Transitioning to Stud.io

[Shroud]

Hi all,

 

I thought I would share my experience using Stud.io during the AFOL designer program.  I’ve been a huge follower of LDD for many years, through its start and the days of opening up all its bricks to its current form. I’ve had POV ray setup rendering highly detailed Mocs and blueprint to make the instructions (great program).  Unlike stud.io V1.0, the new version is smoother with less bugs and after a few hours of use I’m finding it easier to build with. Once you know what headers the parts are under it’s very easy to find what you’re looking for.  The manipulation of the MoC is smoother including the placement of parts.  The inbuilt rendering can be changed from its native one to POV ray at a click. The native rendering however uses your graphics card...finally and doesn’t have issues with transparent parts. The renders are so so so much faster and looks amazing, I run just a GeForce 780ti. The instruction section is of a high quality with the ability to rotate the view freely and choose background colours. It also exports to PDF now and lets you add pages from external sources. You can now add your amazing cover page/render. Then uploading the MoC to your “my studio” is easy and create a wanted list of the parts. There’s also a buy all option.  You can even import your lxfs.

So in short Stud.io combines LDD, POV ray, blueprint and BrickLink in a higher quality whilst using your graphics card with faster render times.  It looks a lot more professional and I’m looking forward to it’s future.

It’s taken me a while to come around to it but I’m sold, it’s almost like it’s developers have been listening to us! If you haven’t tried it yet I would seriously recommend it.

Any of your own thoughts and experiences are of course welcome.

Shroud

 

[SylvainLS]

Little correction: “The native rendering however uses your >NVidia< graphics card.”

Which is a bit sad as Blender Cycles (on which Studio’s Eyesight is based) also works with OpenCL (AMD).

 

[Shroud]

Does it not work on other graphics cards?

[SylvainLS]

CUDA is NVidia only.

[Seasider]

Does anyone know what this runs like on an Mac ? and more importantly how well Technic is supported ?

[Ivan_M]

30 minutes ago, Seasider said:

Does anyone know what this runs like on an Mac ? and more importantly how well Technic is supported ?

I cannot answer to mac thingy, but technic is screwed since long time. The problem is that the grid stepping should be selectable as "plate height (ie 8 LDU) or "technic height (ie. 10 LDU), but it isn't working (or am I the only one?). So the movement of parts in Y axis (up/down) by keyboard is virtually not possible at all as it moves in wrong steps. I have "solved" it by staying at old version where everything that I need works fine and I add new parts manually from LDraw library. Some are probably fine without keyboard control as sanpping is very good, but for me that is a dealbreaker. You can also select fine grid (1 LDU) but that is pita to use as you have to press key 10 times instead of one. It is still zilion times better than LDD, I appreciate categories like on BL and how it is working with colors. I never had any issue with performance or stability since beta V1 (on windows). Parts-wise it is complete (technic) and you can always add parts from LDraw library, you don't have to wait for Stud.io developers to add them.

[SylvainLS]

6 minutes ago, Ivan_M said:

you can always add parts from LDraw library, you don't have to wait for Stud.io developers to add them.

Well, custom parts won’t snap because we still don’t know how to add connectivity information.  Or, do you?

[Ivan_M]

6 minutes ago, SylvainLS said:

Well, custom parts won’t snap because we still don’t know how to add connectivity information.  Or, do you?

No, but it is not difficult to place them in correct place using fine grid. Unless you want to add hundreds of them of course. I only build technic and the most missing parts were PF for a long time. So I have added them manually and since most models use less then 10 motors it is fine to "play" with it a little.

I have checked the movement bug once again in latest V2 version and it is still bugged. No matter the grid selected the keyboard shorcut moves parts at 8LDU units, while "T"-transition function works fine and moves it by 10 LDU no matter the grid. I have tried to point it on Stud.io forum long time ago but no luck..

Edited October 9, 2018 by Ivan_M

[SylvainLS]

2 minutes ago, Ivan_M said:

I have checked the movement bug once again in latest V2 version and it is still bugged. No matter the grid selected the keyboard shorcut moves parts at 8LDU units, while "T"-transition function works fine and moves it by 10 LDU no matter the grid. I have tried to point it on Stud.io forum long time ago but no luck..

