Hey all,
Lots of posts this month as we celebrate Star Trucker’s first anniversary. If you haven’t checked in for a while be sure to have a peek at what we’ve shared so far…
Monster Dave also spent some time chatting with renowned sci-fi aficionado, The Spaceshipper, about the creation of Star Trucker. So if you wanna read the interview and see some rare concept art be sure to check it out over at his Patreon where it will be free to view for a few more days…
BUT…for this post we’ve switched the process around and got in touch with Jürgen Wittner (who some of you might know from earlier in the year) about his incredible Star Truck MOC.
Jürgen was kind enough to answer some questions and give us the low-down on himself and his build…
Thanks for taking time to answer some questions for us. To start with, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into making Lego MOCs?
Hi, I‘m Jürgen, 48 years old, from Berlin, Germany. I’m an architect and work for an office that mostly plans and builds public and cultural buildings, like universities, schools, libraries, etc.
As a kid, Lego was - together with playing video games - one of my favorite indoor games. At the beginning, I earned a lot of Lego from my two older brothers, later my parents bought me some Lego City and Technic sets. I always loved to play and build my own stuff after I‘ve built the sets according to the instructions.
Then at some point during my early teenage years I lost interest in Lego and started new hobbies, like restoring old cars with my older brother, going to Hip Hop jams and drawing Graffiti styles with my friends.
Around 5 1/2 years ago, during the first Corona lockdown in Germany, I rediscovered Lego as a hobby and started to build my first Lego set (the 2019 playscale Millennium Falcon) after 30 years, with the intention to modify it. That ended up with a complete rebuild of the model with the tripple part count.
And that sucked me right into the big rabbit hole of Lego MOCS....
Can you tell us the story behind the Star Trucker MOC?
In our family we all love to play video games and we also love to watch let’s plays of video games. So, one year ago, my 9 year old son and I stumbled over a let’s play of one of our favorite streamers about Star Trucker and we immediately loved the look of the game. At some point my son said, that it would be cool, if I could build one of the space trucks in LEGO.
As I am always on the lookout for new ideas that I could realize with Lego, I was immediately on fire for this idea.
The same evening I started designing the MOC…
First I started with the truck unit. Since there are different color variations of the truck in the game, I had a certain amount of freedom in choosing the color scheme. So I decided to reproduce more or less the color pattern of the starter truck, but then changed the individual colors until I liked the color combination and all the necessary parts were available in that colors.
Since I really like the color combination of the Romanian flag and blue, yellow, and red, together with black and white, are the classic, original Lego colors, I thought that the “Lego retro colors” would go well with the fantastic retro look of the game.
So I designed the truck in white with blue, yellow, and red stripes, and the trailer completely in blue with white accents. In my opinion, that fits well with the colors used in the game and still has a personal touch.
That color choice also matched perfectly with the red housing of the hyper jump gate with its yellow-black warning stripes.
So at the end I had a really cool looking and coherent color composition for the whole MOC and due to the fact that these colors are more or less the oldest existing Lego colors, I had the biggest amounts of different available part moulds, which also made it easier to design all the different shapes.
How long did it take to complete the build and which part did you find the most challenging?
As with all my MOCs, I started designing digital with Bricklink Stud.io.
That’s an open access Lego building program. I’m always very fast with the digital design, because that’s also one of my favorite parts of the whole process. I think it took around 10 days with 2 or 3 hours of work to finish the digital build.
After that I ordered all the needed bricks via Bricklink. That’s an online market place for new and used LEGO bricks, sets and minifigures. I also ordered the 122 custom chrome plated parts for the grille, front bumper, the exhausts and the other chromed stuff.
The end of the whole process is the real life build. After the parts arrived, I started building the truck. It is actually always the case that there are minor construction errors, collisions or similar problems in the digital model that need to be rectified in the real model. It is also easier to optimize the stability of a model on the real model than on the digital model, because you can see the effect of the improvement directly.
About 1 1/2 months after I had started the whole project, it was ready on the table in front of me.
You mentioned to us previously that you're an architect by trade - do those skills translate to your hobby?
I believe that being an architect is certainly not a hindrance when designing Lego MOCs. My job deals a lot with how to technically implement a creatively developed building sculpture.
That means you often think about how you can implement technical aspects without compromising the original building design.
On the other hand, developing a Lego model is not completely different from my approach to designing a building.
With buildings, I have almost always designed the building volumes subtractively, i.e. I have "cut away" things like inner courtyards, entrances, loggias etc. from a simple basic volume.
When designing a Lego MOC that is supposed to replicate an existing vehicle or spaceship, it is usually a matter of additively working towards an existing shape. Also, due to the large but limited number of different parts, you often have to find very creative ways to recreate complex shapes with the available parts.
This is of course a completely different approach.
Lastly, could you share some advice for people wanting to get into the MOC scene?
I think the most important advice I can give to leaders who would like to start building their own things with Lego is: "Just get started!".
Think about what you would like to build, but don't think too much about how more experienced people do it or what exactly the end result should look like.
Just getting started is the first step.
Then, from my own approach, I can recommend starting with a smaller element or detail for which you already have initial ideas for implementation. This is how I personally start all my models.
I never build a rough skeleton of the spaceship and start filling it, but rather work forward in partitions.
Of course, it can also make sense to create the basic framework first so that you have a better idea of the overall proportions. That's not for me, but everyone has to find their own way of working.
Especially at the beginning, I wouldn't look at too many other people's things because that often distorts your own creativity and can simply be very frustrating because you see so many insanely cool models on social media and that can sober you up.
It's better to look for different building techniques first and get an overview of what parts are available.
Personally, I can recommend digital building with Bricklink Stud.io because you don't need a big stock of different parts and can still access almost all the parts and colors that are available. You can then order exactly the parts you need to build your model in real life.
But many people simply prefer to build physically. Of course, this also has its appeal, but you need a basic stock of parts and you are of course much more limited.
Here too, everyone has to find their own way...
MASSIVE thanks to Jürgen for taking time to talk to us. We hope you found this interview interesting! If you want to know more about his builds be sure to check out his social media account and give him a follow…