rich_jacko

My latest Lego project: Grimlock, by far the greatest Transformers character, in Lego form!

This monster uses 1,244 Lego pieces. He measures 36cm tall in robot form and 53cm from nose to tail in dinosaur form. I tried to keep his transformation close to the toy; there are some modifications but I was pleased to make him able to transform without needing to remove and replace any Lego pieces in the process.

The model has 58 points of articulation all told, most of which enable him to transform, but some also allow him to pose (moving the leg, arm and finger joints in both forms, as well as allowing both heads to turn and the T-Rex jaws to flex).

I'm rather pleased with the way he turned out. This was a very different building challenge to most of my own builds of recent years, which were mainly about constructing my Lego cityscape. This was much more of a technical challenge (especially the centre of the body, and working out how it was all going to fold), involving functionality, more organic shapes and working at a different scale to normal.</td>

Here he is again, alongside his original toy counterpart, for comparison:

Well, here it is. It started over five years ago with these purchases and my first home-made modular build, has seen me through several individual building projects, the most recent of which was my museum and toy shop. Now I've finally finished putting together my modular Lego city. Or at least, I've filled all the available table space anyway! There are around 60,000 Lego pieces (maybe a few hundred over) in the display below:



( Details of final builds under cut )

The new Lego space station is pretty cool, but it's another set which can benefit from buying it twice to expand it. I also took the opportunity to fix a few things that bugged me about the original, such as the ridiculously small solar panels and the lack of an airlock for the entry hatch. :o)

Inspired by the new Ultrakatty set, I give you a glorious, can't-believe-no-one's-thought-of-it-before, Lego Movie / My Neighbour Totoro crossover :o)

(Okay, so a Catbus should really have 12 legs and the proportions aren't quite right, but I'm working with the bricks I've got, and you get the idea!)

Total pieces (excluding minifigs): approx. 780
Total build time: approx. 4 hours

The Ninjago City / Temple of Airjitsu complex is massively impressive, but it's just too damn big to fit in with my ever-growing modular city. Plus, you know I can rarely resist messing around with official sets. So I decided to keep the bits that fitted best, and rebuild them into a smaller (but still 2,642-piece set, with another 100 pieces for the mini-figures) modular Japanese restaurant, on a suitable scale. Here's the result:

The new building is two storeys. I've kept the frontage of the seafood restaurant from the city set (including the crab above the door!), flattening it out so it no longer wraps around a corner. Above, I've used mainly pieces from the temple to create a matching upper floor, and transferred an interesting feature window from the city set to differentiate the upper floor above the alley, with the alley itself being completely new.

At the back, I've created a courtyard with the temple fountain, and added flowers, paving and other features. It makes a nice little space as a miniature Japanese quarter to the town. The comic store and fashion shop from the city set round off one side of the courtyard.

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The ground floor of the restaurant is mostly taken up by the amazing rotating sushi bar from the city set (with a few added dishes). The comic store is unchanged. Besides that, the rest of the ground floor layout was mainly determined by access - As well as the alley entrance, I needed to include doors to the various premises off the courtyard, and staircases to the upper floor of the restaurant as well as the fashion shop.

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Upstairs, the restaurant includes a kitchen area with the rotary crab cooker (which was a pain to transfer into this build!) and the toilet from the city set, as well as a new raised area with more seating. The fashion shop needed careful planning as to what to keep. It's a fair bit smaller than the shop in the city set, and I had to work the staircase access into the design. I'm happy with the result though, as it keeps most of the elements I liked about the original.

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The roofs were a pretty straightforward build. The main roof is mainly just a repackaging of elements from the city roof, especially at the front. The fashion shop roof was dead easy at less than 100 pieces. But they both do the job.

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Here's the completed restaurant in the modular street. I think it fits in okay:

Some of you may remember that I once built a Lego pub, then a while later I made a bigger version as a modular build. You may also remember that I built a Lego church... Yeah, I think we can all see where this is heading:



Let me take you through the building of this humongous creation, starting at the bottom and working our way up:

First, the floor. I've been wanting to try a diagonal floor in a modular build for a while now, and this seemed like a good project for it. It turned out to be immensely complicated - what you see below is 562 pieces on its own. Just for the floor.