I just checked myself.

I hadn’t assigned keys to brick movement (only rotation), and only left, right, forward, backward are available, no up, no down  so I couldn’t test vertical movement by keyboard, only mouse (grabbing the move axles to avoid snapping), but the grids work.

Coarse = 20/20/24 LDU, medium = 10/10/12 LDU, medium “P” = 10/10/8 LDU, fine = 1/1/1 LDU.

Movement is left-right / back-forward / up-down relatively to the brick’s orientation.  That is, if a 1x1 brick is stud-up, the medium grid moves it scene-wise horizontally 10 LDU and scene-wise vertically 12 LDU.  If it’s stud-on-one-side, scene-wise vertical movement becomes 10 LDU and it’s 12 LDU in the stud’s direction.  That’s fine for bricks, that’s stupid for beams/liftarms (their up is their width / their pin-holes vertical).

[Philo]

@Ivan_M Since you do a lot of Technic, have you considered using LDCad? Admitedly I am much more used to LDCad than to Studio, but I think that LDCad is really easier to use, especially for Technic.

[Shroud]

I’m probably doing something wrong but I can’t seem to get the minifig legs to hinge at the hip.  Think I’m missing something and just imported the legs in from LDD in the meantime.  That was ok for a work around.

[SylvainLS]

1 hour ago, Shroud said:

I’m probably doing something wrong but I can’t seem to get the minifig legs to hinge at the hip.  Think I’m missing something and just imported the legs in from LDD in the meantime.  That was ok for a work around.

It’s like LDraw: if you used the hips+legs part, you can’t rotate the legs, you need to use the three parts (hips, right leg, left leg), which is what happens when you import from LDD.

BUT, a new version has been promised for this week with the ability to hinge minifig legs and torsos and other hinges, mainly because the ADP palette for their contest doesn’t allow bits of minifigs, only what you can find from LEGO.

[Ivan_M]

5 hours ago, Philo said:

@Ivan_M Since you do a lot of Technic, have you considered using LDCad? Admitedly I am much more used to LDCad than to Studio, but I think that LDCad is really easier to use, especially for Technic.

I have tried, but I always struggle with color pie and parts bins. What I like about the studio is how easy is to filter colors by selecting "show only available colors" and I also like that I can have custom parts bin with predefined colors of certain parts - I have pins and axles in their most common color in one bin, liftarms in other bin and so on. This is probably doable in ldcad as well, the amount of customization is impressive to the point that it freaks me out. I use it for rubber bands, pneumatic hoses and stuff like that. It is also very usefull when you want to rotate part/subassembly around certain point, studio is picky about that. I also like how easy is to move and rotate parts in studio using keyboard only, clone tool is also easier to use (valid for 1.0.100, newer versions are not that good as mentioned above).

[Shroud]

15 hours ago, SylvainLS said:

It’s like LDraw: if you used the hips+legs part, you can’t rotate the legs, you need to use the three parts (hips, right leg, left leg), which is what happens when you import from LDD.

BUT, a new version has been promised for this week with the ability to hinge minifig legs and torsos and other hinges, mainly because the ADP palette for their contest doesn’t allow bits of minifigs, only what you can find from LEGO.

That would explain it then as that’s the palette I’m using.  I’ll have to run the check to see if the import is accepted for the competition, cheers.

[SylvainLS]

1 hour ago, Shroud said:

 I’ll have to run the check to see if the import is accepted for the competition, cheers.

I checked with the new version:

Now minifig parts are “releasable,” that means they are seen as some sort of submodel and a “release” button is available in the status line when you select one.  So you can “release” the parts (separate them) and then rotate them individually.

And if you tryi to submit, no more problems with them 

 

[Shroud]

23 hours ago, SylvainLS said:

I checked with the new version:

Now minifig parts are “releasable,” that means they are seen as some sort of submodel and a “release” button is available in the status line when you select one.  So you can “release” the parts (separate them) and then rotate them individually.

And if you tryi to submit, no more problems with them 

 

That’s awesome news! Love how they update and change so quickly.