The Magazine for LEGO® Enthusiasts of All Ages! Issue 31 • November 2014
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Spotlighting
LEGO® Bricks of
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with Iain Heath and Tommy Williamson Featuring
Mike Dung Annie Diment Eero Okkonen Kevin Ryhal Nick Vas Shawn Snyder Instructions AND MORE! 09 0
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Issue 31 • November 2014
Contents
From the Editor....................................................2
People The Cathedral of St.Francis of Assisi.....3 Building Calvin and Hobbes........................9 Storytelling with Bricks: Making Hogan’s Heroes............................16
Building Minifigure Customization 101: 3D Resolution.................................................22 You Can Build It: Lars’Homestead Mini Diorama.........26 MINDSTORMS 101: Using the Colour Sensor.........................30
Community Character Witness...........................................33 Adventures in Meme Chasing..............37 Mike Dung: Anime Character Builder........................41
Annie Diment: Looney Toons Character Builder......46 Paul Lee: Bat and Mouse Builder............................50 Eero Okkonen: Building Characters from the Hobbit to Metroid.................54 Kevin Ryhal: Building Characters from a Galaxy Far,Far Away..................62 Nick Vas: From Bionicle to Character Building................................66 Shawn Snyder: Building Characters of Video, Movies,and Comics.............70 A Little Something for Everyone.........74 Community Ads..............................................78 Last Word..............................................................79 AFOLs......................................................................80
From the Editor: This issue is about Bricks of Character, or character sculpting in LEGO. This fan theme has only been around for a few years, but examples have been around since Miniland characters were built at LEGOLand Billund (Denmark). More recent builds have gone into many different directions, including life-size busts as done by Shawn Snyder, and Calvin and Hobbes as built by Adam Dodge. Both of those are seen here, as well as other characters that you may or may not know.
November 2014 Issue 31 Publisher John Morrow
Editor in Chief Joe Meno
Photography Editor Geoff Gray Proofreader John Morrow
Japanese Bureau Editor Nathan Bryan West Coast Editors Todd Kubo Ashley Glennon
LEGO Ideas Correspondent Glen Wadleigh
Contributors: Jared Burks, Iain Heath, Tony Sava, Adam Dodge, Brian Williams, Christopher Deck, Damien Kee, Mike Dung, Annie Diment, Nick Vas, Shawn Snyder, Paul Lee, Eero Okkonen Tommy Williamson, and Greg Hyland. Many thanks to the websites who have served as mirrors for BrickJournal: www.LUGNET.com, www.Brickshelf.com, www.peeron.com, www.brickmodder.net www.rustyclank.com
About the Cover: One of Mike Dung’s creations. Photo by Mike Dung About the Contents: Iain Heath’s LEGO version of Ellen Degeneres’ selfie. Photo by Iain Heath.
All characters and their LEGO likenesses represented in this issue are TM & © their respective owners, and used here for instructional purposes only.
What makes all of these so wonderful is that LEGO is a very challenging medium for this kind of building. A character builder has to take his or her subject and convert it to a LEGO model, which in many cases means making a curved form fit into the LEGO system of building. It takes patience and practice to build these types of models. The results, though, can be astounding and inspiring. Many thanks to Iain Heath and Tommy Williamson for their help with this issue. There’s other great things in this issue too, so have fun reading and building! Joe Meno, Editor P.S. Have ideas or comments? Drop me a line at admin@brickjournal.com. I’m open to suggestions and comments and will do my best to reply. P.P.S... Yes, BrickJournal has a website — www.brickjournal.com! Twitter? Yep, there too — http://twitter.com/brickjournal. Facebook? Yup — http://www.facebook. com/group.php?gid=58728699914&ref=mf. Or you can scan the bottom codes with a QR reader! P.P.P.S. If you want info on a subscription, you can go to: http://twomorrows.com/ index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=78&products_id=616 or scan below!
Website
Glossary AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) NLSO (Non-LEGO Significant Other) MOC (My Own Creation) TLG (The LEGO Group) BURP (Big Ugly Rock Piece) LURP (Little Ugly Rock Piece)
Subscriptions
POOP (Pieces—that can be or should be made—Of Other Pieces) SNOT (Studs Not on Top) LUG (LEGO Users Group) LTC (LEGO Train Club)
LEGO®, TECHNIC, MINDSTORMS, Belville, Scala, BIONICLE, ExoForce, Mars Mission, World City, and other LEGO theme lines are trademarks of the LEGO Group of companies. All articles, photos, and art are copyright BrickJournal Media, LLC 2011, TwoMorrows Publishing and the respective writers, photographers, and artists. All rights reserved. All trademarked items are the property of their respective owners and licensees. Subscriptions are $50USD Media Mail, $68 Canada, $78 International Surface and can be purchased at www.twomorrows.com or payment sent to: TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614 USA. The editorial/advertising office address for BrickJournal is: BrickJournal Editor, 5610 Briar Oak Lane #510, Raleigh, NC 27612 USA or admin@brickjournal.com. First Printing. Printed in the USA. ISSN 1941-2347.
