Stud.io V2 Instruction Maker - A Blueprint and LDD Killer?

[Shroud]

You could maybe group everything in stud.io, would that make it easier? Also I noticed that the .io files are a compressed group of .ldr ldraw files?

[supertruper1988]

21 hours ago, anothergol said:

I've toyed with Stud.io's instruction maker for a few minutes, frankly I didn't understand how it works. I found Blueprint pretty straightforward, and I thought that was THE best way to generate instructions, and that Stud.io would follow the same scheme, but isn't it working backwards?
I opened one of my models, opened the generator, I was expecting something already kinda pre-generated & waiting for manual fixes, instead I got one gigantic step with everything in it, and any attempt at cutting it in parts failed. Even the tool that generates steps for selected parts, is only forking for a small amount of parts.

I assume it has to do with the fact that it's based on the "steps" in the editor itself, & thus it requires using these in the first place.. which of course my models, coming from the LDD, don't. And I don't understand the purpose of those editing steps in the first place. But hey, I'd love to love Stud.io, especially if the LDD is bound to die, I don't love Stud.io yet but it's still the best second choice I have left, other editors are just hell.

When you get in to the instruction maker, select some parts and then click the "step before" or "step after" parts to move them to a new step before or after the current one. It takes a little getting used to and and multiple sub models have to be created in the editor, not the instruction maker. 

BluePrint's algorithm for generating steps already is a super feature but once the flow of Studio is worked out, I find it to be a little better because i am not scrolling all over to find the parts I need, I just select and move. 

[anothergol]

12 hours ago, supertruper1988 said:

When you get in to the instruction maker, select some parts and then click the "step before" or "step after" parts to move them to a new step before or after the current one. It takes a little getting used to and and multiple sub models have to be created in the editor, not the instruction maker. 

Yeah that I figured out, but when you have a medium model of a new hundred parts, you have to select the whole lot minus a few, then move them to the next step, then unselect, etc, it doesn't make sense IMHO. The tool to generate a step for each part in the selection is definitely there and that would be very useful if it wasn't limited in count. That way you'd "explode" all of the parts, and then decide to merge steps, that would be easier. Or maybe not, because when toying with it & merging stuff, I ended up with so many empty steps, it was a big mess.
But really, it's because I was taking for granted the way it works in Blueprint, I thought that there was no contest that it was THE best way to do it, it's a pity not to have used the same method.

[supertruper1988]

5 hours ago, anothergol said:

Yeah that I figured out, but when you have a medium model of a new hundred parts, you have to select the whole lot minus a few, then move them to the next step, then unselect, etc, it doesn't make sense IMHO. The tool to generate a step for each part in the selection is definitely there and that would be very useful if it wasn't limited in count. That way you'd "explode" all of the parts, and then decide to merge steps, that would be easier. Or maybe not, because when toying with it & merging stuff, I ended up with so many empty steps, it was a big mess.
But really, it's because I was taking for granted the way it works in Blueprint, I thought that there was no contest that it was THE best way to do it, it's a pity not to have used the same method.

Instead of selecting the whole lot and moving to the step over, select a few and say step before. Then the remaining parts are the current and last step. Thats how I do it. 

[SylvainLS]

Er, @supertruper1988 the way you explain it, it seems you build from the outside in   but it’s also the way @anothergol explains it 

Anyway, I do it the other way: peel the build like an onion.  In the instruction maker, create a next step, select a few parts on the outside, move them to the next step.  Rince and repeat.

[supertruper1988]

4 hours ago, SylvainLS said:

Er, @supertruper1988 the way you explain it, it seems you build from the outside in   but it’s also the way @anothergol explains it 

Anyway, I do it the other way: peel the build like an onion.  In the instruction maker, create a next step, select a few parts on the outside, move them to the next step.  Rince and repeat.

I mean you can see some of the instructions I make here.

If its a dense model I will peel the outside and put it after so I can get at the core but most things start on the bottom center and move up and out from there.

[Shroud]

6 hours ago, supertruper1988 said:

I mean you can see some of the instructions I make here.

