Hi everyone,

 

After a few weekends of building I finished the Droid Factory part of my Geonosis landscape.

I am waiting for one part to arrive in a BL order. At Lego World in October I will film it to show all the mechanisms. 

The picture is taken in the dining room (that is not something I do usually). 

For more pictures look into my Flickr album.

 

Sander

Great build! The platform looks cool, do you have any pics of the interior?

Thanks! 

There is no interior. The Geonosian Fighter is inside a hanger, but there’s not much to see. 

I remember seeing your Geonosian Fighter and thinking it looked really nice, but never would I have thought it would get such a monumental "garage"! You've managed to create an incredibly fine piece of landscaping that really captures the feel of Geonosis like few MOCs have done before for me. And that without even relying on the cliches that define the planet like the orange haze and those tall and curvy spires. You seem to really have understood what makes Geonosis Geonosis at a more subtle level and you've managed to translate it into bricks so perfectly that I expect a whiff of steam to escape from one of those holes any minute now!

What jumps out to me when looking at your creation is the abundance of long, vertical lines. They are everywhere, but they are subtle enough not to overwhelm the viewer with too much contrasted details. And those vertical lines are interrupted by a myriad of even finer horizontal lines. They're a natural result of the features of the bricks you used, but they read as the perfect analog to the texture of those rocks on Geonosis, so you chose your parts very well. It's admirable that you really embraced their texture and used them everywhere in your MOC.  imagine that it becomes a bit boring to keep building the same stuff for a long time and that it becomes tempting to throw in some other techniques along the way.  But here, mixing in different techniques in random places would probably feel quite unnatural, because in reality all bricks represent the same material that has undergone the same weathering processes, so it's only logical that they have the same basic look. Of course other textures can be present in your model, but it's best when they're concentrated on a place that makes sense and not one-off things randomly strewn about, like those singular curved slopes or wedged slopes or that one brick just above the Lego World 2012 brick. Those small deviations tend to jump out as a bit jarring and unnecessary to me. In other places, you show great mixing of different textures in bigger patches though. For example, towards the right corner the surface starts to look a lot smoother which makes sense because that's were sand and dust would be likely to collect. Also, you kept the sand red parts you used together instead of sprinkling them around, which feels much more natural, as if they represent veins of another mineral poking through. It echoes the fact that nature might be random, but not noisy in a way...

Apart from using a mix of different textures without going overboard, there are other things that make your creation interesting. The naturally incorporated holes in the rocks and the walkway are obvious examples, but there is another one that I really like: the overall shape of the rocks. In the picture you posted here, I really love how you have that part of the cliff coming down at a gentle angle and then receding. There is an interesting overall shape in your rockworks that elevates it above just a study in textures. And it has the same quality as the rocks in the pictures of Geonosis: steep at the bottom, gentler at the bottom and grouped together in lobes. I think you coud have gone a bit farther in that last aspect, to exaggerate a bit and make the cliff less flat but have more pronounced protrusions from it (so that when you look at it from the top, it looks more wavy) to really mimick that feel of the original even more, and you could even put those lobes at an angle with each other to bring even more variation (maybe something for a smaller diorama that does not need to come apart in baseplates?). Now, especially your back wall looks a bit flat, but I imagine that is largely due to the constraints of the base and stuff. Talking of the back, that's also a nice flight of stairs ou built, which look especially great because of their angle. The only thing that bugs (pun not intended) me is that they don't look as if they were hewn from the cliff. Now it just looks as if a part of the cliff face has jumped forward were the stairs are. To me, it would make more sense if the cliff face above the stairs would have another texture because in that spot a lot of rock would have been removed in order to make the stairs 'appear' from the rocks.

I'm probably not talking sense, anymore, but if there's anything you need to understand, it is that I really like what you did here, showing us a unique piece of landscaping. I hope your Geonosis project still has many more pleasant surprises like this for us in store!

looking forward to have more detail show in this Oct. then, love your MOC

@BEAVeR: thank you!

First my compliments on such a detailed response and analysis of my build.

The left front XL baseplate and the right back XL baseplate have a big mechanism that is removable.

At the front it created a limitation in space for rocks to form, which led to using a lot of slopes of 3 bricks high.

To keep it subtle, I used the same structure with tiny variation in the entire mountain.

The top is a bit flat but I had to end the rocks at some point, because I was almost out of slopes.

 

The part with the stairs was an excuse to build a movable Geonosian Canon, but it looks probably weird from this point of view. If you look straight at it, it looks better.

Thanks again for commenting.

@JoeChu1980: Thanks!

I look forward to it as well.

Lego World is already three weeks ago, but I was a bit busy with sorting Lego and preparing other builds for other events.

I had some great reactions from the visitors during the seven days at Lego World. 

There were some trouble with the mechanisms in the Droid Factory, which means that I do not have a video of the action inside the Droid Factory.

Some pictures of the landscape:

The battle of Geonosis

The Droid Factory

For more pictures, see my Flickr album.

If you want to see more pictures of Lego World, see my other Flickr album.

 

Questions and feedback are always appreciated.