Rapidly moving forward to 50% being finished...

I've been working on the model again for about 3 hours and have achieved quite some progress. Some of the things that appeared to be wrong on the second floor have been corrected and I've managed to get the first floor to a near-ready state as well. Between the first and second floor there are a lot of similarities, but on the other hand a lot of differences as well. The first floor will house the project managers and the consultants.

More details will follow later, but for now I'll keep the story short and let the pictures speak for them self.

The work continues...

It's been a few days again since the last update on the model, but no news in this case doesn't mean that nothing has happened in the meanwhile. I've been working hard on finishing up some elements on the 3th floor canteen. After I received an update on the official document of the design of the building I now know most (if not all) of the official colors that will be used for the various elements of the building, which meant it was time to do some corrections on this as well. Currently I don't have any new renders of the canteen floor though. I will try to get them online later this week after correcting some of the final things to be done.

Another part of the building I've been working on is the floor right below the canteen. This floor will be home to our webmasters and system administrators. The walls have been reworked in order to replace the plates in the inside of the outer walls with bricks and to remove the attachment parts for the windows as I chose to change the way the windows will be attached. Beside this, all of the inner walls have been added to the second floor as well as most of the interior of the floor.

In the upcoming days I hope to be able to completely finish up on the 3rd floor canteen as well as the floor below, which would mean that approximately 20% of the design work would be finished.

For those of you that know where to find me and have access to our office, there will be a prototype model to show what I've been working on and the way I designed some of the elements that you can find in the office model. Feel free to come by and have a look at it.

Tomorrow I will try to post an article about the design of the cabinets that can be found on the second floor renders.

First floor now furnished...

After finishing up a couple of things on the outer shell and correcting some of the errors that were in the model I started to disassemble the model into smaller models by separating the model in separate floors. After this it finally was time to start working on the inner walls as well as the interior. Which I have been working on the last few days for the top floor canteen and terrace.

Most of the interior is now in place for that floor and I consider the floor near finished at this point. There are a couple of things that need some reviewing and improvement, but all in all, I'm getting close to what it should be like.

Below you can see a couple of new renders of just the top floor with it's interior.

Nearly finished on the outer shell!!!

After some hard work last evening I have nearly finished the bodyshell. The last things to do now is finished the final parts and correcting some things that aren't as they should be yet. This means adding doors, hatches, vents, replacing a few of the windows, find a better solution for the glass facade at the front entrance, finishing the middle glass column and so on...

In other words, there's still a lot to be done about the outer shell but at least it getting close to a ready state. After I finish the body shell I will look into the interior of the building. This will mean that I will split up the model into it's separate sub models of each floor and will then go through them one by one to create the interior. I reckon this take me a couple of weeks to complete.

For now there's a new render of the model for you to look at. Note that the chimney of the fireplace and the fireplace itself are currently just try-outs to see what they will look like and need some work in order to properly fit in. It's not entirely to scale yet either. Beside that the railing on the terrace is also temporary and a try-out to see how it will work on the model. Currently it's just loose pieces that aren't attached to anything at this point.

A bit of work done again...

Unfortunately due to lack of time in the end of last week as well as this weekend I've not been able to do as much I wished to. Despite that some work has been done on the model. I have finished another 2 half floors and started on the final floor to be done. This one is a bit more complex then all the others due to the fact that it is partially open to house a terrace. Tomorrow I will hopefully be able to work on that and finish that floor as well, which would mean that except for some rework that needs to be done the outer shell is mostly finished.

I have made a quick render of the current state of the project. This time only one from the backside as there have been no changes to the front of the model at this time. Except for a temporary roof that I placed there.

A while ago I posted an estimate of the number of parts needed to build the outer shell. Not that I've gotten a bit further on the model I rechecked to current number of parts and there are around 24.000 parts in the model already, without the last floor being completed at this point. The previous estimate mentioned an expected 22.000 to 25.000 parts, which most likely I'm going to exceed. Considering the current partcount and the work to do before the outer shell is finished, I think the final part count for the outer shell will be around 28.000 to 30.000.

I will post an update on the project as soon as I have the last floor finished. See you next time.

Todays update of the progress.