If its a dense model I will peel the outside and put it after so I can get at the core but most things start on the bottom center and move up and out from there.

I took a look at one of the trucks and compared it with one of my own blueprint instructions and the stud.io one is a higher image quality. Smoother edges and a higher resolution. I haven’t checked, when you save the stud.io file does it save the instruction layout? When you move things in blueprint it doesn’t save them at all and you have to redo the layout. Also it would be nice if the new steps in stud.io are highlighted. Maybe not a pink shade but the yellow outline.

[supertruper1988]

10 hours ago, Shroud said:

I took a look at one of the trucks and compared it with one of my own blueprint instructions and the stud.io one is a higher image quality. Smoother edges and a higher resolution. I haven’t checked, when you save the stud.io file does it save the instruction layout? When you move things in blueprint it doesn’t save them at all and you have to redo the layout. Also it would be nice if the new steps in stud.io are highlighted. Maybe not a pink shade but the yellow outline.

I actually have not used the instruction PDF or PNG export feature in studio. I have long used LPub3D to generate the actual pages of the instructions I create. I tried the Studio layout tool and it has some strange things that I didnt like so I went right back to LPub3D. I stopped using blueprint all together after Studio 1.0 came out and I could make the step and export to LDraw without any issues. 

Another tip to make the instructions look clear is to make sure you are using a sufficiently high resolution. With BluePrint, I would make an 8.5x11 page be 2550x3300 pixels so that the export of images would give me 300 DPI which is the minimum needed for clear prints. I continue to do that for all of my images and I use InDesign to put them together into a book form. 

All the instructions on the previous page are 150dpi which is what is required for Retina screens and the web standard is 72dpi which is terrible IMO. 

Let me know if I can offer any more advice!

[RoxYourBlox]

I'm having issues saving models without losing progress on steps I created. Specifically, the formatting of the model and parts windows is lost upon exiting the program and re-opening a file. Any workarounds?

[kokkie20]

I have the same issue....

Was working on instructions in the instruction maker, and suddenly at the end the software just randomly closed.... Then i decided to save in between.... When i wanted to open the saved file it just hangs on loading it into the software.

Hopefully they fix this issue soon untill then this is a no go for me to use....

[anothergol]

On 10/15/2018 at 11:24 PM, SylvainLS said:

Er, @supertruper1988 the way you explain it, it seems you build from the outside in   but it’s also the way @anothergol explains it 

Anyway, I do it the other way: peel the build like an onion.  In the instruction maker, create a next step, select a few parts on the outside, move them to the next step.  Rince and repeat. 

 

I have just tried creating the steps in the editor, as I assume that the instruction maker was made easy when steps already exist. I really don't get it. I thought that I was missing something, & I went to check tutorials, but no, it seems to be dumb & horrible by design.

Groups are nice in Stud.io, not as good as in the LDD (moving parts between groups sucks, thus you have to get your group right from the start), but it's nice to have groups treated as one large part, something we can't do in the LDD.

Steps, however.. It looks like something made for those who already have their model built with real parts, and want to translate it to 3D. I thought that you could create steps afterwards, and I even read that in a beginner's guide that said "You do not have to create steps right away, you can rearrange parts later on.".
But NO! You can't, it totally blows! I was expecting selecting a few parts, then "add new step", and voilà, a new step created with the selected parts in it. But nope, the new step is created empty. Can you MOVE parts to the selected step? Apparently not (or I couldn't find it). You have to CUT parts, and PASTE them to the selected step. While tedious, this would still be ok if Stud.io's auto-snap was perfect, but it is far from perfect. When you have multiple attach points like bars into holes, studs, etc, pasting back your selected parts can be very fiddly. LDD's auto-snap isn't perfect, but Stud.io's one is even worse, & I can't imagine cutting/pasting hundreds of parts into steps. Thus I guess it's really better to create the steps in the instructions maker, which IMHO sucks too.
I still like the app though, it's still the second best after the LDD, but it's still not ready yet IMHO.

