Greebling

[Delta62]

Detailing, or Greebling with Lego parts just perplexes me. Its definitely adds new dimensions to your builds, but its very hard to achieve. Just how do you do it?

[Space Police XVIII]

Lego is ALL greebling.

Example, take a look at the early airplane sets, compare them to more modern brickbuilt aircraft, let's ignore the ones with the huge molded fuselage bits.  Engine details, nav lights, a windshield with room for a pilot and a control panel, all that is greebling with a named purpose.  Building my space junk I do the same thing, making up technobabble as I go along.  This here long bit's part of the hyperdrive system, inside needs an air plant so here's some box with ventilation grilles and trans-green accents, and so on.

[Delta62]

Thanks, makes sense. Greebling on spaceships always baffles me because of its extreme detail. I tried googling but no luck there.

[dulsi]

I think a lot of it is practice. Try looking at other peoples designs. Steal whatever cool ideas you see. If you don't have the pieces in the color, try anyway. I've molded things with physical legos just so I know a digital model will work and then recolor it digitally as I like.

[Delta62]

I agree, it takes a lot of practice to acquire a skill. Good idea, i did find a lot of interesting designs on google but nothing on how to do it.

[Mr Greeble]

It is about just messing around with small parts in interesting ways. Also, having a lot of one piece is always helpful for interesting greebles. If you find an interesting piece at the Pick a Brick wall, be sure to grab a lot of them. Once you have them, try out all the different ways they can attach to other pieces and each other. If you haven't seen his stuff already, Peter Reid is a fantastic example. Good luck and happy greebling!

[dulsi]

6 hours ago, Delta62 said:

I agree, it takes a lot of practice to acquire a skill. Good idea, i did find a lot of interesting designs on google but nothing on how to do it.

Some people make their instructions available like on rebrickable. For threads on here, you could ask. Normally I just stare are the different pictures and try to figure it out. Admitted I can't always figure it out. I found a unicorn model with parts list for different sections. I could not figure out how some of it was built. I ended up just creating something similar with different pieces.

[Bricksnaps]

So I built a large trench run scene. It was 8ft and required a ton of greebling. 

 

I started by working the bigger pieces into the moc first, all over.

then I built little builds with tons of detail, random but if similar size and scope. I then attached them, again all over the moc. 

 

Then I would take sections and have a bin of small parts and make random patterns ( is that even a thing).

 

then I would fill in as much of the space as I could randomly. 

 

Tedious tedious work but so worth it.

 

to summarize- I built in layers in different sizes. Good luck.