BrickJournal and its staff would like to thank the LDraw community for the software it makes available to the community, which we use for making all of the instructions and renderings in this magazine. We would especially like to thank Kevin Clague for his continued upgrades of the LPub tool that is a part of2the LDraw suite. For more information, please visit http://www.ldraw.org.
People
The Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi Interview by Joe Meno Photography provided by Tony Sava
Tony Sava is a husband, father of two young builders, and an Internal Auditor for Kinder Morgan Inc. In addition to building with LEGO bricks, he likes to dabble in photography and making smoked barbeque. He started building when as a child, “My grandparents gave me first LEGO set 6385 Fire House-I sometime when I was around six years old, but I didn’t really get into playing with LEGO in any major way until my parents gave me 6081 King’s Mountain Fortress. I didn’t have too much of a dark age to speak of, though I didn’t really start moving away from building only sets and start building MOCs until my mid- to late- teens. Well into college, in July of 2000, I joined Lugnet and became an official Adult Fan of LEGO and have been actively building ever since.” When asked about what kind of models he builds, he answers, “I used to build exclusively Castle MOCs, but I’ve since moved onto building Trains—primarily steam engines. To a lesser extent I build Town as well, but mostly as a backdrop to my trains.” One his most ambitious models is the Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi, which has been shown at train shows and most recently at Brickworld 2014. Here, he talks about how he built his model.
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Iain Heath’s mowrk is also shown in the film.
Another detail shot of the rear.
How has the public reacted to it? Public reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. Most everyone who sees it comments on how beautiful the stained glass looks, and simply how massive it is. I’ve even had folks recognize the inspirational Cathedrals, most notably St. Patrick’s. Occasionally my club will do a show where we’re near a window, and typically in the evening the sun will shine through the windows of the venue and into the Cathedral. Photography usually increases about that time. If I’m able, I usually show off a few of the features, like the swinging bells and the interior. My club-mates have been supportive of it too, though they do find it hard sometimes to find room for it in our layouts. Its sheer size usually dictates just about every feature of the city section of our train displays, and does tend to overshadow smaller MOCs. What are you proudest of with the church? I suppose the thing I’m most proud of is completing a project of such immense size and detail. It’s certainly not the biggest MOC I’ve ever attempted, but it’s the most detailed, most complete, and most “finished.” Since I don’t have boxes in which to store it, it sits on one of my build tables between shows. I frequently find myself looking at it and questioning myself—“Did I really build that?” I have to confess I sometimes even find little parts of the build that are particularly complex and think, “I really need to remember this technique, that could be useful.”
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Calvin and Hobbes TM & © Bill Watterson.
People
Building Calvin and Hobbes Design and Photos by Adam Dodge Instructions by Joe Meno
Adam Dodge posted this sculpture online, which was immediately posted on leading blogs. BrickJournal contacted him and was able to make instructions. When asked about this creation, Adam explained: “I made this Calvin and Hobbes in response to someone wanting to buy a Calvin and Hobbes creation from me. Not wanting to part with the amount of bricks in my original model, I put together this smaller, more iconic image and gave that away.“ This is a great Bricks of Character creation that not only captures the look of the classic cartoon characters, but also shows the whimsy that the Calvin and Hobbes strip (and LEGO) has. Enjoy building!
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People
Hogan’s Heroes TM & © Bing Crosby Productions.
Storytelling Making with Bricks:
Hogan’s Heroes
Making Beyond the Brick: A LEGO Brickumentary Interview by Joe Meno Photography provided by Helo
Article by Brian M. Williams
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Lights on!
They say that great art is born of struggle. And while my Hogan’s Heroes diorama may not rise to the level of, let’s say, the Mona Lisa, it certainly had a difficult birth. For starters, there was only 3.5 weeks of build time when this diorama was built for the 2013 Annual Flickr Military Build. Then there were the contest requirements that it be only 48x48 studs and be built as an interior. As I pondered these requirements, my son was watching Hogan’s Heroes, an old TV sitcom about a German POW camp where the prisoners operate a secret espionage and sabotage organization. It occurred to me that such a subject might make a good MOC. The show was funny, popular, and can still be found in reruns today. And all the tunnels would provides a set of interconnected interior scenes. Best of all… it had a good story to tell.
