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.
Several people asked me to provide more details on rendering LEGO models like the Trabi or the MiG-15. Until the surprise is built, let me entertain you with a tutorial on how to render LEGO models.
Before we start, let me underline that this is by no means a straightforward process. You should start only if you are ready to edit programming-language-like text files and download, unzip and manually organize files. It needs several hours, some debugging and tweaking, and possibly more hours to compute the final image.
Ok, if you have read so far, then you are at least curious to know what it takes. What follows is based on Koyan's excellent tutorial with some tweaks. Let's see how a typical render is made!
Step 1: I install LDraw. LDraw is an community-maintained database of LEGO bricks that will be needed for our photorealistic renders. As you can guess, this is needed once only. I download and unzip several files:
LDraw official parts (Core Files and Libraries / LDraw Parts Library, zip format). I unzip them in a directory on my computer. This is my LDraw directory.
Many bricks are not in the official release. I download the LDraw unofficial parts as well. Unzip those files as well and move them in the LDraw directory too. Some files will already exist, I don't overwrite them.
LGEO is another parts library that is made especially for POV-Ray renders. It contains fewer parts but those are nicely modeled. I download and unzip it into a separate directory.
I have built my Brandenburg Gate. I have always liked the Architecture theme and this is the first set that I have bought. It is clearly for adults. Compared to Creator sets is a bit on the expensive side, but the result is very nice and I like it very much.
