flame piece because it'd always be getting lost or getting stuck inside other pieces. A pencil/pen mold would be a nice thing to have, though. Again, the size problem comes up, but it could potentially be dealt with.

...And it should. 3.2mm pins don't follow the same rules as studs in terms of which connections are legal and which are not-- they don't have to be fully attached to be considered legal. At least, as far as I know. I wonder if Front could share any insight into that matter?

I had the Nintendo 64 version, not the PC version. I enjoyed it a great deal, but haven't played it in a long, long time.

Those parts have been in sets since last year. They're basically an updated version of this part, which they replaced. The official name for them is "Butt". (really, check PaB!) I'm kind of surprised that the yellow barbarian microfig isn't in fact the female barbarian which we've seen in the upcoming LEGO Champion game. If that's the case in the final sets, then both of the female microfigs in that set are unique to it! Of course, I'm sure a lot of AFOLs will want that set anyway. It includes an abundance of microfigs, including an unprinted one in Warm Gold (BL's Pearl Gold), and 2x4 bricks in various colors like Light Purple (BL's Bright Pink) and Medium Lilac (BL's Dark Purple). It also seems, like Creationary, to be a game that could appeal to the whole family, with gameplay focused on creative challenges rather than just strategy and good rolls of the die.

I basically ignored a lot of the last year of Alpha Team. In retrospect, I never got many Alpha Team sets at all-- I was too concerned with BIONICLE in those days-- but I loved the first year of Alpha Team and it bothered me to see so few ideas from the first year carry over into future years. In particular, I disliked the third iteration because the Alpha Team logo and color scheme were changed drastically, and because new never-before-seen agents were introduced, making Alpha Team seem less like a crack team of specialists and more like a sprawling secret agent network. In retrospect, the third iteration of Alpha Team had some beautiful minifigures-- much better than in Mission Deep Sea, when LEGO had the bright idea of using colored eyes on minifigures. This ended up causing many minifigure eyes to show up poorly, like Dash's bizarre light gray eyes. I like the colorful Alpha Team agents in this iteration, and it should be noted that (as my twin brother noticed when building sets on LDD) each Alpha Team Vehicle had a 1x2 grille plate on it in the color of the arm from one of the agents in the set. It's a subtle touch but a nice one. If only one of the sets had had that grille plate in Medium Lilac (BL's Dark Purple), the color of Radia's right arm! The "red lens" gimmick actually dates back to the Exploriens theme in 1997, which featured both red and blue lenses. The sets came with black 2x2 tiles decorated with odd red, blue, and white stickers (before you complain about stickers, let me point out that these ones had to be stickers because they were also magnetic). Looking at a certain one under the two different filters would show you either an alien egg with an alien fetus inside, or a somewhat cartoony alien fetus. Exploriens had some weird sets and a lot of <insert that tiresome argument> pieces, but overall it had some really amazing gimmicks. In particular, I wish 3-D holograms like on this piece were still done today.