UCS AT-AT : Tricky

Last time I wrote about the UCS AT-AT build (here) I'd completed one of the AT-AT legs and started work on the remaining three. It took me longer than expected to finish them up (doesn't it always ?) but I eventually completed them as you can see below. Astonishingly, the four legs alone are made up of a total of 2,120 pieces, which means that once I'd completed them the model was more than a third finished, in terms of part count at least.

Suitably confident after having largely breezed through the first part of the build, I decided to face my demons head on and attempt the AT-AT body next. This was really the only part of the build that I'd been facing with a degree of trepidation, on account of the complexity of the structure plus designer Pete's warning that there might be mistakes in the LDD rendition of his design. Having at times struggled through the distinctly illogical LDD-generated building guide while constructing the legs, I was also wary of what the building guide would throw at me this time round given the significantly greater level of complexity that it needed to negotiate. As it turned out, I was right to be apprehensive....

Above you can see a screen grab of the LDD file for the AT-AT body (click to enlarge). It's 'only' made up of 1285 parts in total, so significantly less than the legs. Once again I had the added complication that the LDD file had been tidied up a bit by Pete after I'd sourced the parts, so some of the hidden internal pieces I'd collected were a different colour to those in the LDD file. Thankfully however this didn't turn out to be too much of a problem.

I got a hint of the challenge to come as I waited for LDD to generate the building guide for this section of the model; the operation took almost 10 minutes on my (reasonably high spec) iMac, yielding an impressive 422 building steps. First to be built were the structures to which the legs would later attach plus the large cylindrical structures slung under the body which I assume are the engines, then a bunch of greebles, and finally the floor of the body and the internal skeleton upon which everything else would ultimately hang. At time of writing I'm up to step 343 of 422, so a good way into the build, and you can see a few pictures of the build so far below (click to enlarge).

Attachment points for front legs & forward engine section.

Attachment points for back legs & rear engine section

Work in progress : Body - floor

Work in progress : Body - underside

Contruction of the body has been, to put it politely, rather tricky.... This is in large part due to the ridiculous LDD-generated building guide which I've been struggling to follow. You may recall that while building the legs I wrote about the sometimes baffling and illogical order of the building steps, plus the expectation that the builder is able to make parts float in mid-air as if by magic. Well, the building guide for the body has taken these issues to a whole new level of absurdity, and it's been a significant challenge to follow along at times. I've attached a screen grab of one page of the building guide below to try and illustrate my point; at one stage there were up to 50 Technic pins, axles, sub-assemblies and various other loose parts floating in mid-air. These are positioned in 3D space exactly where they will eventually reside when later sections of the build drop into place, but you're given no guidance on how they attach to everything around them. At the point when later sections eventually drop into place en masse, therefore, you have to figure out what on earth all these free-floating bits and pieces attach to. This isn't too much of a problem for most of the larger sub-assemblies, but for the individual free-floating parts, and particularly the Technic pins and axles, it's a huge problem because you can't actually see them when everything else is in place - they're hidden by other parts and/or located deep within the build. All you can therefore do is study the final page of the instructions in minute, painstaking detail and, skipping backwards and forwards between the final page and earlier pages, try and figure out where everything goes.  It's a colossal and totally unnecessary pain in the arse.

LDD is a superb tool, but a build of this size and complexity has seriously shown up the limitations of the building guide generator. Even so, I'm getting there, slowly but surely, and next time I post an update I should have finished the body and decided on what to tackle next. Hopefully....


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