Pythagoras tells me that a 12x12 square is 16.97 on the diagonal. That's close enough to 17 to be well within Lego tolerances. Once I *ahem* realised those measurements needed to be from centre-of-stud to centre-of-stud, and I needed to build a 13x13 square with a diagonal of 18, it worked perfectly and I was able to fix the floor in place at 45 degrees.

Here we are at 1,000 pieces:



You can see how I began to cover up the rough edges of the floor. The furnishings go in now. Some of them, such as the organ, pulpit and knight's tomb, are ported over pretty much unchanged from my previous church model. Others, such as the pews (Pew! Pew!), font and altar are, um, altered and improved. A few, such as the screens for the chapel on the left-hand side, are entirely new. That staircase at the front right corner will eventually lead up to the footbridge over the road.

I should probably say at this stage that these photos don't accurately represent my building process. Much as I might like to claim I had the whole project worked out in advance, then built it from the ground up, the reality was a lot more messy. There was a lot of trial and error, designing and re-designing, creating one section then going back to modify a different section to make them fit together. These photos were taken during the final re-build, when I was doing the piece count and making last checks to see where I could improve structural integrity.

Anyway, here we are at 2,000 pieces:



...and finally, with the lower stage completed, at 3,060 pieces:



The front wall had to be double thickness to accommodate the niches with the statues, and to embed half the pillars on the inside. This also gave me scope for further detail, tapering the walls as they rise in the next stage. Having the entrance gable stand proud meant I could make the entrance arch triple thickness, giving a strong impression to any minifigs walking in that this is a really solid stone building.

Onto the second stage - the aisle roofs, triforium and clerestory. This section was a pain to build, as it didn't properly hold together until it was almost complete. Here it is at 500 pieces:



...at 1,000 pieces:



...and complete, at 1,453 pieces:



I want to pause here to talk about window design. There are a lot of single-stud translucent pieces making up the stained glass windows in this model - 1,198 of them in the lower stage and a further 537 in the upper stage, in fact. I experimented with a variety of techniques to get the best effects. Some (particularly in the apse, which was tricky enough to build as it was!) are simply piled on top of each other, but many are not.



A rose window was the first element I decided I wanted to include if I was to build a bigger church. Here is the finished version alongside the prototype I built to work out the circular(ish) shape. I found that the windows tended to dictate the heights of each stage. Although I knew I wanted the main roof height to stand just a little higher than other modular buildings, the height of the rose window heavily influenced the height of the upper stage. The window's height and width were determined by the space between the towers on a standard 32x32 baseplate, and also by how many grey 1x1 plates I had to play with!

All the windows along the sides of the church (and one at the front) are made using SNOT. I don't tend to make things with SNOT much; it's messy and I tend to end up stuck with lumps I don't know what to do with... Okay, I'll stop. ;o) SNOT is a real term used by Lego experts (though I'm sure the acronym amuses them). It stands for Studs Not On Top. Here it gave me a much better arch shape, and narrow mullions for the windows. Lego geometry helped to set the size here - 6 studs wide exactly matches 5 bricks high. Useful to know!

Moving onwards and upwards to the roof, this section comes to a mere 408 pieces:



Note the gargoyle and the decoration created with Technic beams and single-stud round plates at the front. The curved shape was a challenge at the back, and took nearly all my available roof corner bricks to achieve.

There is decorative vaulting inside the roof. Unfortunately I ended up with a wide expanse of flat plate at ceiling level before the vaulting begins in the middle. This was a case where structural integrity won out over aesthetics; the roof would be too flimsy if the vaulting went right to the edges.



We're nearly at full height now. Just the towers to go:



This spire probably went through more redesigns than any other part of the model. Given the gradient on Lego roof bricks is at most 3:1, it would be short and stumpy if I just used those. So I had to get more imaginative. Each rebuild made it taller. The dimensions of the tower underneath are determined by the large 8-stud wide arch on each side. The tower went through a couple of designs too; originally I had just a single, simple arched window on each side, before I made the design more elaborate.