The Design
I started by researching the show to determine the most popular episodes and scenes. Then, using this information as a guide, I prioritized the most frequently appearing characters, locations, and vehicles. After this it became a game of Tetris trying to fit everything into the available space. The show had strong characters with unique uniforms… so viewers would have no problem
identifying the individual minifigs. The locations were colorful, distinctive, and most importantly, they appeared in most episodes, so even if a viewer only saw one episode, they could recognize the MOC. And the tunnels connected everything both horizontally (under ground) and vertically (to the surface locations). But best of all, each location had funny stories, gags and gadgets which appeared in multiple episodes. I created three designs of varying size and estimated the cost and build time. Selective compression was used and repeating structural elements removed (eg. only a single window need be shown on the barracks). In the end I chose the medium design due to time constraints, and partly because that’s all which was needed to tell the story. Every single brick in a MOC should contribute directly to telling the story, and all others should be ruthlessly discarded.
The Build
The lower portion is built hollow on a single 48x48 stud baseplate. I had worked out the room sizes and structural supports on paper beforehand. But once the tunnels were in place, I took pause to validate the viewing angles. This led to some size adjustments and structural reinforcements. The tunnel walls are built from
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Legend of Zelda and all related characters TM & © Nintendo.
Building Minifigure Customization 101:
3D Resolution by Jared K. Burks
Link created with custom printed 3d parts designed by Michael “MINGLES” Inglis, painted and decaled by Michael “Xero” Marzilli, featuring custom decals created by Jared Burks. Photo by Jared K. Burks.
3D printing is a method of rapid prototyping, which involves creating digital 3D objects and ‘printing’ them by having a printer lay down successive layers of a material. Objects manufactured using this process can often be extremely detailed and include awkward shapes. Other manufacturing processes, such as metal injection molding, cannot easily manufacture these awkward shapes without multiple molds. The process of 3D printing allows a minifig customizer to physically make a 3D model without having to deal with extremely large production costs and minimum orders. The rate at which these models can be ordered and received is merely a matter of days with companies such as Kraftwurx and Shapeways. How do you know if 3D printing is right for your LEGO project? Well, it typically boils down to resolution: specifically, print resolution. Will your printed part hold the design details you have created in your 3D file when printed to LEGO scale? In this article, I will discuss the differences in print materials and resolutions from two of the major commercial sources: Kraftwurx and Shapeways.
Don’t miss Jared K. Burks’ two books Minifigure Customization: Populate Your World! and its sequel Minifigure Customization: Why Live In The Box? (both are available now at www.twomorrows.com)
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Previously, this article series has discussed creating your own 3D files for printing. This article appeared in BrickJournal #19 (June 2012). The 3D files from this previous article will be presented here printed in different types of materials and different resolutions as examples. As with anything in life, you get what you pay for: higher resolution materials will be more expensive. You will need to balance the expense of your project against the desired quality. The materials that can be produced by a 3D printer are extensive. Shapeways and Kraftwurx, the major commercial leaders in 3D printed parts, currently provide metals, plastics, glass, ceramics and sandstone. An exhaustive examination of all the printable materials is beyond the scope of this article. Both manufacturers offer very informative sections of their websites on the materials they offer; if you want to try something out of the mainstream, please visit their sites and community sections for more details.
The same parts printed by Shapeways and Kraftwurx with various resolutions. Left two columns, top down, are as follows: White Strong and Flexible from Shapeways, Black Strong and Flexible from Shapeways, Nano Clear HD from Kraftwurx. The Swords from left to right are White Strong and Flexible, Black Strong and Flexible, and Nano Clear HD. Notice the print pattern on the Nano Clear sword. This can be removed with sanding, however, be careful not to remove your print detail or sand your part too thin. Note: the Shapeways shields (White Strong and Flexible and Black Strong and Flexible) are much larger than the Kraftwurx (Nano clear HD) print; for scale see the Multicolor Links or Shield figure.
