Details: This year, Santa's got a new ride. Someone ought to make a movie about this model and use that as the tagline.
There's lots to love in this modernized interpretation of Santa's sleigh and reindeer, but even with all the space-y greebles and twists, it's still faithful to the sleigh-and-reindeer formula. Santa's throttles (in place of reins) round out his one-seater carrying a bag of toys - which also seems to have a thruster of its own beyond the reindeer pulling it. At this scale, a few long Star Wars blasters make for great antlers, and a pair of pearl gold 1 x 1 round plates with holes mounted on what looks like minifig handlebars make for excellent eyes.
Other great details include the use of wheels as hooves, a white Technic wheel to represent the fur around the neck, a minifig ski for the top of the reindeer's head (not to be confused with the larger skis used for the front of the sleigh), and a plate with a tooth for the gold trim on Santa's sleigh. Make sure to check out all of the photos - the Reindeer Mech can be posed in a surprising amount of ways (probably more than are shown).
Details: Here's another clever alternate build, this one using set 31021: Furry Creatures. Normally, you'd expect such an alternate model to have more in common with the main model from the set - in particular, I think most of us would be tempted to use the large eyes (printed on 2x2 round tiles) as the eyes for the doll. This time, though, we see a few 1x1 plates for the eyes and the bright pink 2-wide cheese slope used for the mouth - a simpler but adorable solution for building a character's face. I'm also loving the uses of a wedge slope for her dress and the tail element for a bit of hair out of place.
Her pet is also a fun little build - a rare example of the bar-and-clip technique being used simply to reverse studs.
As an added bonus, the builder posted building instructions for the girl and her dog in this model's Flickr set.
Here's a solid take on the ancient myth that the world is carried on the back of a turtle. Somehow it works well both with and without the foliage applied. The juxtaposition of the shell sculpted with ordinary bricks and the tan limbs that make great use of slopes is very effective. I never get far trying to make slopes look like natural shapes, but the head on this turtle uses that technique perfectly. I'm both jealous of the realistic form and curious as to whether or not there are actually any pupils in the turtle's eyes. You could spend all day staring closely at this to determine whether or not that's just a perfectly planned shadow.
Details: The reigning champion of cutesy Easter models is back to one-up last year's impressive model. I do wish we could see a different angle of this bunny's face - the minifig helmets used for eyes look pretty good from this photo, but I'd love to see how it looks from the side. The egg cart is priceless, continuing the studs-out approach and even including wheels built out of plates instead of using regular wheel and tire parts. The best detail may be the necktie, though, making use of two red plates with clips attached sideways to get the double-sided plate effect - it's not a difficult technique, but most people wouldn't think to have made the middle of the bowtie sideways facing outward so that could work.
Details: The birds are angry. The pigs don't stand a chance. Particularly if the other birds are also built out with studs facing every direction. The eyebrows are actually adjustable (the joys of mounting a 1x2 tile on top of small plate), but the really angry look captured here seems to capture the feel of the popular game surprisingly well.
Details: You may have noticed the odd pacing of posts these past few days. We are at BrickMagic, and earlier today (erm, yesterday now) were present during the official unveiling of 10218 Pet Shop. I've been slowly uploading my photos of the event (including 10218 and a few great town and train layouts) to BrickMagic 2011 flickr set, and we'll probably put more of a round-up together sometime in the next few days. The high-res press photo pack has also been put on flickr. Here's the official info from LEGO:
10218 Pet Shop
Ages 16+. 2,032 pieces.
US $149.99 CA $199.99 DE 149.99 € UK 119.99 £
Available: Beginning of May
Continuing the LEGO® Modular Buildings series, this highly detailed, 3-story Pet Shop building and townhouse with full internal and external detailing is the perfect addition to your LEGO town. Greet customers with a menagerie of pets and let them treat them with a selection of toys and supplies. The pet shop building features a hinged staircase for easy access, upper apartment with kitchenette and upper loft overlooking the open plan interior below. To the side, the tastefully appointed townhouse features a detailed ground floor with accessories and spiral staircase leading to the upper floor. The attic space features storage boxes and French doors leading out to an elegant front balcony, while the rooftop garden, complete with fresh vegetables, brightens up the rear of the building.
• Includes 4 minifigures with accessories: pet shop owner, girl on bicycle, painter with paint roller and woman!
• Pet shop includes dog, cat, 2 parrots and fish tank with goldfish!
• Also includes 3 dog bones, ball, frog toy, birdhouse, bucket and brush!
• Kitchenette features stone fireplace, stove, sink, coffee maker and small table and chair!
• Upper loft features skylight, bed and lamp!
• Townhouse features ground floor with mailbox and mail, hat rack, couch, telephone, toilet and access to basement crawl space!
• Measures 11″ (25.5cm) wide and 10.5″ (26.5cm) high!
