[MOC] Orc's Guarded Cottage

This MOC has a chance to become an official LEGO set! This orc hut is taking part in the Bricklink Designer Program 6 competition.

Vote here on the Bricklink website.

What is it about? In short, you had to design a LEGO set, gather some AFOLs votes and if the LEGO team like it, it can be released as a limited set (quantity up to 30,000).

Since I love fantasy, I decided to go in this direction. I have always been fascinated by the world of orcs in the style of WarCraft or Lord of the Rings. I have already built a few things in this style, such as Orc Tower and I have been thinking about building a classic orc cottage for a long time.

Designing this set was quite a challenge. You could only use bricks that will be in production in 2025. It was also necessary to create instructions that would have a good building flow and meet a million design and construction requirements. Later, the LEGO team reviewed it, gave very positive feedback and allowed it to the competition.

The rest of the text is below the video, keep reading ;)

I started the prototype of the cottage by designing the roof. For me, it was the basis of a characteristic orc's building. While I figured out what and how from real bricks quite quickly, building it virtually in the program, where I also had to design instructions, turned out to be quite complicated. A lot of mathematics came into play here. Sitting with a calculator and understanding how the program calculates rotation angles took some time and I made several approaches to the subject. Thanks to Jerac and Jetboy for the tips how to solve the problem.

The rest went quite quickly, I knew exactly what I wanted to build and how it should look. The whole thing was created in the software. The only problem was the availability of parts. It often turned out that some completely ordinary brick which I have a lot in my LEGO drawers, was unavailable. That is, unavailable in the bricks palette 2025 from which the set for the competition should be built. Because of this, simple things had to be built in a complicated way, or the concept of a given element had to be changed.

Because of this for example - cabinets, door/frame, well or mount had many versions with different bricks.

The availability of heads was also a big problem. Unfortunately, the happy alien heads from the LEGO City line were the only ones with a green color. The only ones that even slightly resemble orcs. I played a bit by covering their smiling mouth with various accessories. But these are still not the orcs that live in my imagination. Mighty, raw warriors.

Once I finished the virtual model I started creating instructions. This involved further modifications, because not everything could be easily presented in the subsequent building steps and the flow of building was lost.

I also ordered some bricks on Bricklink to build my project with real LEGO. Due to the use of many new or rare elements, I did not have everything in my home resources. I had to get some elements all the way from Estonia (I am in Poland) because their availability on the market was second to none.

While building the whole model in real life the project got more modifications. Often things that seem to work well in the software did not work well in reality. For example - they fall off after a mere touch, or they simply do not look as attractive. Sometimes it also works the other way around. Something looks great in real life but in renders it does not look very interesting.

I finished everything a few days before the deadline for submitting projects. All that was left was to take photos (optional, but for me it was mandatory - in my opinion the cottage looks much better in reality than in the software) and renders (mandatory). I am not very happy with those renders. I do not have much experience in rendering in stud.io, and I did not have the more power nor time to transfer it to other programs.

The application was finally sent, I waited about a week for the LEGO Bricklink team to accept it. Each such application is analyzed, it is checked whether it meets all the conditions. At this stage, you can also be asked to make changes to the project. Fortunately, there was nothing to change in my case, I got feedback that they really liked my cottage and it was accepted into the competition.

Now is the voting stage (until 18.10.2024). You can vote for my work on the Bricklink website (click here). All you need is a Bricklink account (you probably do, since you're reading this blog ;)) and click the "Love it" smiley under the photos.

Thanks in advance, every vote counts!

P.S. The final winners (there will be five of them) will be chosen by the LEGO Bricklink team. They will be guided by the votes and will choose the finalists from the most popular items. Keep your fingers crossed!

And here are the pictures and renders of my Orc's Guarded Cottage.

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