Materials
http://www.shapeways.com/materials http://www.kraftwurx.com/3d-printing-materials Shapeways has two materials which suit both the detail and texture of LEGO elements; the ‘White Strong and Flexible’ (WSF) and the ‘Detail’ plastic. The WSF material is a nylon material and as the name would suggest is strong and flexible. Although cheap, it has a somewhat bumpy surface due to it originating from a powder. The Detail material solved this surface problem. The Detail material is an acrylic-based photopolymer, which is a smooth material with a much higher resolution to the printed item. This resolution has limitations as it lacks both the flexibility and the strength of WSF. Many colored variations of the two materials have been introduced as well as a polished WSF (50-51 micron resolution) option which significantly improves the problem of its bumpy surface texture. The high demand for such small detailed objects also allowed Shapeways to release the ‘Frosted Detail’ and ‘Frosted Ultra Detail’ materials. This UV curable acrylic plastic can achieve details of up to 0.1 mm and is very smooth to the touch. Despite being quite costly compared to the other materials, it is by far the most authentic looking in the hands of a LEGO Minifigure as it most closely resembles LEGO element materials (ABS). Kraftwurx has several options well-suited for both detail and texture of LEGO elements: Water Clear SLA, Nano White, Nano Crystal, Nano Crystal HD, and Vero. Nano Crystal would be the first choice with the smoothest surfaces and highest detail and part strength. Vero White would be the next best choice for smoothness and detail. For the purpose of this article I am going to focus on Nano Crystal and Nano Crystal HD as these are the best and still affordable. Water Clear SLA is highly detailed, but small features may be lost in LEGO scale. Shapeways’ polished WSF is same material as Karftwurx’s Nano Crystal, however Nano Crystal is printed at a higher resolution (29 microns for Nano Crystal versus 50-51 microns SW polished Strong & Flexible). The Polished WSF
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My meme-based builds have probably reached the level of stunts at this point. The best example of this was probably at Emerald City ComicCon. My local LEGO group, SeaLUG, always puts on a large display at this event. During set-up day, I learned that pop-culture icon Wil Wheaton was attending the event. Someone had posted some photos of him signing autographs, and for some reason his table looked way nicer that those of his fellow celebs. So I rushed home, and spent the next convention day off-site building a tiny replica of the scene. On the last day of the convention, I brought it along to his table for him to sign. That photo made the rounds on the Internet for a long time, and is one of my most widely viewed images to date… no thanks to The Man Himself though, who to this day remains completely oblivious to the entire thing, despite his gazillions of well-informed Twitter followers! Wil Wheaton signing his model.
While a lot of my meme-based builds take advantage of the timeliness of their subject matter, my research sometimes exposes me to memes that have already peaked, but are just too inspiring or well-known for me not to parody them with LEGO. The “Trololo Guy” video was just hilariously bad, and hilariously yellow. While the “Y U NO” guy has been modified in so many different ways at this point, it seemed time to give the world a LEGO version. I even posted a caption-free “exploitable” variation of it, that people could use to vent their own frustrations on LEGO-related issues. And it’s just as well I wasn’t trying to push that one out in 24 hours because, as it turns out, taking a two-dimensional outline drawing and turning it into a three-dimensional model is nightmarishly difficult! I was noodling on that one for almost a week… You can find pictures of Iain’s LEGO creations at flickr.com/ochre_ jelly, and watch his hilarious LEGO-themed videos at youtube. com/ochrej …including his Epic Split parody and the destruction of LEGO Miley Cyrus!
A close-up of the Wheaton model.
Iain’s Trololo guy.
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Iain’s “Y U No” model.
Community
Mike Dung is a 29-year-old software engineer from Taipei, Taiwan. When not playing with LEGO bricks, he enjoys digital painting, playing volleyball, watching Anime, and singing along to Vocaloid songs! BrickJournal: How did you get into building LEGO characters? Mike Dung: It began about 18 months ago when I first saw the work of Japanese builder MOKO. This had a great influence on me, since I had just started building. At that time I was crazy about Japanese Anime, so I started the idea of creating Anime characters using LEGO. Most Anime fans will be attracted by some characters in the animation, and I am no exception. The attraction drives me to create LEGO characters. Compared to the rest of the world, it seems like a larger proportion of MOCs coming from Asian builders are character-based, inspired by Anime or videogames. Why do you think that is? Since I’ve started following and learning from the works of LEGO builders in other countries, I have found that the proportion of characters built by Asian builders is more prominent, although I have seen a lot of characters built by European and American builders and they are also excellent.
RWBY, a group of Anime characters built by Mike Dung.
Mike Dung: Anime Character Builder!
Interview by Iain Heath Photography provided by Mike Dung
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Community
The gang’s all here—(from left to right) Marvin the Martian, Tweety Bird, the Tazmanian Devil, and Yosemite Sam! All Looney Tunes characters TM & © Warner Bros.
