With only a week and a half left in OcTRAINber it’s time to make that final push to finish the entries before the deadline. Already the sweet sights of many WIP entries have been coming out to be seen. It’s always so amazing to see the creative and amazing things that people choose to build each year for the competition!

Build competitions are always filled to the brim with very high-quality models, and each year the quality gets better and better and it’s always difficult to choose a winner. Today I’d like to take some time to make my life harder in that regard, and talk about how to make a stronger entry. Some of these things are nearly universal, but I’m also going to have some extra focus on Digital entries. 

In this article, I’d like to briefly discuss a few things to help add a little extra polish to your entries, and after that I’ve found a few links to resources that may be of great assistance to digital builders.

Adding Life into a scene

When building structures or scenery, oftentimes just getting the shapes and the details right is hard enough work on its own. Sometimes the subject of your build is something that would be quite pristine in the real world, but oftentimes in both nature and constructed environments life leaves a mark on the world around it.

Be it cups, boxes, old wheels, tramped-down foliage, or just general clutter, making sure to include these sorts of ‘lived in’ details can help make a model feel less like a model and more like a little picture of something real. As you study your real-world inspiration, keep a look out for these sorts of details and see if you can incorporate them into your build.

Breaking up Repetition

Breaking repetition goes quite hand-in-hand with adding life into a scene, but I find it especially important for digital modeling. One of the nice things about building a digital model is that, if you need to build a five-section bridge you can do almost all the work on just a single section and then copy that as many times as needed to create quite a large model quickly.

With a physical build, the sheer size or magnitude of something made this way could well make up for the repetitious nature of it – you know that though the design of the segments is the same, the builder had to procure and assemble every brick of it. Digital builds can lose a lot of ‘oomph’ that a very impressive physical structure can muster; but they don’t have to suffer this lightly.

Whether it be a large bridge, a multiplatform station, or something as small as a fence, adding details and finding ways to break up the visual repetition of the build can bring a very satisfying depth to any model. Sections of damaged fence, station platforms that are under maintenance, or other ways of bringing a used or unique perspective to otherwise identical or repetitive parts of the structure can go a long way towards making something feel more substantial; digital or not!

Showcase your highlights, show off your clever solutions

Whether you’re building digitally or physically, you may find a situation where you end up spending a significant amount of time solving a build problem that ends up being wildly complicated, incredibly tricky, or just needs a really clever solution… but the end results end up being subtle and something that may be missed.

With so many entries of such high complexity and quality, it is of course possible that these sorts of details or features may end up overlooked (Or it could just be hard for someone seeing only the finished product to understand the hidden depths and complexity!). This is where the WIP aspect of OcTRAINber really can help you show off your entries – take good pictures of your tricky or clever solutions and share them! We’ve had quite a few entries over the years that used some pretty mind blowing build techniques that were well-documented by the builder.

Documenting these also helps serve as a ‘proof of concept’ for certain aspects, especially with digital builds. Even if you have a digital entry, if there’s something complicated involved it may be worth it to include a picture of a test build of the clever solution to show it really works!

Digital Resources:

It’s no secret that digital builders do often feel like it’s hard to get the same attention for their builds that physical builders do. It’s something that we judges work hard to keep in mind, but the fact of the matter is that we can only judge based on the things we see. We have seen many absolutely incredible digital entries over the years, but a lot of otherwise amazing builds end up missing the same level of finesse.

A high-quality LEGO train build, or indeed build in general, can very often be found to have all sorts of extras. Just like a traditional model railroader, LEGO train models tend to go very cross-disciplinary: Well-made decals, custom wheels, custom rods, and other ways of adding those perfect finishing touches. Learning how to add these sorts of finishing touches into a digital model takes both skills and resources that may not be readily available to most people, so one of the things I’d like to do is help provide links to places where people have made these sorts of things available to the community.

LDraw/Stud.io Compatible Parts

There are many digital building programs available, and quite a few which make use of the LDraw Parts Library. If you are using one of these programs, such as Stud.io or LDCad, you can add custom parts to the program using appropriately created files.

BMR Knuckle Couplers

For those of you who want to model your trains with the Kadee Knuckle Couplers offered by BMR, we have the digital parts files available for free in the shop:

https://brickmodelrailroader.shop/products/knuuckle-coupler-ldraw-studio-cad-files

Big Ben Bricks Drivers

Big Ben Bricks has offered a great selection of wheels for a long time, and they offer downloads for the LDraw Parts files for the majority of these wheels. These files can be added to Stud.io as well, though if you want connectivity functionality you will need to add it yourself in the Parts Designer. They are still quite usable without, however.

http://www.bigbenbricks.com/ldraw/ldraw.html

HA Bricks Drivers

In advance of plans to sell injection molded drivers of their own, HA Bricks has made Stud.io files available for a very wide variety of train wheels. These can be found at the link below, and each download has a text file with instructions for how to import the parts into Stud.io using the Parts Designer tool.

https://www.habricks.com/product-categorie/wheels/

Custom Locomotive Rods

While there’s nothing wrong with sticking to standard LEGO liftarms for the rods on your engines, I very often see an array of these liftarms used on a model with a note or comment that they are stand-ins for custom rods that the designer hopes to add in later. Trained Bricks is probably the most popular supplier of well-functioning custom rods for LEGO trains, and conveniently also offers a download pack for the digital files for these rods.

https://trainedbricks.square.site/digital-resources

I hope the digital resources come in handy for you! It’s been very amazing to see the WIP builds posted so far, and I’m quite excited to see what else shows up as we approach the final deadline.

Please remember to have everything submitted in the proper entry threads on our Flickr page no later than October 31, 11:59 PDT!! At that point entries will be closed.

Happy building!