And here we are again...

Unfortunately not that much has been done today, partly due some other obligations, but also because I've been experimenting around with the stairs, which cost me quite some time in order to find a way to keep the to scale and work out in the building (it's hard to get the height and distance covered if you need to rely on fixed size parts). In the end I found a way to create the stairs and to attach them to the pieces of wall and flooring that are attached to the glass column in the middle. Except for the ground level stairs they're all in now. Something that is still to be done about the stairs though is to find a way to add the safety walls to them. I still have to decide on how to manage that and it might even require me to redesign the stairs after all.

Also I've been able to finish up on the ground floor walls on the left side of the building and I've been correcting the height of the walls on the glass column, though the glass itself isn't the correct height at this point yet. Next to this I've also done some preparations for the 1st, 2nd and 3th third floor. The floors of these storeys is finished as well as the positioning of the windows. I hope to be able to get at least one or 2 of them finished regarding the walls, which would mean that in a few more days from now I should be able to get most of the outer shell of the building finished.

By now the parts count grows quite rapidly. By now we are talking about around 17.000 parts already and that's with 3 floors still missing. I expect the outer shell of the building to require around 22.000 to 25.000 parts to be complete! And then I'm not even talking about all of the interior of the building yet.

Here you can see the current state of the project:

In the render above you can see that I added some temporary paving around the building. On the top floor you can also notice two of the stairs that are in the building. The building contains a total of 14 stairs, spread in two separate staircases.

Here you can see the back side of the building, note that glass facade that has been added here. You can also see some more of the stairs going from floor to floor from the left side of the building to the right (and back). You can see that the stairs on the left side on the image above has a wide space between the stairs. In this area an elevator will be build.

After a couple hours of hard work...

After a couple hours of hard work and after finally finding a somewhat faster method building the walls, I've been able to make quite some progress. Yesterday I got no further then the walls of the ground floor. So first thing to start on today was creating the ceiling in the area above the pillars, which forms part of the support of the storeys above.

The ceiling was quite a tricky part to design as there is no real way that I can support it from the bottom and it can't be thicker then 2 plates. Though giving in on the accuracy I found a way to at least somewhat supporting it on the white columns, and I don't think it looks that bad.
The second and third floor where quite easy to create, just straight forward like the ground floor with the exception that there is no corner removed like the ground floor. They were as well identical looking at the windows, the disadvantage was that due to the sizes of the modules, the plates are not identically positioned in the second and third floor. This meant that instead of just copying the entire module, I entirely needed to recreate the walls in order to keep them properly aligned.

The forth floor was somewhat different when looking at the window arrangements. At the beginning of the right wall there are 2 windows left out. And according to the architects drawings there should also be 3 windows removed from the end of that wall, but on that point the design drawings aren't too clear, so I need to see if I can find some more information on what it exactly looks like there.

All in all I'm quite satisfied with the result so far and now that there is more finished you can really see the effect of the mixed colors used for the walls. I think it looks great and stops the walls from being to flat, it adds to the realism.

From now on I will start making 2 renders when I post an update here. One from the front-right and one from the rear-left. This because I'm now getting to a point that design features of the back start getting hidden as well as that I will soon start working on the other half of the building.

Next thing I will start working on now is correcting some of the things that aren't as they should be yet. For example, the area on the first floor needs to have a door added to the wall. And if I feel up to it I might already start on some paving on the baseplates around the building, at least in the part that is getting closed to finished by now. I also need this in order to correct a technical issue with the white pillars, as currently they don't fit on the baseplate and need to be raised slightly.

An extra 1000 parts added again...

It's amazing how many parts it takes just to build a single wall. Tonight I've been working on the model for a bit, though I didn't have as much time as I hoped for. But despite that the model got a bit further now. All in all I've been adding about another 1000 parts to the model, which means that the walls of the ground floor on the right side are now nearly finished. All that is left to do there is to add the ceiling of the part where the white columns are.

Below you can see the progress. I also added a thumbnail of the latest render I made to the righthand column of the blog as well. This way it automaticly updates as soon as I upload the new images.

