Rebuild the Sydney Opera house as The Robotics Lab, the new high-tech institute in town, specializing at mech prototyping and AI. Take a sneak peek at the latest robot the folks at the lab are building - and if you want, use more parts to finish it!

Transforming this set into a 32w modular was certainly a challenge. As opposed to the Big Ben, which has a lot of small parts that lend themselves nicely to decorations, the Sydney Opera House has a large amount of specialized pieces and technic parts that don't really fit well with a standard modular. 

When I saw the amount of ball joints included, I immediately remembered my Bionicle MOCing days and thought about making a mech out of them. But I still wanted a modular to add to my city as well, which presented an interesting dilemma. I wanted to use the white roof pieces as armor plates, but their scale meant that the mech would be several feet tall if built like that. And there was no way the modular would be able to house it. I thought about making a scene where the mech was destroying a half-damaged building, but that seemed hard to incorporate into people's towns making it look out of place. So in the end I went with a solution of a Robotics Lab, where pieces of the Mech are being constructed and assembled. That way there is a nice scene in the modular, but it's tucked away and not clashing with the standard town aesthetic. And in case anyone wants to finish the design, they only need to add a body and an arm to have the finished product.

The large amount of dark windows are well suited to a "secret" project, keeping it away from prying eyes. With no doors in the set at all, I had to make due with brick-built ones using hinge pieces from the set. I am especially proud of the tilted roof windows that ended up being perfectly LDD legal, which is something that's always a worry when you design with real bricks first.

The first floor has the legs mounted on a wall, ready to be attached to the final body, as well as an arm being worked on by a group of engineers. There's also the AI sign, just in case it wasn't clear to everyone what's going on here.

 

The second floor (and the roof) have no floor, accentuating the verticality of the building, leaving enough space for the Mech to be assembled (though they will probably have to airlift it out when it's done). There is an engineer doing final checks on the head of the Mech, using a platform and some adjustable lights.

In the end, I am really hope as to how this project turned out. I may go and use the remaining parts to actually build the body and recreate the destruction scene described above, though that will probably take me some time. I hope Lego will release a new large scale Creator Expert set soon so that I can try rebuilding it as well (the Roller Coaster isn't really a modular material :D).

The instructions are available on my rebrickable page, where you can also check out some other cool alternate models.

https://rebrickable.com/users/Huaojozu/mocs/

That's a rather unusual and a futuristic modular! It's difficult to make a good modular because of the big quantities of specialised parts but I really like how this turned out. Great shaping and SNOTing on the façade and nice interior! I have a suggestion though: switch to Lego, I promise you won't regret!  But if your reply to one comment is correct, I have nothing to say except saying great job!

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It's actually not the L**** set, although I understand where you're coming from. I tend to buy Bulk bricks at auction sites and garage sales and unfortunately, even when advertised, parts of the content tend to be off-brand. 

I could have rebuilt this with "official" Lego bricks but I didn't want to take apart my other MOCs and sets - the main reason I built it at all is because I like to show that all of my designs CAN actually be built and aren't just LDD based.

And as far as supporting Lego goes, if you want, I can send you pics of my collection of LEGO boxes ;)

 

Edited June 2, 20186 yr by LegoModularFan

On 6/2/2018 at 10:08 PM, LegoModularFan said:

That's a rather unusual and a futuristic modular! It's difficult to make a good modular because of the big quantities of specialised parts but I really like how this turned out. Great shaping and SNOTing on the façade and nice interior! I have a suggestion though: switch to Lego, I promise you won't regret!  But if your reply to one comment is correct, I have nothing to say except saying great job!

Thanks for the kind words. Building this I realized that I don't really like making non-corner buildings. And while thinking about it, I also realized that Town Hall was the last true non-corner modular from Lego. Every non-corner building that came afterwards had some sort of a design quirk - be it the hallway in DO or the slightly cut side of PR and DD. For the "standard" modulars, you can only really take a picture of the front or the back - you can never have two interesting sides in the picture - and that means your available perspectives are limited.  But for the corner buildings or the cut ones like PR and DD, you can take a picture from the side, without it looking weird the way the old modulars do. I feel that's the biggest lesson I learned from this MOC.

And as far as your second comment goes, I learned my lesson trying to get a discount and suffice it to say I've burned myself enough to stick to S@H. I can't wait for the next D2C Creator Expert set to come out so that I can get my hands on it ASAP (Roller Coaster doesn't count, though huge props to anyone who can make a modular out of that).

a very distinguished shaping