 

[SylvainLS]

2 hours ago, anothergol said:

Groups are nice in Stud.io, not as good as in the LDD (moving parts between groups sucks, thus you have to get your group right from the start), but it's nice to have groups treated as one large part, something we can't do in the LDD.

 

Yes, and “select by colour” or “by shape” etc. don’t work inside the groups.  So you need to visit each and every group if you want to find and change all the parts of the same colour/shape.

 

2 hours ago, anothergol said:

Can you MOVE parts to the selected step? Apparently not (or I couldn't find it).

You can select parts (either in the editor pane or the step list) and then drag’n’drop them inside the step list.  (I believe it was suggested we could be able to grab them in the editor and drop them in the step list but it doesn’t work for me.  So we need to grab the selected parts in the step list.)

I find creating and managing steps easier in the Instruction Maker where the parts from later steps are hidden (which works pretty well for “peel the onion” method).

 

[zux]

@anothergol it seem like you assume instruction maker would be some sort of AI or magic, which could understand your model and produce correct steps for building it. This might work for bottom-to-top brick-built MOCs, but not for the rest. Stud.io is based on LDraw (and I understand it uses similar logic) where steps must recorded as if you would build it in real life. And this must be done by yourself. If you built your entire model in single step - well, that's a lot of bricks you need to place in one step...

[anothergol]

6 hours ago, zux said:

@anothergol it seem like you assume instruction maker would be some sort of AI or magic, which could understand your model and produce correct steps for building it. This might work for bottom-to-top brick-built MOCs, but not for the rest. Stud.io is based on LDraw (and I understand it uses similar logic) where steps must recorded as if you would build it in real life. And this must be done by yourself. If you built your entire model in single step - well, that's a lot of bricks you need to place in one step...

It's not really magic, Blueprint & the LDD itself do a good job at it, and it's then very easy (in Blueprint) to reorder stuff.

But if we really need to create steps, it should be made easy in Stud.io, adding a new step should move the selected parts to it.

10 hours ago, SylvainLS said:

You can select parts (either in the editor pane or the step list) and then drag’n’drop them inside the step list.

Ah, that's better than nothing

[SylvainLS]

38 minutes ago, anothergol said:

It's not really magic, Blueprint & the LDD itself do a good job at it, and it's then very easy (in Blueprint) to reorder stuff.

Select some parts (more than one) in Instruction Maker / Step editor, a button “Divide into steps” will appear on the right, just above the BOM at the bottom.  It will work at least as efficiently as LDD’s crappy algorithm.  I didn’t use Blueprint enough to know if Studio’s on par or worse than Blueprint.  The groups aren’t treated the same way, so the results will necessarily differ.  In Studio, a group is a submodel, so built separately, and even if you use more than one instance, only one set of instructions is needed for each submodel.

[anothergol]

21 minutes ago, SylvainLS said:

Select some parts (more than one) in Instruction Maker / Step editor, a button “Divide into steps” will appear on the right, just above the BOM at the bottom.  It will work at least as efficiently as LDD’s crappy algorithm.  I didn’t use Blueprint enough to know if Studio’s on par or worse than Blueprint.  The groups aren’t treated the same way, so the results will necessarily differ.  In Studio, a group is a submodel, so built separately, and even if you use more than one instance, only one set of instructions is needed for each submodel.

Not really, as I reported when I tried it it wouldn't work, as there seemed to be a limit in the # of steps, it was creating a few dozen small steps & then the rest as a big chunk. Seems to be working since yesterday's version (either it was improved, or that was a bug when I initially tried it), but it's still far from ideal.

Groups in the LDD are also used by LDD's instruction maker btw, as hints.
The benefits of groups in Stud.io being real submodels are outweighted by the drawbacks IMHO, until it gets a mode that lets you fully edit, bypassing all groups. Right now Stud.io's groups are ideal to group minifigs/multipart stuff, but not really limbs of a character or parts of a vehicle. For me the #1 use of groups, in the LDD, has been to quickly hide stuff I'm not working on, and that works great in both apps. But editing through groups is way better in the LDD.

