Another batch of three old models, first a shoddy prototype wip, then a fairly boring model testing out an interesting but obsolete technique, and finally a really cool spacefighter with wings fanned out like bird-feathers!
Enjoy:

Although this moc is old, I still very much like it because the geometry turned out very well, so check it out:

Thanks to LDView, I also got around to post some decent pictures of my old Space P38-contest entry:

You might’ve noticed that I didn’t posted anything last week: I’m really busy with work until after Christmas, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll be able to invest in the page until then…

Here’s the last microscale fighter in the series. I really like the poseability you can achieve by combining the classic trans-clear SW-shooter satnd with a 1×1 bracket:

Almost too weak for stuff this size though :(

Uploaded a microscale fighter inspired by my latest Z-Fighters. While adjusting the lighting in levels, I discovered that you can actually save the settings and use them for more pictures:

It’s still a little cumbersome, as you have to open the file for every picture (Load…), but at least the lighting on the pictures will be more consistent - especially if you adjust the midpoint as well, instead of just squeezing the brightest and darkest tones together (which was the case with this moc.

If anybody know a good way to batch-adjust a bunch of pictures, I’d love to know (especially if you can add a watermark in the same process).

I have about 30 mocs from 2003-2004 awaiting upload, but haven’t really been able to come up with an idea on how to manage this huge task: Rendering with LDPAO/POV-Ray takes several hours per moc, and I’m not even going to consider rebuilding the moc and photographing it in real life. Using LDView turns out to be very fast (under an hour), and I’m quite satisfied with the result.

The primary reason it’s so much faster is that the program automatically save the snapshots with a name similar to the previous one (unlike digital photos). You can also set a fixed image size, and with the program’s automatic cropping, you almost doesn’t need photoshop…
Unfortunately the automatic cropping eats the outermost edgelines, so you still have to run all the photos through the usual crop & resize.

With most of my newer moc-presentations, I’m using 400×300 images in the text and linking to larger 800×600 versions. And frankly, I don’t think that anybody is actually clicking them anyways, so in the future, I think I’ll just cut out the doubles.

For a long time, I’ve been using MLCad to design specific details on mocs I’ve been building, but since December, I’ve begun designing complete craft directly in the program.
So far I’ve only found two of these designs worth rendering in lego (this and the black fighter crashtested a while back).

But I can definitly recommend this approach: firstly because designing is much faster in MLCad (or on paper), so generally you’ll have many more designs to choose among, once you’ve finally got the time to pick up the bricks, and secondly, you’re sure it’ll actually work, unlike the ‘vague idea that might look good’ that is the usual starting point when we design directly in lego:

Concept art mocs almost always pwns anything we can design directly in lego, but more about that later, when I’ve finished my colourscheme-investigation