It was not until recently that I have discovered this blog (in Hungarian). While the trains are most recognizable to locals, the build quality may appeal to everyone. Most of them are built with Lego Digitial Designer, which is understandable - I certainly would not have enough bricks to build all of them. Let's go through the best ones.
We start with the M28 shunter, I think it looks awesome:
There are larger engines as well. The NOHAB has Swedish origins. In Hungary it has been known as the M61. It may be familiar to everyone who travelled around Lake Balaton:
There are electrical engines too. This is the V43:
We can see interesting trains in the capital as well. This is the Cogwheel train that brings you up to the closest hill:
Once you are up, you can take the Children's railway to take a trip amongst the hills:
As the image shows the minifigs are all well. But I am sure they get tired in the fresh air. The way home is quick and comfortable in this Combino:
I am totally flattered. Each one of these has been built in LDD but they are all original: the details are right and they are instantly recognizable, full of happy minifigs. On the blog you can find other engines too: there is a V63, an M41, and M62 "Sergey" as well.
Lego Porsche was, and I am sure it will be too. But this photo speaks for itself: the expressions of the minifig tell it all, no need to ask who the king of the road is.
This is a Porsche 911 Turbo. I am pretty sure it does not get any smaller or more recognizable than that. A small nit is that the body of the minifig does not fit into the car, but this is a minor detail. On the other hand there are building instructions on mocpages.
No studs anywhere, it is covered by flat surfaces and curved edges. Sydag likes to hide studs on his aircraft. The colors are bright, but the aircraft is real. This one is a Hawker Sea Fury for example:
The shape matches its real world counterpart almost perfectly. The engine looks great with its eight-sided shape, but the rear part of fuselage, the the arc of the wings are all perfect. The color choice is a bit unusual, it seems to be an air racer, but the shape makes it very clear that the basis is a war machine.
Amongst the images there are more war-like creations too. This one is another legendary aircraft with a radial engine: an F4U Corsair fully armed:
To me these models with all their perfection seem almost a little bit "too synthetic": it feels like they want to hide their studs and I start to have doubts if they are made of LEGO bricks. But the finish is perfect: the body, the wing of the Corsair are all a perfect copy of the original. It is no coincidence that a the newest models ended up on Brothers Brick.
As an amateur builder I get very curious too: how? What is under the skin? Ok, I have some ideas about the wing, but how is the engine built? Fortunately there are quite strong hints amongst the photos. Voila:
The brilliant part is the 4-studded bricks in the front that are rotated in 45 degrees to form a skeleton for the 8-sided shape. The rear part is also very interesting as it is basically a skin held together by bricks with studs on the side. Take a look at the canopy too: the front part is held in place by a gray minifig hand.
Feels like no matter how many aircraft I build as an amateur I will never get to this level. No matter how much I tease my brain I will not be able to build so freely in all dimensions, and not stick to plates and bricks. Congratulations, Sydag, keep up the good work!
Christmas is still two months away, but planning ahead may save you some $$$.
I tell you what to do: if you plan to buy Technic and live in Europe, you should go to Amazon.de. Almost all sets are on sale, delivery is mostly free (2-5 days International).
Recently I had a chance to visit my one of my favorite places again, the Legoland in Germany. This was not my first visit to the park (see older here) and it was interesting to see what changed in two years.
First of all, there are new themes. Star Wars has been a popular theme for LEGO sets, but two years ago this was not visible in the park at all. By now this has changed completely: next to the Miniland of European cities there is an extensive Star Wars Miniland covering the older and newer movies. Another sign of the increased interest is the extra tent selling Star Wars sets only.
Friends got quite visible too. In the big store there is a separate corner for Friends fans. There is also a specialized store selling accessories and... khm.... sets. At least in theory. The store personnel said that as soon as they have a new shipment it is sold within days. This is of course not official, but every signs points to Friends being very popular.
Ninjago did not exist 2 years ago either and become quite apparent in Legoland. It has its own mini-world now and something quite special, the Flying Ninjago. As I have quite apparent and strong limits when trying extra dimensions, I did not get try it myself. But the concept seems interesting: by controlling two wings one can do a full turn or even rotate continuously.
One of my favorites is the brick store. The selection was excellent as usual: more limited than Bricklink, but better than anything else. The price has increased though: 100g of bricks costs 9 Euros now, compared to 8 Euros two years ago.
Regardless of this, it's still an excellent buy, as the spreadsheet shows:
Dear Readers, I have no excuses. Against all promises this blog does not grow as fast as I have planned.
However something incredibly cool has happened so I must speak up and break the radio silence. We have had Lego Digital Designer for a while that continues to be the friendliest LEGO creator software that cannot produce nice renders. We have had POV-Ray as well which is free and creates nice images. Putting the two next to another yields quite satisfying results, but saying that it's a lot of work would be an understatement.
More precisely speaking, it used to be a lot of work. Because LDD2PovRay is ready. It promises combining friendly editing with world-class images in a way that works for everyone. The images speak for themselves.
There is one nit though. It only works on Windows, so I won't be able to test it for a while.
I have finally managed to finish the Parliament Building. It was a long wait, I know, but it served its purpose: I have nominated it to a building contest! Keep fingers crossed.
One of the iconic buildings of Budapest, the Hungarian Parliament Building stands by the Danube giving visitors a perfect view from the Castle Hill on the other side of the river.
After Budapest was united from three cities in 1873, an international competition was held to establish a new, representative Parliament Building. Imre Steindl emerged as the victor. Construction was started in 1885 and the building was inaugurated on the 1000th anniversary of the country in 1896, and completed in 1904. During the communist regime a red star perched on the top of the dome, but was removed in 1990. The Hungarian Republic was declared from the balcony facing Lajos Kossuth Square on 23d October in 1989.
I chose the Parliament because it has a distinct shape that is easy to recognize. The original building has plenty of small details. To keep it all in LEGO I would have had to build in at a much larger scale. Instead I opted to keep it simple and manageable: I wanted to keep the distinct shape of the building but simplify many of the details so that it can be built at a reasonable scale. Even so it is larger than the typical buildings from the Landmark series: 36 studs wide, 19 studs deep and built from about 660 bricks.
It is well known that I like LEGO Architecture sets. Not so long ago I posted a review of the 21011 Brandenburg Gate on kockagyar.blog.hu (in Hungarian) that triggered some of the fans to build several famous buildings and scenes from around the country. Many of them sent me the model they created so that I can render them in nice quality. Let me show you the result, click on the images to see them in large:
We have covered the history of Technic cars a long time ago (see part I, part II and part III).
Now Eric Albrecht (also known as Blakbird, author of Technicopedia) did the same on the in the guest post of the official LEGO Technic blog:
The history of LEGO "Super Cars" is even longer than the Technic line itself, beginning in 1977 and running right up to the present day. There is no official definition of Super Car and therefore different fans might include different models on their own list. Most fans consider a Super Car to be one of the large scale automotive models which attempt to maximize realistic function as much as possible. Over the years, the models got more and more functionally realistic, and the complexity peaked in about 1994. Since then, subsequent supercars have become more realistically styled without adding a lot of complexity.