Also I was nagging, in another thread, about instructions makers being kinda pointless for the mass, in general. There I was talking about Blueprint, & thus it's much worse for this one which is much slower to use. The market for instructions is so tiny that spending hours to craft instructions for less than 100 people is pointless, other than for the fun of it (which doesn't last). It will make a lot of sense for Bricklink's own AFOL Program where a few thousands people will be following instructions, but other than that, I don't know.

[supertruper1988]

41 minutes ago, anothergol said:

Also I was nagging, in another thread, about instructions makers being kinda pointless for the mass, in general. There I was talking about Blueprint, & thus it's much worse for this one which is much slower to use. The market for instructions is so tiny that spending hours to craft instructions for less than 100 people is pointless, other than for the fun of it (which doesn't last). It will make a lot of sense for Bricklink's own AFOL Program where a few thousands people will be following instructions, but other than that, I don't know.

I really disagree here. I love making instructions and do it for fun. It helps me build the item once I have the brick and its a great way to build without having to have all the bricks. 

Plus by growing the amount of people that are in the market for and making instructions, we grow the LEGO hobby overall. 

Your gripes with the instruction makers are valid but at the same time, with trillions of possible connections between 100 bricks, there is no way to automate it and everyone has their own instructions style. Complaining only brings the hobby in a negative light. I would be happy to do a screen share to show how fast instruction generation can be with a little practice. 

[SylvainLS]

33 minutes ago, anothergol said:

Groups in the LDD are also used by LDD's instruction maker btw, as hints.

Never worked nor changed anything for me.  Seems each application chooses its users 

 

36 minutes ago, anothergol said:

It will make a lot of sense for Bricklink's own AFOL Program where a few thousands people will be following instructions, but other than that, I don't know.

In that instance, it will only be of use for BrickLink themselves as they are the ones who will create the (printed or at least PDF) instructions for the, at most, 20 models.  Maybe more if the program is renewed.  But they are (supposedly) professionals too.  So they aren’t part of “the mass.”

Anyway, people create their own models, and at one time, they all start thinking “Hey, it would be great to create instructions like ‘real’ models!”  So there’s a very strong demand.  And you can verify this with the many posts asking for it for version 1.  Maybe, as you say, they’ll do it once (or try to) and then they’ll see it can be hard work and never try again.  But the strong demand makes it a must-have.  And Studio made a decent job of it.

Besides, most of these people will do small / simple models for which the Instruction Maker works well.  For the others, as supertrooper1988 says, it’s actually not that difficult.  You just need to find the right workflow.  And if you do big / complex models, I believe thinking and making the instructions as you create your model is a great help: to see how easy your model is to build, its structures, the submodels, the parts and colours used, etc.

Personally, I only made full / finished / refined instructions to test the wizards (both Blueprint and Studio; LDD never went anywhere with my models, even the simple ones), but I’ll certainly continue to think and make them to perfect my models.  That means I don’t spend hours aligning parts and arrows or page numbers on the pages but I make steps and submodels/callouts and examine the build sequence(s) often in the last stages.

 

[anothergol]

31 minutes ago, SylvainLS said:

Anyway, people create their own models, and at one time, they all start thinking “Hey, it would be great to create instructions like ‘real’ models!”  So there’s a very strong demand.  And you can verify this with the many posts asking for it for version 1.  Maybe, as you say, they’ll do it once (or try to) and then they’ll see it can be hard work and never try again. 

Yeah that's exactly what I'm saying. "everyone" wanna do it for fun once, but doing it regularly would become work & it's boring, especially when only 3 people bothered to view their work. But as I wrote in the other thread, perhaps in the future there will be a market for MOC *sets* (with the help of China), & that would totally change the deal. Very few people know how to Bricklink, & those who know, know how boring & expensive it can be to buy 1000 parts from 10 different shops that only have 1 of the rare ones required, while a lot more are ready to pay for full sets. I myself have bought Xingbao sets that were originally Lego MOCs (while I have placed hundreds of Bricklink orders, but only for my own MOCs), while I would never have bought their instructions alone (even though the Arvo bros have made quality prints).

