I spent part of the morning reworking Perry White’s office on the 4th floor of my Daily Planet model. I still need to add other details, and design some art for the monitor and walls, but I’m hoping to have it built in real brick by mid-September. There’s more photos below:

I got the remaining bricks to build the globe at the top of the 5th floor including the lettering and I’m beyond happy at how it turned out! I half expected it to be a nightmare but all those hours of moving around digital bricks and plates seem to have paid off, and it was actually quite easy.

There’s more photos below.

In semi-related news, I also got all the tiles for printing exterior signage and “newspaper” tiles and they’re ready to go to the printer. Here’s a few images:

I just completed building the 5th floor of the Planet following my own instructions, and it went perfectly. There’s a few shots from different angles including one of Lois smoking on the roof while Superman looks on disapprovingly, along with a render of the floor from Stud.io for comparison.

It’s especially nice to have it done today because tomorrow would have been my dad’s 85th birthday, and I know he’d have loved it. Miss you dad.

Now that I’ve cleaned up and reworked the clock for the top of the planet I also finished (mostly) reworking the fifth floor which now includes a door that opens behind the clock to allow access to the hub that controls the motor that rotates the globe on the top.

I’ve also added an air conditioning unit communications antenna array. I’m planning to create two large custom art billboards for each side of the clock tower, and a custom warning tile on the face of the bottom of the antenna. There’s more photos below.

It’s been a while since I posted a Planet update, and that’s been because I’ve been super busy (going to Bricks By The Bay) and getting set up to take on a collaborative build for that show in 2024 the theme of Once Upon a Time. For that build my part of the will be the Wizard of Oz, and I’ll be working with my resident expert, 8-year-old Henry.

But enough about that – I’ve also been revising the instructions for building the 5th floor of my Daily Planet MOC which is the roof where Lois smokes which includes a clock. In order to accomodate the Powered Up! motor and hub I wanted to add a hinged back wall that can be used to access the hub for recharging the battery. Once I had the design done I went ahead and ordered the parts to build the clock in real bricks and here’s the results, including another look at the entire facade with the clock at the top:

Overall, I’m absolutely thrilled with how it’s coming out, and I’m planning to order the parts to build the rest of the 5th floor this week or next, before moving on to building the globe on the top and starting to build the lower floors.

For the past week or so I’ve been working on adding a mailroom to the Daily Planet model. In real newspapers the mailroom is either adjacent or part of the room the papers are printed in. In the mailroom, mailers run machinery to insert ads and different sections into the folded papers and then they are put on pallets and sent out to the delivery trucks, etc. at various times, my father, grandfather, uncles and even my mom worked in mailrooms, and I even worked as a sub in a few for a while.

I decided to add a print room/mailroom to the Planet model for fun and you can see my rendition of a press to print the papers on, though the mailroom has been obviously simplified. I even created a minifigure of dad working there, along with some signage to go along with it (apparently the Planet is a dangerous place to work), and a pallet of papers ready to go and I chose the “Luthor Wins!” newspaper tile as the edition being printed. I’m thinking about adding more custom details and maybe even a locker, and a few more employees. You can see more photos below.

I’ve spent the last few sessions in Stud.io revising the instructions to build the dome, because I wasn’t completely happy with how easy they were to follow and there is a weirdness in the instruction generator around creating submodels for symmetrical objects like the dome sides. Truth be told I struggled with it for hours and wasn’t making much progress and then one Sunday morning a few weeks ago, my wife (a former software engineer as well) spent about 2 hours with me doing experiments creating submodels and then seeing exactly how the instructions are generated. The problem I was having was in creating the submodels in a separate file, then copying them into the dome file and having each side blow out into a completely different set of instructions.

In about an hour after spotting the common thread she suggested an approach that did exactly what I wanted and worked just like instructions for official LEGO sets. I plan to create a simple demo example along with the steps to create correct instructions and put them up here because I can’t imagine I’m the first person to struggle with it.

Besides that, I wanted to actually create a plan to allow the Planet globe to turn using a Powered Up! motor housed in the clocktower of the model and I hadn’t allowed for that in the previous build. This new set of instructions and the model in the photos here are the final approach and you can see a few aesthetic differences from the original build of the dome I did originally. Here’s a few more photos of the results:

I’ve also been working on the room where the papers were printed (interestingly called the mailroom) along with a model of the printing press to fit in the floor above the bullpen. My father had long worked in real newspaper mailrooms running the machinery used to add inserts for things like ads into the papers before they were sent out for delivery. I’ll be adding a LEGO minifigure of my dad to the model and something tells me he’d love it if he were able to see it.

For the past few days I’ve been drawing another Daily Planet “newspaper” tile design for my model featuring The Flash!

I actually draw these using Affinity Designer for iPad in color and then desaturate it for the B/W 2×2 tile, but this one came out so cute I’m toying with having a Daily Planet special edition with a full color exclusive. Or maybe I’ll use this color one on one of the 2×4 “TV News Monitors” in the bullpen.

I originally started drawing these using Procreate, a raster tool, because I thought it would be fun to try to do them on the iPad in the evenings, and it never occurred to me to see if there was a vector tool available until I was working on the Brainiac tile. Imagine my surprise to find that Affinity Designer, my go to tool for print work, had a tablet version.

I admit I was skeptical about doing a complex project on a tablet, but after a bit of learning how to do things using only touch gestures, I was completely sold, and the Apple pencil makes it feel similar to working on paper.

I created another decorative tile for the Daily Planet MOC I’m working on. A Daily Planet exclusive: Brainiac Attacks! to go with my previous designs that can be found here. It’s been a while since I posted one of these and that’s because I did the previous tiles as raster graphics (pixel drawings), and since I prefer to work with vectors because they can be scaled to any size without pixelation. And because I’m doing them on my iPad and then bringing them into my final editing on the computer, I was delighted to learn that my favorite tool for print work, Affinity Designer was available for the iPad. There’s been a pretty steep learning curve for me, but I’m thrilled with how well the software works on it.