Hey, Hei Hei
Lego released a kit awhile back to let us builders have our very own HeiHei the rooster, from Moana. As one of my favorite animal sidekicks, obviously I had to have one!
He's a chonky boi though, and stands about 10.5 in sitting on his base. The spot that I have available to display him is closer to 7" tall, and not especially deep! So a good shrink is in the cards. Austin Carlson's design is great, so keeping as much of the set's original look as possible, and trying to only use parts from the original set makes it easier to reconstruct the full kit down the road.
Stud.io has a great feature where it can import all of the parts from a given set directly into its design space. From there, the model can be constructed using the original instructions:
It sure would be nice if the constructed models were available, but this went pretty quickly actually.
I tinkered with the design in Stud.io, transferred the changes to the physical model, and then went back to stud.io and incorporated what I learned a few times. We lose the exaggerated lanky look of the original Heihei character, but wind up with a chibi style that actually works. Here are the two models side by side:
He almost fits on my shelf now, and he's still pretty cute! Good enough for now, and maybe I'll have a chance to revisit this again later.
Almost-fits! And these are the leftover parts.
UPDATE: This MOC is available on rebrickable!