[supertruper1988]

1 hour ago, anothergol said:

Yeah that's exactly what I'm saying. "everyone" wanna do it for fun once, but doing it regularly would become work & it's boring, especially when only 3 people bothered to view their work. But as I wrote in the other thread, perhaps in the future there will be a market for MOC *sets* (with the help of China), & that would totally change the deal. Very few people know how to Bricklink, & those who know, know how boring & expensive it can be to buy 1000 parts from 10 different shops that only have 1 of the rare ones required, while a lot more are ready to pay for full sets. I myself have bought Xingbao sets that were originally Lego MOCs (while I have placed hundreds of Bricklink orders, but only for my own MOCs), while I would never have bought their instructions alone (even though the Arvo bros have made quality prints).

What does it matter if every one does it once? I dont see why this is such a sticking point. The Studio instruction maker works pretty well and yeah it could be better but we are light years past the old days of MLCad and LPub. That was a STEEEEEP learning curve. 

It only serves to bring people to our hobby and being so negative about it isnt helpful. Yeah its SUPER annoying that the developers over at BrickLink see to not make wise decisions and it hurts the UI or its not super smooth but its so easy compared to what was that I am happy it even exists. 

[anothergol]

4 hours ago, supertruper1988 said:

What does it matter if every one does it once? I dont see why this is such a sticking point. The Studio instruction maker works pretty well and yeah it could be better but we are light years past the old days of MLCad and LPub. That was a STEEEEEP learning curve. 

It only serves to bring people to our hobby and being so negative about it isnt helpful. Yeah its SUPER annoying that the developers over at BrickLink see to not make wise decisions and it hurts the UI or its not super smooth but its so easy compared to what was that I am happy it even exists. 

It doesn't matter, and Stud.io is free, so I'm not complaining. I'm saying that instruction-making, in general (except for Lego & clones), is mostly pointless. There is a big difference between making instructions for thousands of people, and for just 3 people.

Even though there is actually a reason not to do it: the time they have to invest in the app would be better spent on the rest of the app. This Lego/Stud.io collab is a hint that the last LDD update might really have been its final one. If that's true that Lego is ok with Stud.io taking over, I want to LOVE Stud.io, I'd like it to work as well as the LDD, in its core workflow rather than side features. At the moment it just doesn't, but in places that haven't changed since its first release.
For me, Stud.io so far has been a great rendering tool (and that has just improved), but I would like to enjoy using it to build.

And I agree with you that ALL other tools are horrible to use. If the LDD didn't exist, Stud.io would be the best editor, by far. But LDD does exist, there are things I take for granted that I'm not finding in Stud.io. Most of my clicks in the LDD are right-clicks, to set the origin & move around. The same thing in Stud.io is tedious, rotating the cam is too sensitive, and no more direct right click because there is a popup menu. The whole app has what I call "that Linux feel", it's clunky in places, like, you right-click to rotate a part in the part browser, it stops rotating as your cursor goes outside the cell. And why? Because it hasn't been polished yet. Polishing is something you do last, and adding new features pushes back that polishing phase.

Finally you have tube bending & semi-physics. Frankly, I've been a programmer and I would have found physics in a Lego modelling tool way overkill. But hey, the LDD did it, and it's pretty impressive, even if it doesn't always work. That too is something Stud.io will have to do, but first IMHO its auto-snapping needs a polish as well, it doesn't work as well as in the LDD (& in some cases it's due to the part database, here it would be nice for Lego to give Stud.io official, accurate part models, which are also needed for rendering anyway).

So I've used Stud.io more than ever during the last few weeks, and it's not the case of "I don't know what key to press, I'm not used to it yet", it's a case of "grrr whyyyyy doesn't that part wanna snap there, whyyyyyy?". You know when you curse at the LDD because it doesn't allow you to fine-position a part & you have to cheat it? Or when it doesn't allow a part to be placed because of false collision detection? These are 2 things that Stud.io fixed, and that's great. BUT, there are more things making me curse at Stud.io, than things making me curse at the LDD.

