Working on my first MOC that's actually held my interest enough to actually "finish" it, but I can't decide on how to do the water... I like the herringbone thing but even that means 166 pieces, doing it as a grid of 1x1 tiles would be so much worse. In case you're wondering it's Hotel Adriano from Porco Rosso. I need to tweak some things - lots of the structure is 2 layers of plates (it started out 1 brick high but I wanted to change the colour of the top layer after I'd developed it a lot, so I used Stud.io's super helpful split and merge functions to achieve that) so I might add a third layer so they can become bricks again. I'd also really like to raise everything but the docks and water by one plate then raise the docks by half a plate so that the docks are no longer flush with the water and the seam between the docks and "stairs" (the 3x1 slopes on the bottom face) is either smoothed out or reduced. I think the garden also needs work but designing tiny foliage was fun. Edit: oh and I want to make some teeny tiny boats or a seaplane, but haven't considered that yet.
This is the "inspiration", if you can call it that when I'm trying to replicate it:
Edit: Apart from tweaking the garden and adding crucial supporting bricks under the water, I think this is pretty much done:
Offsetting the height of the docks by half a plate
really adds to it, it's so satisfying, but it wasn't super straightforward. This is what the space under the water looks like:
So I have to have a headlight brick with the hollow stud up, suspended between a pair of other headlight bricks, to create the half plate offset, then I put two plates on each hollow stud to bring it up to the correct level. Doing the base this way is probably really expensive, though, because it means I need 16x24 studs of plates on the bottom, a brick height perimeter plus MILS-like supporting bricks then 16x24 studs of plates again except with the shapes of the docks punched out. Never mind having over 100 1x2 blue tiles on top but I think that looks good enough to be worth doing.
I did want to put the hotel itself on jumpers but to get it at the correct height and with enough structural integrity I would've needed to punch the entire hotel's shape out of the blue plate layer which would've made it quite fussy and not as strong, so I have unfortunately had to settle for having the entire hotel on studs. It's probably quite over-built but it's my first MOC and I'm quite pleased with how it's turned out. I also think I'll do MILS-style technic holes in the corners in case I want to do any more models like this.
What can I do to make it better? You can't really see it but the water behind the hotel has a medium azure stripe, it's the bottom right design from the first image (I thought the others were too much), is it worth keeping or should I just make the top all blue? Also, I want to make some boats and add jumpers so I can add planes and maybe clouds like those from Pursuit of Flight.
Edit 2:
Maybe this is too much, but to make it somewhat "playable" I figured it could have some optional dressing. Still not sure about the stripe in the water, either. It's turned out better than I was expecting, but honestly I wasn't expecting much! Oh and I changed the colour of the roof tiles but the little, um... Hut? Out in the garden has a different colour because I couldn't get that piece in the correct colour, not sure if I'll sub it with something else or just make do. Looking at it side by side with the still from the film I wonder if the hotel should be a plate or two taller?
Edit 3, I kinda knew I wasn't truly done with this - I spent some time last night tweaking the top layer of the island to make more of it green, I don't really like how that means the wall is green around the edge all the way around but I want the top to be green because it looks weird having a tall tree standing on concrete, as if it's in a pot or something.
I'm also now considering designing the layer that's hidden below the water to include some easter eggs (so far all I've got is a 1x1 red tile, supposed to represent the piece of the plane Curtis finds after their first encounter) plus some rock texture around the island, and I think I'll at least try to dress the headlight bricks that offset the docks to make them look like they're part of the actual real life structure. Also I wonder if there's a more efficient way to achieve that offset, maybe I could hide a half plate offset into the rock texturing... Hmm!
