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This is a fictional space-themed LEGO shopping mall complex named "The Spaceship"
due to the shape of main building resembling a spaceship. If that naming idea had
come sooner I would probably have designed something that actually looked more
like a spaceship, but the idea only came to me more than halfway through the
project when I saw what shape the building was taking so I just used the idea
to name and style numerous parts of the model.

The model uses approx. 175000 parts and 258 custom sticker designs and measures
3810mm x 3493mm x 519mm (13.3m² footprint). It features 30 shops, 218 car parking
spaces, 500 minifigs, bank, post office, library, cinema, amusements, restaurant,
foodcourt, admin/security office, service access, maintenance areas, escalators,
functional elevators, toilets, ice rink, gymnasium, boating pond, custom
brick-built road layout, and real LEGO lighting in most of the main building and
ice rink.

The design attempts to be as functional as possible by providing convenient car
access, separate rear public transport access, and separate rear service vehicle
access to all shops on the first two levels, as well as multiple entrances and
fire exits. It also attempts to be wheelchair/buggy friendly as much as possible
using a mixture of stairs, escalators, ramps and a glass elevator.

The main glass roof can be removed in two halves, as can the roofs of the gym,
the wing shops, and the rear section, the latter of which reveals the battery
packs for the LEGO lighting. There's also manual cable winders on both the
customer and service elevators. I managed to get the water tank in too but had
to forego the boiler room - despite the size of the build I found myself
running out of space.

The massive size of the model caused numerous problems, especially due to buggy
software and PC limitations, so I had to reduce the intended length of the mall
and forego a few other features too, but it's still by far the biggest model
I've built. It probably should have taken around 6 to 9 months to complete, but
due to personal and technical issues it ended up taking more than 2 years.

This virtual LDraw model was built using MLCad software and rendered with LDView
(sadly it's too big to render with POV-Ray), with additional construction,
graphic and animation support via the use of PHP, LDraw Sticker Generator,
LDraw txt2dat, LDraw LSynth, ImageMagick, Paint Shop Pro, GIF Movie Gear,
IrfanView, PNGOUT, AviSynth, VirtualDub, and ffmpeg. Even had to use Excel to
write macros to compute the precise angles needed for the curved window walls
on the wings, which were too difficult to compute on paper.

And no, I don't intend building it for real!

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The Spaceship - All Links:

  https://www.flickr.com/photos/71148741@N05/albums/72157680887405232
  http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=572691
  http://www.mocpages.com/moc.php/443793
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r21SZu_R0k8

The flickr album has individual image descriptions.

The youtube video (best viewed at 720) contains still images and many flyby
sequences which give a better impression of the model by restoring some of the
3D visual cues lost due to the non-raytraced renders containing no shadows.
Excuse the length of the video and number of images. It's a REALLY BIG model,
and 25 images just wasn't going to do it...

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