Power to the Pieces: Detailing with Lego
When I think of what makes Lego a great medium, I truly believe it is the versatility of the pieces that makes Lego such a great tool for creation. A single stud-piece can be utilized not only in micro-building but also macro-building, within each instance providing a necessary level of detail for the scale the creation is built in. A micro-build like the one featured here shows how minimal room for detailing can occur but still provide a vivid and interesting visual. A macro build like this replica of the Big Ben in the London Lego Store is quite the opposite, using many bricks and singular pieces represent specific architectural nuances.
How does a pile of bricks turn into a well thought and crafted scene? With the help of some planning, trial and error, and a few happy accidents the bricks start to mold out a shape. When I plan out a setting for a picture or animation, I have to first stop and think to myself; What details do I want shown? With this set-piece that I wanted to make, I wanted the feel of an old waterway in a town. The first mental image that came to my mind are the arched bridges that gondolas go under in Italy. That was the basis for my framework attempt for this set-piece.
The creation process was simple, starting with a few designs I for-sure wanted to implement and then modified from there and built around those designs. The flooring, pipe, and arches were the main parts of the set-piece that I wanted to place when making this. Once the floor and arches were made, it was simply building up walls and swapping bricks to get placement right. When originally brainstorming for my set, I had decided that I wanted the flooring and wall to have a more realistic feel to them. I went through multiple different floor designs in the MOC (My Own Creation), finally settling on one that actually only rests on the baseplate and is not secured.
The way the floor is built, the floor is a wall on its side, with a ring of bricks around the wall to keep it in place. The most important tool to adding detail to a bland brick wall, is to add textured bricks throughout. Textured bricks like these pictured can provide that extra level of visual to really make a certain area in the MOC more visually appealing. SNOT (Stud Not On Top) bricks are also useful to place intermittently in the piece as various items can be placed onto them. In the scene I had created, I used certain SNOT pieces to hold plant pieces and make an ivy.
One of the most visually appealing aesthetics of Lego is the ability to make greebling to almost any capacity. A greeble can be anything that is designed to look as though it would have a purpose, but it really does nothing. It wouldn’t be aesthetically pleasing in a film for instance, if a spaceship cockpit had buttons for On/Off and Launch/Land only. While this is a hyper-simplified hypothetical, the idea remains the same. We add greebling to make what we’re looking at more visually interesting. One could have simplistic greebling like using rods to make wall piping, or an ultra-smothered-by-greebling creation like this Lego Millennium Falcon. Although I had not used greebling in my MOC, it is a technique that helps fill empty space and provides an illusion of greater detail.
Patterns are also a great way to create a visual within your MOC. Large or small, something that repeats will have a more pleasing visual to the eye than not. I used a small repetition of cylinder brick stacks to give a more ‘architectural’ design to the background wall. It broke up the area between the window pieces and gave more definition and shape to the look of the wall. Patterning of colors is also useful, as it breaks up the monotony of using a single color for an area. On cliff faces and rock formations, it can give the allusion that multiple materials are present in the formation. I had made an attempt to do so in the picture above, however I feel I could improve the look of the dark tan and grey bricks with better positioning. I also used color patterns on the flooring for the set-piece and specific textures as borders to better visualize it as a dock-type space.
One area that I myself am actively trying to improve upon is the simulation of water effects. In the scene I tried to create a smooth transition of transparent studs and blue-transparent studs for a in motion water effect. A viewer could imagine what I had created as water, however there are better effects that can be employed.
One of the current most popular Lego water effects is the Stud Flood. Stud Flood is when you take a large amount of transparent studs (1x1 round plate) and let them loosely pile. The large number gives a pleasing fluid look to the water, sometimes depth as well. My favorite display of the Stud Flood technique is this group MOC of scenes from The Odyssey. In their MOC, two separate instances of Stud Flood are used, the main ocean and the River Styx. I think that the sheer amount of Lego studs used for that ocean play into the scope of the MOC but also the tale the scenes had come from. It helps the MOC feel as grandiose as the journey Odysseus embarks upon.
This post by the TheBrickBlogger.com compiles a thorough list of different water techniques, many of which look much more impressive that what I have accomplished as of yet. The blogger included pictures of AFOL(Adult Fans of Lego) creations that exceptionally highlighted and showcased the techniques. I was very impressed by the multiple waterfall designs and the extraordinary use of clear pieces for hurricane-style torrents.
Overall I am pleased with how my current iteration of the set-piece has turned out.I came down to a design that I felt was detailed but not overwhelming. I was able to flesh out the more unique areas of the set-piece while still keeping uniform designs throughout. The spaces I created within the set-piece gave me the option to do quite varying scenes.
All three of these pictures below would look quite bland without the detailing techniques that I had used. There would be no greenery on the walls, which would also look very flat and unappealing. The piping would not be able to run from the wall and into the floor. The floor would instead look more akin to a standard Lego plate, and the water would only be the baseplate that the whole set piece resides on. It is thanks to the sheer versatility of Lego that these pieces can even be manipulated in a way that is not just stacking one on the other. This can be attributed to the stringent specifications, quality control, and idea of backwards compatibility for Lego bricks. Bricks are built to highly specific dimensions created in specialized injection molds and all pieces are designed to work with any other piece Lego creates before or after. So one could say that it is due to the Lego Group’s attention to detail that gave builders the platform to create intricate and detailed creations themselves.
