Landscaping: a how-to article by DNL and SlyOwl

[Bruce N H]

Hey all,

Do your castle figs live in a world like this?

Would you rather their surroundings were more like this?


Check out DNL's new how-to article on landscaping with LEGO, full of tips and examples to put your Castle MOC into a more natural setting.

(Btw, no offense meant to the first examples given above. I simply wanted things with some figs on an unadorned baseplate.)

Edit - I've added an appendix by SlyOwl, derived from his long post on the second page of this thread.

Bruce

[footsteps]

Nicely done, with lots of good (and bad) examples. The tree/foliage section was quite illuminating.

There are two peeron links within the article that don't appear to be active -- may be a coding error.

Some of the rocks examples made me a bit sea-sick trying to focus on the undulating surfaces.

[Athos]

Nice article of examples. I think it would be better if it had some simple 'how-to' illustration of some of the techniques.

Steve

[The Shadow Knight]

Hahaha. The bad example on the right is mine! But I was taking pictures of the fig and I just used that as a background. I wasn't really concerned with the background that much, so please don't think that I can't build surroundings.

[Kevin1990]

its really an greate topic, but I think this is reallyfor advanced people I know I could never build mountains and differant hights like that It would take years for me not to menchan ALOT of bricks, and for kids who dont really have a full time job and a very low salarij this is basicly really inpossible, I do admit it looks way cool when you have levels in the sceneri but it would take alot of green bricks and slopes to create it.
so I am just keeping ti right now to the bassic plain low level stuff, and hopefully in a few years I can take a look at this topic again and finnaly build some great stuff like this. mostly the trees look amazing way beter then the standart lego tree's!

so all I got to say this is really great and the picture are amazing but its nothing for me

[shmitty]

VERY !! helpful although it woulda been kinda nice to see how some of these harder techniques r done cause i was looking at some of these think " how do they do that ". This post has given me a idea

[LegoLord.]

Cool idea. I love Chris Edward island.

[Garbageman13]

A very nicely done topic! I love landscaping, and was impressed with all the MOCs. I'll definatly look back on this when I need help on my landscaping.

Thanks Daniel, and God bless.

-Garbageman13

[legokilt]

I bow at the feet of the masters. Hope fully with some more parts (and money) I can make my castle's landscape more life-like. Thanks for posting this great article.

[outcast]

YES!

I have been waiting for a landscaping article for ages

Thank you so much.

[medieval_total_lego]

thank you dnl, very well done!
what about increasing the utility of this article with roads and paths?
Marco

[Teherean]

I already had a small sneak preview from DNL through PM, but it was nowhere near as awesome! Let's try some of this stuff.

[Bruce N H]

@Alan - oops, the coding error was mine (I used forum codes rather than html for the links). It's fixed now. Thanks for pointing that out.

@Shadow Knight - I hope no offense was taken as none was meant. I just wanted a couple of pics of figs on plain baseplates, and so intentionally chose things where there was no pretense of landscaping (rather than choose something where someone actually tried but did a bad job). That's why those two pics aren't clickable links, but the positive examples I gave in my initial post are, because I didn't want peoplel to follow the links as if I were casting aspersions.

Bruce

[Memsochet]

its really an greate topic, but I think this is reallyfor advanced people I know I could never build mountains and differant hights like that It would take years for me not to menchan ALOT of bricks, and for kids who dont really have a full time job and a very low salarij this is basicly really inpossible, I do admit it looks way cool when you have levels in the sceneri but it would take alot of green bricks and slopes to create it.
so I am just keeping ti right now to the bassic plain low level stuff, and hopefully in a few years I can take a look at this topic again and finnaly build some great stuff like this. mostly the trees look amazing way beter then the standart lego tree's!

so all I got to say this is really great and the picture are amazing but its nothing for me

I think you might be very surprised as to what you can accomplish with very little bricks. I would even venture to guess that the very large mountain scenes don't actually use much more brick than what is seen on the outside. When I have time I'll post some pics I have of some rock-scaping I did for the base of a castle I was working on(it's still a WIP, but currently boxed while I focus on other things). Basically I used a bit of SNOT(several pairs of http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItem.asp?P=4213 and http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItem.asp?P=4315), a line of 4x plates, a line of 2x brick down one side of the plates and about 100-200 slope bricks per side(that might sound like a lot until you actually see that it's about a sandwich baggy full). The effect looks pretty good, and hides the fact that I was using raised base plates for the foundation of my castle. Now each side did take about 2-3hrs to do, but that was so I could make it look as random as possible.

[Kevin1990]

its really an greate topic, but I think this is reallyfor advanced people I know I could never build mountains and differant hights like that It would take years for me not to menchan ALOT of bricks, and for kids who dont really have a full time job and a very low salarij this is basicly really inpossible, I do admit it looks way cool when you have levels in the sceneri but it would take alot of green bricks and slopes to create it.
so I am just keeping ti right now to the bassic plain low level stuff, and hopefully in a few years I can take a look at this topic again and finnaly build some great stuff like this. mostly the trees look amazing way beter then the standart lego tree's!

so all I got to say this is really great and the picture are amazing but its nothing for me

I think you might be very surprised as to what you can accomplish with very little bricks. I would even venture to guess that the very large mountain scenes don't actually use much more brick than what is seen on the outside. When I have time I'll post some pics I have of some rock-scaping I did for the base of a castle I was working on(it's still a WIP, but currently boxed while I focus on other things). Basically I used a bit of SNOT(several pairs of http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItem.asp?P=4213 and http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItem.asp?P=4315), a line of 4x plates, a line of 2x brick down one side of the plates and about 100-200 slope bricks per side(that might sound like a lot until you actually see that it's about a sandwich baggy full). The effect looks pretty good, and hides the fact that I was using raised base plates for the foundation of my castle. Now each side did take about 2-3hrs to do, but that was so I could make it look as random as possible.

Mm thanks well show me some picture and I would deffently try it :O anything for a beter landscaping:D