Annie Diment:
Looney Tunes Character Builder! Interview by Iain Heath Photography provided by Annie Diment
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Annie Diment is 47 years old and lives in Hampshire in the UK. She is married to professional LEGO artist Ed Diment, who she met through their shared hobby of tenpin bowling. Annie helps out from time to time at Bright Bricks, Ed’s company. She has attended many LEGO events in the UK, as well as LEGO Fan Weekend in Skaerbaek, Denmark, Tomar, Portugal, and BrickFair Virginia in Chantilly, Virginia. BrickJournal: How did the whole idea of building Looney Tunes characters in LEGO come about? Annie Diment: I wanted to build something sculptural so started playing around with building a rabbit, but this didn’t really inspire me, so I started looking for something else. Ed had shown me the online Bram Sphere Generator (http://lego.bldesign.org/sphere/), and it occurred to me that cartoon characters’ heads are often spherical. Marvin the Martian’s head is a black ball, so I started building one of those and the model went from there. The cartoons are appealing due to their fun nature, coupled with a wide range of colors across the whole Looney Tunes family, and obviously a large number of characters to choose from.
In the film, Alice Finch talks about her models, including Hogwarts (above) and Rivendell (seen at right).
Beep beep! Road Runner drops in.
What drove you to build them at a larger scale versus a smaller scale? How do you figure out the size each new model is going to be? All the models came out the size they did based solely on Marvin the Martian’s head. I picked a size of sphere and probably didn’t appreciate the size it would be until I built it. Then I looked at his arms and legs and thought “actually, at this size, 2x2 round bricks would be perfect,” and everything fell into place from there. Once I had done one, of course, the rest fell into line based on the actual relative sizes of the characters. The only one that is a little out-of-scale is Tweety Bird, but it would be tricky to get the eye detail in without going to this size. The original cartoon characters are two-dimensional. Does it require a lot of planning to translate them into three dimensions? Thankfully they are very popular characters so there is plenty of source material to work from. And because they are in cartoons, there are lots of poses too. I tend to break the builds down into parts (head, legs, arms, etc.) and
Marvin the Martian, one of the many impressive models by Diment.
work out a rough size for each bit. But beyond that, it’s largely made up as I go along. Most of the heads and bodies are variations on a sphere, as that’s where I started. The bodies are built with a rectangular core of bricks, including “SNOT” bricks to allow plates to be attached on all sides. Once clad in plate, I then start to layer up the plate to create more rounded shapes, and just keep adding until I am happy. The eyes are usually the tricky bit as they often have to be angled, and it is usually a question of building them flat on a table and playing around with all sorts of combinations of small white wedge plates. Where there is a small lightweight detail, I think it is fine to attach by a single stud or clip. Sam’s neckerchief simply has two wedge plates attached only by one stud so that they can be rotated to a nice angle. Sam’s hat is not actually fixed to his head, but simply hooks over a row of orange cheese slopes that form part of his hair. Making really small fingers is a nightmare and I’ve never really been happy 47 with how Tweety Bird’s turned out.
Community
Paul Lee:
Bat and Mouse Builder!
Article by Joe Meno Photography provided by Paul Lee
Batman TM & © DC Comics.
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Paul Lee is an illustrator for the LEGO Group. His latest work was the DC Super Heroes comic that was a giveaway at San Diego Comic-Con and with the new Batman Tumbler set. He’s been an artist for comic book publishers, but he’s also a LEGO builder. He caught the attention of BrickJournal with a couple of character models he displayed at LEGO fan events.
One of Paul’s more recent builds was a figure model of Batman for a contest at the LEGO fan convention Bricks by the Bay, which took place in California. Paul’s a bit of a LEGO purist when he builds, as he explains, “I made a point to source all the pieces from LEGO. In the case of the cape, I cut the back out of a black LEGO Club T-shirt. So, while it isn’t a building element per se, the shirt did come from LEGO. The only thing used in the model that didn’t come from LEGO was the thread I used to attach the cape to some Technic pins.” Paul also reveals another reason behind building Batman: “I was interested in creating a large, articulated figure similar to TeknoMekas (a large-scale robot model that was first developed by builder Brian Cooper) , but at a smaller scale. The difficulty was compacting the joint gears small enough to fit the scale. TeknoMekas tend to be about 3 feet tall. This Batman tops out at 21.5 inches.” When asked about how he did the bat logo on Batman’s chest, Paul answers, “The bat logo on his chest was composited from about 15 official LEGO stickers. LEGO generally tends not to make large black stickers, so I had to cut out little corners of black parts of other stickers, making a collage of them until it was the right size. Then, I cut the shape out of the collage of stickers. “I am particularly proud of the solution I used for the hands. Employing power drills as fingers worked well. Also, in trying to get the right angle on the nose, I did a modified Cube Dude solution for the nose and eyes. That part of the face sits at a 45 degree angle from the square of the rest of the head.”
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