Marcus Müller a.k.a. Tethpub ZNeK
crack-admin/coderâ„¢

MOCs

Viper MK II

Bluerender (bublible) 0.0.0.5beta

The classic Viper MK II is my favorite. Not just due to childhood memories, but also because the model looks stunning on my desk! :-p The model is based on pictures (read below), and I'm probably forever grateful to Stefan for inspiration and excellent execution. Buggi sort of pushed me to finish the LDD design, here's my current version. There had been several design problems to overcome and I'm quite happy with my solution for the attachment of the nose stripe. The real world solution is a bit different to what I've done in LDD, but the idea is very similar.

Getting the spacing right and side panel attachment
Nose stripe attachment solution

Hinges in LDD don't allow for all possible movement achievable in the real world, however, it's possible to join the sides of the nose at the tip.

Rendering LEGO

The best result rendering LEGO that I did achieve so far has been to use LDD to POV-Ray Converter . Getting the lighting right is crucial, but by no means an easy task. I would prefer to use a GUI to create the scenes and thus tried Blender . However, I built all my MOCs with LDD and while in theory you should be able to convert everything from LDD to LDraw (a requirement for Blender), in practice always some of the bricks I use in LDD are missing in LDraw. Additionaly, import from LDraw in Blender is far from perfect. In total, LEGO in Blender is much harder to do than using LDD to POV-Ray Converter and afterwards fiddling with POV-Ray, so I finally gave up on Blender. A recent development is Bluerender . It's by no means as accurate as POV-Ray, but has very good defaults for getting superb results out of the box - an excellent choice for doing quick renders that don't look too shabby.

Why?

I recently picked up my old LEGO hobby. As a kid I'd been a huge fan of Battlestar Galactica. As a matter of fact, one of the last LEGO models I built back then was a Colonial Viper.

Classic Viper MK II, ca. 1983

When searching for Battlestar Galactica MOCs I came across various models, but notably a model by Mark Kelso (a famous MOC builder). While digging around for more (better) photos of this MOC I finally found photos of this Viper model , created by Stefan . He also has instructions (sort of) for building this model and with the help of Buggi I was finally able to reverse engineer the model in Lego Digital Designer .

It didn't stop there. Of course I had to build my customized version of the model for real, thus I dived into everything beginning with ordering bricks online to organizing your LEGO collection and so on.

Just when I thought I was done with the Viper, I found this and this .