Hello from France

[elricklqby]

Hello

My name is Éric, I’m french, so sorry for the spelling and grammar faults I’ll certainly make.

As child and teenager, I liked playing Lego® and I’ve build lot of self conceptualized models, I suppose long before the "MOC" term even exists… "playing Lego®" is for me "making his/her own conception" and that’s the heart of Lego® idea.

Now I have grand-childrens and one of them can now play with Lego® parts (6 years old) and I’d like to design some models and instructions with a mix of old (for example I have the #650 part) and more recent parts (some minifigs contained in the few bulks I’ve recently bought for them).

I aim to make my grand-son feel the same things I felt conceiving, trying, building, learning with Lego® from basic bricks and plates, to RCX and NXT programming… exploring simple, technical & pneumatical features.

I began for a week to search a good documentation, without finding the one I’d like to find… I found few documents without explanations about what I can call the "between stud placing" of a cylinder brick, or the "between stud perpendiculary plate slotting", or "the underneath tube using" like a 1x2x1 below a 2x3x1, or 1x4x1 / 1x4x2 fence using to have studs on side… and including Jamie Berard hints.

So because I have some knowledge in software and IT, I decided to merge all information I learned and have found into a single document, perhaps web site, to teach the possible assemblies. That for I need to produce images/clips of parts assembled as I want, with visual explanation on how to do it, thus with helpers. I tried with LDD and it seems to have assembly restrictions (furthermore LDD run very slowly on my Windows7™ PC) and have only recent parts.

For few days, I tried some alternate cad softwares. I find an unharmonised world of pieces. Interested in LDraw with old pieces, official or unofficial, which has powerful tools, I quickly learned and choosed MLCad, LDView and LPub… (and sooner LSynth). I succeeded to produce in few hours a complete 611-1 instructions booklet (for fun, googledoc shared MLCad version and my preferred LPub version). Unfortunately, MLCad has bugs handling ghosted arrows (it seems to me to be a reading or saving record error) for submodel using.

But I keep MLCad and I’d like to have more recent LDraw parts so I try to export part’s definition from the LDD LXFML format included in the LIF data file, using given LDraw conversion rules, to the LDraw format. I tried to download from this forum a file about the LXFML format (already found a 2007 version, but without explanation for the "bricks" and "brick" elements)… because I hadn’t enough rights to do so, so I register myself :)

Sorry, this was finally quite long, longer that I initially intended to write. I’m not sure I’ll write lot of posts in this forum, perhaps later… or if 10 posts are mandatory to have the right to download an attached file ^_^

Btw It seems to me that I have a problem recording my gravatar avatar in my settings, I’ll certainly post a help message later in the evening if my avatar isn’t displayed.

Freely

Éric

[Robert8]

Hello Eric

Welcome to Eurobricks!

[Graham Gidman]

Welcome to Eurobricks!

[dr_spock]

Welcome aboard, Éric.

[elricklqby]

thanks for the welcome

[incomplet]

Welcome Eric!