There's no spire atop the second tower. Maybe there was one once. Maybe the townspeople ran out of money before it could be finished. Maybe Rich ran out of the necessary black pieces and wanted to try something different. ;o)



It is, however, a bell tower, as you can see. This was another port over from my original church model, improved a little. Technic beams support the bell and allow it to swing. There's also a clock on the outside. The spire tower came to 448 pieces, while the bell tower clocks in (Sorry!) at 262 pieces.

The last few bits to go - I wanted to build a "Bridge of Sighs" leading to buildings on the other side of the road from the church. As well as being something I wanted to have a go at building, this is all part of a Grand Plan (TM) for how all my modular buildings are eventually going to fit together. The connecting building over the road is only six studs wide, to enable it to fit neatly alongside corner buildings, such as the Palace Cinema or the Brick Bank.

The road base is made up of 90 pieces, the bridge 362, and the narrow building 431.



The narrow building, like other modular buildings, splits into 4 stages. Arches in the sides allow you to see in, as well as allowing the door to open (Six studs wide is surprisingly limiting!). Stairs at the back allow access to the bridge.



The photos below show the completed church - a mighty 6,514 pieces in total, which is two to three times a standard modular building. You could maybe shave 100 to 200 pieces off that for the places where I didn't have enough large bricks and had to use multiple smaller ones instead. This project has virtually exhausted my supplies of grey pieces! You can see the church really should extend back further; it's not very deep. Given unlimited pieces, I might have extended it over another baseplate, but all I'd be doing is repeating the bays I've already made. There'd be no new design involved, although it would allow more space for more than just the brief impression of a churchyard that I was able to include.

I've also photographed the church alongside other models for scale. At 74cm tall, it's about twice the height of a typical modular building, but a fair bit shorter than the Disney Castle or the Saturn V.



Here are some more views inside. The first of these pictures is probably the only time I've given myself vertigo photographing a Lego build! The second and third show off the stained glass windows quite effectively. The "temple and arch" decorative features on either side of the doors in the last photo were a late addition, to add interest to an otherwise fairly blank stretch of wall.



...and some more views of the outside too. You can properly appreciate how it all fits together in these photos. Although, as mentioned, the church doesn't extend back very far, I'm pleased with how the overall proportions turned out.



Finally, why do most people go to church? Hatch, match and despatch :o)

The Lego Batman Movie may actually be the best Batman movie. It isn't the best Lego movie however.

It deftly balances dark broodiness and zany humour, both essential Batman elements. No one has managed to do that effectively in a film since Tim Burton was running the show. Okay, it's mainly zany humour ("Waiter!"), but it's a very affectionate and knowing tribute to all things Batman. I loved all the references to the character's many incarnations and adventures over his 78-year history ("Atomic batteries to power; turbines to speed..."), including many of the more obscure villains (the Condiment King, anyone?). Great to see some unexpected, crossover guest villains in there too. ;o)

As any Lego nerd will tell you, "Lego" is a contraction of "leg godt", meaning "play well". And the message of The Lego Batman Movie, as with its predecessor, is about playing nicely together as a family. But whereas The Lego Movie subtly made that the entire basis of the plot, with an ingenious twist, here there's no such cleverness. The message is in your face and layered on with a trowel. It's still an enormously fun adventure though.

Also like its predecessor, the inventiveness of the Lego world is astounding. Millions upon millions of virtual bricks, and some of the action sequences will need to be watched several times to absorb all of the detail of what's going on. Special mention for the Scuttler, because it's awesome (but then, isn't everything?).

I saw the film with 16 friends. It's been a long time since I've gone on a mass cinema trip like that and I'd forgotten how much fun it can be. Afterwards, most of us decamped to the Lego shop. Of course. :o)

It's been a fun couple of weeks socially. ( Photos and details under cut )

If I've successfully earwormed you, my work here is done. ;o)