Considering how it goes now and the fact that the weekend is coming closer, I hope to be able to finish at another floor (but hopefully 2) by the end of the weekend.

Technical insight into the 157 windows of the model.

Todays post will give you some information on the design of the windows of the scale model of the office as for the outside of the model this is one of the most common and distinctive elements to be seen in/on the walls. In total there are 157 windows in the walls (not counting the glass facade at the entrance and the glass column in the middle of the building). About 140 of these are of the small type I will be telling you about below, the rest of them are somewhat higher (but are have the same construction).

Here you can see a window separated from the walls together with the elements that attach it to the wall. The red bricks are Technic bricks 1 x 2 with 1 hole, which have a 1/2 length pin to which the window parts attach.

The windows are made using the so called SNOT technique, which means "Studs Not On Top", in other words, different from regular Lego building, the bricks are place sideways, causing the studs alto be on the side. Using this method you can have make advantage of the sizes of the Lego bricks that differ when you compare the height of a brick to the width of a brick. In the case of the windows the way I used the bricks resulted in the proportions being close to the windows in the actual building (at least according to the design drawings of the architects).

When you look at how the window is positioned you might notice that the window is slightly moved into the wall by half a stud length, which is possible due to the fact that I decided to have walls that are 2 studs wide as that allows me to color the inside of the walls different from the outside.

Looking at the pieces used to make the windows you can see that the base of the windows consist of 4 1 x 2 plates with one stud (in gray) and a tile 1 x 4 (in white). On top of that there is a construction for the smaller lower glass pieces that are created using the SNOT method of building, that consist of a plate 1 x 2 (in white), a brick 1 x 2 (in trans-clear), 2 plates 1 x 2 (in white), a brick 1 x 2 (in trans-clear) and finally a tile 1 x 2 in white. On top of this there is a plate 1 x 4 and a tile 1 x 4 (both white) which have no real attachment to the rest of the construction and will hopefully stay in place just by friction of the parts around these parts. The layer above that is similar to the small glass pieces with the difference that they are 1 x 4 pieces instead of 1 x 2 pieces. And finally there are 2 white plates 1 x 2 with one stud (in white) on top of that (these are fixed in place by a 2 x 4 plate which is in the wall.

An overview of the parts used in the window...

Work continues...

I've been working on the model for a few hours again. In the past few days I've been thinking about the walls and how to improve them so that they don't appear to be flat red surfaces and also to solve the issue of the ugly mix of plates and bricks around the windows. The solution I now chose is to replace all bricks by plates and use duotone in this so that the appearance of the wall becomes somewhat more realistic like actual bricks.

Unfortunatly this change requires me to start all over again from the floor up, which stops me from making any progress on the next storeys, but I believe it's well worth the effort.

Here you can see an example of what the walls now look like, when only using plates.

I hope to be getting close to the point where I was before in one or two days work.

Some statistics about the model:
Size: 92x80x44 studs which equals to about 73x63x35 cm (this is not the final size)
Parts: ~1600 pieces

Start of moccing...

Hi all,

Hereby my first post on this blog and also the first display of my projects. I will kick off with a project I'm currently working on, which is a scalemodel of the new office that will be build for the company I work with.

The model is a mini-fig scale (1:40) model. Which will be fully furnished with as much as detail that confirms to reality as possible. To scale the model will be about 100x80x50 centimeters in size, which includes the building and outdoor space featuring the parkinglot among other details.

The model is currently being made with virtual bricks by use of MLCad, which is a CAD program specificly designed for virtual building with Lego. The renders are made using L3P/L3PAO with POV-ray as renderer.

The progress achieved so far has taken an effort of about 12 to 16 hours. And the planning is to have the outside shell finished by the end of this month (November 2008).

The building will consist of 4 storeys which are configured in a stepwise way in the two parts of the building seperated by a glass column in the middle. When finished the model should be able to open by hinges on the first floor in the glass column on both the left and right side, so that it is possible to see the inside of the building. Next to that it will be possible to take of each storey as a seperate module.

In the coming time it will be possible to track the progress of the project and occasionally I will try to show some more specific details on certain design features of both the actual building as well as the Lego scale model.

Hope to see you again,
Dryw Filtiarn