To LUGNET HomepageTo LUGNET News HomepageTo LUGNET Guide Homepage
 Help on Searching
 
Post new message to lugnet.buildOpen lugnet.build in your NNTP NewsreaderTo LUGNET News Traffic PageSign In (Members)
 Building / 14752
14751  |  14753
Subject: 
Re: Neptune's Moon Lagoon
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.technic.bionicle, lugnet.space, lugnet.build
Date: 
Tue, 23 Mar 2004 14:33:58 GMT
Viewed: 
305 times
  
Damn, I typed a big reply and then my browser crashed.

In lugnet.technic.bionicle, David Laswell wrote:
   Better than some I’ve seen. One of the guys in MichLUG has a cup about half-full of 1x2 Police tiles because they were the only pieces he could fill the tiny gaps with. And heck, if you can get huge cups full of trans-blue 1x2 tiles, I’m sure finding a use for them wouldn’t be too hard.

Those police tiles get everywhere. Windsor did have the little gems in trans yellow, red, green and purple. They fill up the gaps nicely, and you can mount them along technic beams for fairground lights.

   Maybe mixing the trans and opaque plates would work? It might also give the illusion of varied depth.

I don’t know about mixing them, but switching over to transparent some way out from the shore might work.

   I’d think that trying to limit the variation of the floor surface a bit, and adding in contrasting colors to represent aquatic flora might work pretty well for a coastal region like that.

I did try using a dark patch amongst the tan in one section, with little black dots to be sea urchins or something. It works quite well, but you’re right about reducing the number of colour variations. I need to see what works well, then get more of those specific colours.

There’s even a turtle (off to the left of this picture) under the surface. She’s done in black on tan.

Huw’s camera here has picked up very vivid colours (‘hues’ - hoho, you see, oh, never mind...), which is great for most of the Lego, but it has exagerated what you can see below the tiles. In person, I can’t see as much as this picture shows.

Even so, although different colours give you a variety of shades of blue to work with, the differences in hue don’t transition all that well. The first part of this was random, and the rest was hurried. When I get round to lifting all those tiles, I’ll try again.

The thing is, just like when standing next to a real body of water, 99% of people won’t even try to look below the surface. And you can only really make these shapes out by looking straight down. I could lighten the area around the objects of interest with white, but I think that would be over-doing it.

   It’d be neat to see Pirate builders do stuff like this to represent sand-bars and the drop-offs instead of using the quick-and-dirty blue baseplate method, but again you get into the problem that the water will end up higher than the land (unless you vary the table height), and the tiles will likely get scuffed by pushing pirate ships across them.

Maybe a single layer of trans-blue plates, then tiles, on top of a blue baseplate would look good enough. You could use black plates below the ship for shadow, and tan plates close to the shore.

Since bricks are mostly hollow, they wouldn’t offer much more colour than using another layer of plates. If you did want to make it a few bricks deep though, you could try adding trans light blue below the surface for sunlight effects in the water, or even blinking lights at the very bottom.

   It’s been ages since I watched any of the Jaws movies (mostly I used to catch the second half of the original when I was a kid). I was looking at it and I suddenly realized there were three guys on board (I’d noticed the shark right away, and then kind of ignored it as I peered at the water. Then I spotted the harpooners nest on the bow, and I remember that getting ripped off the boat.

I seem to recall it was still there when it sank. Maybe you’re thinking of the cheesy fourth one, where the bow gets snapped off then they stab the shark with it. I don’t normally admit to having seen ‘Jaws: The revenge’ though!

   The float barrels on the bow pretty much clinched it at that point.

Several kids notice that the guy in the back has a deck of cards laid out in front of him (a printed Wild West tile), so a few adults notice the boat too.

   BTW, I think it might look cool if you used dark-grey plates to draw the outline of a huge shark (at least 50% larger) under the tiles, and replace one tile with a 1x2 45 degree slope as the fin.

I’ve had a small fin before in a river, going for a fisherman’s line. The minifig shark here was supplied by someone else on the day of the display. I was going to do one underwater, but didn’t have the width alongside the boat. A fin, and maybe part of the back, would be a good way of drawing attention to the underwater patterns though. Perhaps a 3x3 wedge, if I can find one in dark grey. I may do a diorama at some point actually...


Jason J Railton



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Neptune's Moon Lagoon
 
(...) Could be worse. I've gotten so used to posting in forums that I sometimes close the window after only hitting the Preview button. (...) Ah, that would probably explain why someone in Wisconsin had such huge quantities of gems, and all but one (...) (21 years ago, 23-Mar-04, to lugnet.technic.bionicle, lugnet.space, lugnet.build, FTX)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Neptune's Moon Lagoon
 
(...) I'm guessing one of the California stores has them as well. Bricksland Free S&H (the store I bought mine from) currently has 7613 of them in stock, and there aren't any sets that come with more than two of them (best value is the SW mini MF). (...) (21 years ago, 23-Mar-04, to lugnet.technic.bionicle, lugnet.space, lugnet.build)

25 Messages in This Thread:







Entire Thread on One Page:
Nested:  All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:  All | Brief | Compact

This Message and its Replies on One Page:
Nested:  All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:  All | Brief | Compact
    

Custom Search

©2005 LUGNET. All rights reserved. - hosted by steinbruch.info GbR