• Combine with other modular buildings, like 10197 Fire Brigade and 10211 Grand Emporium!
Details: I've thought for a while now that the field of alternate models should be more popular. Way too few LEGO hobbyists seem interested in building something small that anyone could build, and instead you see things head the other way - towards giant behemoths full of expensive parts, which often say more about how much you're willing to spend on LEGO than about how skilled you are as a builder. Coming up with alternate models for an official kit serves as a bit of an equalizer: it's all about what you can do with a reasonable set of constraints, and not about what you can afford. That said, even when people do experiment with building alternate models, they usually only try out a few simple designs. Not today's builder. If you look at his Brickshelf gallery, you'll find no fewer than 26 designs that are made entirely out of the parts in set 8271 - a small kit that only cost $20 and has exactly 200 pieces. While the part selection isn't that bad, I don't think anyone would have expected that so many decent models could be built without any additional parts.
...which brings us to today's model. It's an evocative design that is very clearly an elephant. Some simple gearing allows the head to sway from side to side when a knob is turned, and a lever in the back can move the head up and down.
Details: Before we start: this creature is called a wyvern - it is not a dragon, but it's very similar to a dragon without arms. It's supposed to look that way and the lack of arms is completely correct for the subject matter. Now, with that out of the way...
This is the first time I've seen the tauntaunhornelements put to good use. Tan cheese slopes (currently exclusive to the Tower Bridge kit) make up most of the body, as well as the feet. Inspired by the many dragons (such as the Hideous Zippleback we featured recently) that use many articulated sections to make poseable necks, Jordan (also known as Sir Nadroj) tried to make the whole body using a similar technique by using a long tube as a spine and then using various clipparts to connect the rest of the body. The result is a surprisingly successful "organic building study". Heck, even the mix of the colors on the ground stands out.
Details: A dutch family with three generations of LEGO enthusiasts recently built this set of animals. A brilliant mix of NXT robotics and more traditional LEGO sculpture techniques, these life-size animals act out the action in the video above. It seems like there are never enough animations that use this technique instead of stop-motion. Here, we see the animals run around in a fairly realistic manner, down to the mother duck laying an "egg" (a ball from the NXT 2.0 kit, previously known as a Bionicle Zamor sphere) and the rat taking it to eat. A surprising amount of detail went into the robots here - check out the MOCpages links above to read more about them and see photos of the source material. Also of note (but I'm not aware of more of a close-up than in the video) is some of the background scenery - the life-size squirrel sculpture and duck's nest look great too.
Some tape (vinyl) was used to cover some of the NXT parts and make the NXT colors blend in well with the rest of the models. Further "cheating" was used to make the smaller ducks work with power functions motors and a battery set-up small enough to fit inside them (they're controllable through IR - which presumably is controlled by a third party NXT IR adapter). There's another video that explains how the ducks are made.
Details: Coming in surprisingly close to minifig scale, this elephant is a great alternative to the official (and now hard-to-find) elephant from a few years back. The most unusual element here, the Cylinder Hemisphere 3 x 3 Ball Turret, makes for great feet. The slopes work out just right, and all of the other extremities came out great too - the two tusks use small spike elements, a 3-long axle forms the tail, and click hinges get the proper (and pose-able!) trunk look. Did I mention that the legs are built upside-down and connected through Technic pins to create joints? That feature is shown off in some fun riding Spartan photos of this model (the cart for riding the elephant isn't bad either, but isn't historically accurate).
Details: 222Doc claims to have created the first NXT-based biped that can climb stairs. I'll have to take him at his word for that (I'm not aware of any video to prove that, and he hasn't posted programs either). His new creation, though, is even more impressive - a quadruped robot with three-toed limbs that can climb like a sloth. That's the theory, anyway - the machinery has been tested to verify that it can handle the load of lifting it's own weight on ladders in any direction, but the programming's not done yet. This isn't quite purist - you can see some multiplexers and unofficial cable used so that the one NXT can control all of the motors (looks like 8 NXT motors and 4 Power Functions motors to me). Still - this is proof of concept for a type of four-legged walker we've never seen before. I can't wait to see one of these things crawling overhead at a LEGO or robotics event.
EDIT: This is what I get for rushing posts - it turns out that there is, in fact, a video of the X2 walking up stairs, and you can see other videos from the same builder on YouTube as well. More details about the X4 sloth 'bot can be found on the nxtasy forums.
Details: While this miniland-scale rendition of a Hittite chariot differs a bit from the source material, it's still an exciting piece as a LEGO construction. To start with, there's the level of detail on the horses - minifig screwdrivers stick into click hinges to form the tails, studs in all directions to build the imposing face of each horse, and proper harnesses and manes. The builder posted an overview shot of just the horse design, which brings out other details - sculpted legs, hoofs, the angle of the head and neck (I'm going to guess Technic bricks are used to hold that in place) and even half-stud offsets in the middle of the horse's body.
