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Lego haunted house

Cory Doctorow at 2:58 am Fri, Jan 28, 2011

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Mike Doyle's rotting Lego Victorian haunted house contains 50k-60k and took 450 hours to build. It's part of a series of Lego haunted houses that he's building, photographing and selling prints of.
In this series, I am most interested in textures and the effect of layering textures over each other. To this end, the absence of color helps the viewer to focus on just this. Lego colors tend to be pretty harsh and unrealistic for my tastes, so I stick to black/white and grays. Without color, we dive right into form, which is where I want you to be.

The tree was the most difficult texture to determine. I had thought by reversing the bricks - to show backs - worked best (you can see this in my previous post with the detail of the tree trunk). But very late into the process, a friend had advised me that it didn't look as real as everything else. What to do? Spend a week rebuilding the tree and perhaps money for more bricks or let well enough be. In the end, I found that hinge cylinders worked well to describe bark texture. Strung together, they conform to all sorts of organic configurations. Additionally, they could be skinned onto the trees that I had already built so I would not have to rebuild or spend much more money. Whew! It's not perfect, and I hope to try something similar but different in future, but for now, seemed pretty effective. The branches were created with ridged 3mm hose and a variety of droid arms as well as other technic connectors to give the appearance of branches.

Three Story Victorian with Tree (via Super Punch)
 
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I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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  • Ceronomus

    Wow… just wow.

    That this person is questioning the appearance of ANYTHING in that model dumbfounds me. I spent my childhood playing with virtually everything Lego put out, and I never could have even IMAGINED making something as awe-inspiringly breathtaking as this.

  • LeSinge

    Uh… What? That’s Lego? That’s insane.

  • Deidzoeb

    Contains 50k-60k bricks? 50k-60k dollars or euros? 50k-60k of information on a floppy?

  • Anonymous

    Deid, the parallel post on Brothers Brick cites bricks as the unit.