Edited October 23, 2018 by anothergol

[Ivan_M]

 

54 minutes ago, anothergol said:

It doesn't matter, and Stud.io is free, so I'm not complaining. I'm saying that instruction-making, in general (except for Lego & clones), is mostly pointless. There is a big difference between making instructions for thousands of people, and for just 3 people.

I don't think so, just take a look at rebrickable, there are many new creation every day, even very complex ones. I also have 11 models there, each with thousands views and many downloads.

As for the rest - it is matter of habit. I have came out of my dark age two years ago, just when the first open beta of studio was fresh. I had made one model in LDD before trying studio and the difference between the two was so huge - LDD seemed to me as the worst program then. I can now make 2000+ parts technic models in studio very quickly, already divied into steps and groups. I agree studio needs polishing, it is still very fresh program, instruction maker is there for 2 months only so it is necessary to take that in mind.

[anothergol]

57 minutes ago, Ivan_M said:

I don't think so, just take a look at rebrickable, there are many new creation every day, even very complex ones. I also have 11 models there, each with thousands views and many downloads.

Oh I am on Rebrickable too, but define "many".
It's not about views, I have thousands of views there too, just like on my Flickr. Making MOCs isn't pointless, they're definitely seen.

It really is about instructions. I have 2 MOCs featured in the "top selling premium" for a couple of months now. So it's safe to say that the numbers I'm gonna give will be what most people can expect at best, because 1) anything that's not on that top-selling page will obviously do much worse, 2) they're both Star-Wars related, thus get viewed/searched.

Ok let me check:
First MOC: 12k views, 57 downloads
Second MOC: 7k views, 21 downloads
& I have 2 other cheap MOCs that did respectively 4 & 3 downloads, because not SW-related.
I also have a free one (the only one for which I bothered to make proper instructions, ironically) for which I can't easily track the downloads, I'll have to check that.
So, to any MOCer here who wanna start sharing instructions, think again. Unless you're a big Youtuber & you can promote your stuff (a couple do), you will be spending hours on something that won't be viewed by thousands like your pictures are, but by a few, possibly less than 10. If you found fun in making instructions, why not.. but you probably won't have fun doing it over & over only for your own eyes.

And to prove my point that people don't wanna download instructions because gathering all the parts is painful & costly: the long-time top bought MOCs on Rebrickable are.. alternate builds for existing sets. For this niche of a niche, yeah, instructions do make more sense.
And again, nothing here surprised me, as I never have downloaded instructions myself. I watch people's MOCs every day, I would totally buy sets for many of them, but I wouldn't gather the parts myself. Instead, I buy sub-par official sets, because it's easier & cheaper. Like everyone does. But again, this might change in the future, with China. Lego hardly (& rightly so) cares for adults, that's a niche to take for clone brands. The best "Lego" sets I've bought.. were by Xingbao. Lego wouldn't have produced them, because based on old & adult IPs, and because MOC-like built, but that's totally what I'm looking for.

Edited October 23, 2018 by anothergol

[Ivan_M]

Premium instructions for large builds are of course niche, your models are size-wise and price wise good balance, but I think SW is oversaturated and very difficult to sell as there are many other options of the same model in many different scales, part counts and either for free and paid as well.

5 minutes ago, anothergol said:

And to prove my point that people don't wanna download instructions because gathering all the parts is painful & costly: the long-time top bought MOCs on Rebrickable are.. alternate builds for existing sets. For this niche of a niche, yeah, instructions do make more sense.

And such people are target of studio, aren't they? Simple way how to make alternate model easily. Import the parts from certain set into pallet so you don't have to look for anything, build it, make instructions, publish. How can it fall into niche of niche? This is pure mainstream.

[Shroud]

I remember LDD version 2 and I can say that it’s snappable parts weren’t really that great and it had bugs.  Stud.io is still being worked on and I already prefer it over the current LDD.  The instruction app will take time to polish and if it gets the same algorithm as blueprint it’s all set.