Custom Building Instructions

[Sir Bricksalot]

Is there any way to create custom builing instructions for my MOCs? I've been trying to research this, but have found very little outside of LDRAW, which seems highly impractical. I'm guessing that there must be a way to do it because I have seen several AFOLs selling custom sets with instructions. Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Pingles]

I always assumed that the price you pay for those instructions is based on how much trouble they are.

I figured they did Ldraw screenshots then photoshopped in arrows and packaged them in pdfs.

Time-consuming, to be sure although it is the kind of thing I think would be fun, especially when you had a finished product to distribute.

[kyphur]

The LDraw based instructions are generated using utilities like LDView, LPub & POVRay.

Yes they are time consuming for larger models but they are great if done correctly.

[Ralph_S]

I'm not sure whether LDD can do decent instructions, but I find the combination of LDRAW/MLCAD and LPUB to work reasonably well. You need to think about the order in which you want to add parts in every step, and the biggest difficulty IMO is generating an LDRAW with that information in it. If left to its own devices, MLCAD makes a hash of this. Even if you add parts in the right order and tell it to add STEP commands, the order gets muddled. There's some manual hacking involved

However, once that is done, using LPUB to turn your file into a proper instruction booklet is a breeze, including arrows and submodels and callouts and everything. I made instructions for a roughly 100-part model yesterday. Making the LDRAW file took about two hours. Making the booklet took about half an hour. The learning curve is pretty steep, but once you've got the hang of it it's definitely worthwhile.

Cheers,

Ralph

[Brickdoctor]

I'm not sure whether LDD can do decent instructions

It can't. It's a common complaint; the order in which LDD instructs you to add each piece is often confusing.

[Sir Bricksalot]

Thank you for the info, guys. It gives me a better idea of what I'd be getting myself into.

[Aanchir]

The most reliable way I've found of making custom building instructions is actually surprisingly lo-tech: once your model is fully built, take it apart piece-by-piece, taking photographs each time you remove a piece or group of pieces. Then reverse the order of the images, adding arrows if you think it's necessary. The instructions will look sloppy, but in the end they should reliably show what you have to do to rebuild the model.

An example of building instructions I've made with this technique can be seen here or here. If you want to make sure the building instructions are usable by others, test by giving them to a friend or family member and making note of any time they get confused, so that you can then take additional or better photos to clear up that confusion.

Edited July 20, 2011 by Aanchir

[SlyOwl]

This was a go I had a while back at doing instructions - link.

I built it in MLCAD, and then proceeded to gradually delete the parts, taking screenshots at each point and editing them together in photoshop. It's not pretty, but it does the job (it'd have helped if I'd spent more time on it and if I'd realised that I had accidentally used black, not brown; stupid colour defective vision!).