Dawn Rock Castle

I'm a sucker for castles, and LEGO provides the perfect medium for building castle models. Modeler LegoLord (a fellow Tennessean) offers this incredible piece titled Dawn Rock Castle. What's not to like about this piece? The castle has a large contained courtyard, and the back walls contain enclosed buildings. He also makes use of a lot of vegetation legos to create a nice front yard, as well as some dark grey slopes to the side for a natural looking rock formation.

Build with Chrome

Browsing the plots others have created

I have been hearing about a Google Chrome extension that lets you build with virtual Lego blocks and finally got around to trying it out. This new approach to Lego building is called Build with Chrome. Build with Chrome is a team effort between Google and LEGO Australia to show off Chrome's new 3D web abilities. How it works is you start off on a Google map of Australia and New Zealand. The maps are divided into little plots that you can claim and build a model on. Once you're done building, you can publish the model and it will show up on the map when others browse.

The actual build environment.

When you pick a spot to build, you're put into the build environment. You're limited to building on a fixed size plate and a small palette of bricks with a door and window piece. So this is more of an environment for Lego "sculptors" as opposed to "modelers" since you are limited mostly to bricks and no specialized pieces. It's also currently impossible to use SNOT methods of building since you aren't allowed to rotate underneath the drawing or rotate bricks on their side. The way the model moves around when rotating and placing bricks has the usual, smooth polish that Google has shown in their programs over the years (like Sketchup, one of my favorites). It's a very cool concept and shows a lot of promise. Hopefully Google will extend this to include other areas of the world and maybe even develop Build with more options. It's a very promising start.

King Leo's Summer Palace

This incredible structure is brought to you courtesy of David Lines. King Leo's Summer Palace is very pleasing to the eyes. The reds and greens fit in very nicely with the grays and tans on this piece. The center spire is full of some nice detail (check out the use of dinosaur heads near the top). The best feature, in my opinion, is the little fountain in front of the palace framed on both sides by a curved staircase. What a great piece!

MOC Monday: Don't Look Behind Now!

This mini scene actually made me chuckle out loud a bit because of the pirate rowing in the tiny wooden tub seemingly unaware of the giant black octopus emerging behind him. The scene (created by Antonio Silva) reminds me of the memorable scene in the Disney version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea when the Nautilus is attacked by a giant squid. I like the use of different colored and jumbled tiles for the ocean, and the red eyes on the octopus are a great touch.

Stay Tuned

I'm really wanting to do some more work and develop this blog, but I've been a little busy lately. All of this is culminating in me being out of the country through next week for a mission trip. However, once I'm back, I think I'll be able to slip into a routine. Here's some of my goals for the blog and my Lego hobby in general.

• Keep looking at other peoples MOCs and posting about design ideas and processes from my favorite creations.
• I'm hoping to start making some MOCs myself in the near future, so hopefully I will start posting about those soon.
• I'm experimenting with making some LDD and POV-RAY tutorials on YouTube. I just find that visual tutorials like that work better than trying to explain them in a blog post.
• and, of course, continuing on with Project 10179.

So stay tuned and I will try to get into a nice rhythm once I'm back in the states.

Simple, but Effective

For today's MOC Monday, I really liked this Simple built U-Boat by MocPages user Lego 4 Life. It only uses one color, but it has very clean and tidy lines. I love the way the whole pieces comes together but doesn't need a ton of pieces to do it. On top of it all, there's not a stud to be seen on this piece from most angles. So unless you know what you're looking for, it looks more like an actual scale model and less like a Lego creation.

Project 10179: The Beginning

Millenium Falcon 10179

I've been slowly building up a random collection of bricks and used/new sets. I don't have a lot of money to spend, but when done right, having a Lego hobby can actually pay for itself in some ways. So in addition to buying used sets and bricks, I've been doing a little selling on side using eBay and BrickLink (there's a link to my BL store in the tabs above).
To add an additional element of fun to my hobby/business, I've started up a little side project which I've dubbed "Project 10179". Lego Star Wars fans will know the number right away as the set ID of the Ultimate Collector's edition of the Millenium Falcon. This is a monster set. At 5,195 pieces it is the second largest set ever put into production by Lego, and definately the biggest Star Wars set. My goal is to eventually buy/collect all the pieces needed to build this monstrosity, but with a net cost of $0.00. A complete set goes for anywhere between $1000 and $2500 on eBay and Amazon, but buying pieces individually or scavenging them from used sets, the cost goes down signigantly.
So why am I doing this? Mostly for fun. I just want to say that I've actually built this thing, kind of like a Lego pilgrimage of sorts. I'm not trying to build a perfect set from all original parts so I can resell it for thousands, so I can cut corners here and there. For instance, the instruction manual (at a whopping 300+ pages) can be downloaded for free as a pdf from the Lego website. So how far into "Project 10179" am I? I currently have 326 pieces. I'm 6% of the way there! Stay tuned for progress updates.