There are also two great miniland-scale figures riding the chariot. I don't think we've seen bearded figures at this scale before, but the technique is as effective as it is simple. The tree and plain landscaping are just the icing on the cake.
Details: Somewhere along the way, the BZPower Bionicle community decided to have a crab crawl-in at BrickFair 2010. While I'm sure they'll look pretty intimidating together as a group, I was planning on not featuring them individually, in spite of the cool techniques that inevitably show up when such small parts are being used. Fortunately, The Un-Sung Brick rounded up a few that are already online. I will be personally making sure we have photos of all of them at the convention - and if they're all as good as what we've seen so far, it's bound to be a great display.
Details: A while back, research in creating high-resolution LEGO sculptures by aiming bricks in every direction appeared on LUGNET. Although few people have decided to take on that difficult style, everyone who has finished a model using it has come up with a surprisingly detailed sculpture. This model appears to be using a variation on this technique, with some specialized pieces used to add even more fantastic details. The face in particular is an amazing mix of angles, with vehicle mudguards and radar dishes somehow becoming perfect eyes.
The white tiger is a very rare animal in nature - fittingly, in spite of some attention in Japan (including a TV spot), information about this model has been hard to come by. Fortunately, the builder posted about it on MOCPages earlier this month.
Details: This parrot (a type of macaw) is made largely with Technic parts. While some of the parts are Bionicle specific, most of this is more Technic than Bionicle. Considering the unusual color palettes that LEGO makes Technic pieces in, this is actually a pretty impressive bird. Part of the reason most large Technic creations are black, red, yellow, or colored like a Mindstorms set is that LEGO hasn't made it terribly easy to get parts in some colors. While licensed sets (such as Star Wars, Mickey Mouse, Indiana Jones, Thomas the Tank Engine, Toy Story, etc) tend to drive LEGO to manufacture parts in unusual colors, the Technic line hasn't benefited from this nearly as much, making colors like the green and dark blue seen here all too had to find. LEGO recently reached out to LEGO fans about what colors certain parts should be available in, so perhaps we'll see a better selection of colors for more Technic parts in the future. In the meantime, this is an impressively distinctive structure even without needing to cut the builder slack for color choices. The tail, wings, and beak are nice and clear and even the eyes came out well.
Details: Every once in a while, you find a new way of looking at a part and suddenly have an interesting new model idea. That was the case here, when the element widely used as a window arch or a car wheel well mudguard suddenly turned into the face of a dog. From there, it wasn't hard to build full bodies to create a group of dogs. Two of the dogs even make use of other wheel well arch elements!
Details:
I put off blogging this one in favor of getting some photos and news coverage in addition to what Sean Kenney wrote for his own site. That decision paid off, since I can now offer you a round-up of coverage of this exhibit, which lasts for several months. The particular picture above is roughly minifig-scale, and is one of three showing a rainforest in various states (healthy, destruction, replanting). The rest of this exhibit (running from April 10th to October 31st at the Philadelphia Zoo) features large, life-size sculptures. Here's a round-up of links covering the events:
In addition to the long-term display, there are also two "Build with Sean Kenney" events scheduled for visitors to the zoo (both events are free with zoo admission). One is next weekend, the other is in September.
Details: This turtle is easily the best use I've seen of the brown 2x4 piece with slopes on three sides. The shell is a bit large (this probably weighs in at just above miniland scale), but it's very effective. The legs are minifig legs - you can attach them to minifig hands, which in turn will fit on most parts. Then there's the head - the mouth is created with a technique that you rarely see done intentionally. By leaving one 1x1 plate only partially attached into the piece above it, the illusion of a mouth is created. Very clever.
Details: One 1x8 plate. Two sets of minifig hands and arms. One 1x1 tile with a clip on top. One dragon tail. That's it - 7 pieces. It all comes together perfectly. That dragon tail element came out in 1993 for the Dragon Masters faction of the Castle series, and although that style of dragon is now long gone (the company even changed , crocodiles using this element showed up in kits as recently as 2009. Yet we haven't seen anyone come up with such a clever alternate use for this before. So now that we all know - start flipping over dragon tails!
This year, Santa's got a new ride. Someone ought to make a movie about this model and use that as the tagline.
. The pigs don't stand a chance. Particularly if the other birds are also built out with studs facing every direction. The eyebrows are actually adjustable (the joys of mounting a 1x2 tile on top of small plate), but the really angry look captured here seems to capture the feel of the popular game surprisingly well. 
can control all of the motors (looks like 8 NXT motors and 4 Power Functions motors to me). Still - this is proof of concept for a type of four-legged walker we've never seen before. I can't wait to see one of these things crawling overhead at a LEGO or robotics event.
