SylvainLS

Update 2018-11-05 Added: 34173 / 34173.dat Figure Friends Cutlery Spoon 90541 / 90541.dat Minifig Hat Beanie Rematched: 6153 / 6153b.dat Wedge 6 x 4 with Stud Notches Made importable: 6153.dat Wedge 6 x 4 without Stud Notches 6153a.dat Wedge 6 x 4 without Stud Notches 23893.dat =Plate 2 x 2 with Groove with 1 Centre Stud 27059.dat =Minifig Hat Beanie 35386.dat =Tile 1 x 2 with Groove md5sum: 4059c07c118fa77f85126b29d6af4886

I can’t find the post but one of the admins said BrickLink will do the instructions and if the submission have some, they will treat them as a suggestion.

You don’t need Flash for the HTML LDD produces. It’s just images and a bit of HTML + Javascript to show them. I believe it’s simply a case of unneeded dependencies added by their automatic tool that creates their installer, or a “let’s be safe and leave it there, it won’t hurt because who doesn’t need the last version of Flash anyway?” attitude.

Don’t hold your breath….

It’s not a Gatling gun, it’s a “rotative sensor-drone launcher”

Update 2018-10-28 Added: 23769 / 23769.dat Minifig Skeleton Leg Long Added variant: 19159 / 19159.dat Technic Connector 3 x 1 x 3 with Two Pins and Two Clips with Squared Inside 99563.dat =Gold Ingot Made importable: 2538a.dat Boat Mast 2 x 2 x 16 Top without Bottom Nubs 31511.dat =Technic Connector Circular with 2 Pin Holes and 3 Axle Holes 35382.dat =Brick 1 x 1 28618.dat =Minifig Flame with Rim Renamed: 2538 / 2538b.dat Boat Mast 2 x 2 x 16 Top with Bottom Nubs md5sum: 583db3ae2b99f3390771c1ef80158528

Jaclyn’s position seems rather categorical and absolute, but in the same post she says “That being said, a futuristic robot design sounds pretty darn cool. There's still hope! ” So maybe if you don’t qualify the pew-pews as weapons but as sensors and antennas, like in the good old times of Classic Space

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

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.

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. 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).

The LDraw standard is a bit fuzzy around the edges. File extension, from the specifications: “All LDraw files carry the LDR (default), DAT or MPD extension.” It is not said that MPD contents should always have an .mpd extension. Treating .ldr files as potential MPD files is the safe path. “0 NOFILE” is only required to separate non-LDraw contents at the end of a “file” (properly, an “embedded file”), but it may be used to end any “file.” Moreover, “0” does NOT end an “embedded file,” it’s just a useless empty comment. See the specs. Also, it’s not said whether a “file”/“model” in an MPD should have or not an extension. It’s just said “model” or “name of the LDR file.” The extension may or not be part of a file’s name. “0 ROTSTEP” is an MLCad unofficial meta command (list of unofficial meta commands). You can check the official meta commands here. In short: Don’t use ONE application’s interpretation of the specs, use the specs. As the saying goes: “Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.”

The question was about building time, not afterward. Anyway, you can simply (almost) repeat your hinge (you just need to remove one plate): The hinge points are 6 studs x 19 studs apart, that’s a 17.526° angle. Removing the plate on the blue connection adds an angle whose tangent is 1 plate x 20 studs, that’s a 1.146° angle. The sum is then 18.671° which, I believe, is near enough to your 18.7° angle.

Okay, so we can replace the red parts with anything, but nothing over the DBG plate. I’ll try to rephrase the other questions: What do you use to place the LBG part and what’s the position of the hinge point relatively to the DBG part? If we know the exact measures of the triangle, it would be easier to mathematically find a solution. And does that hinge have enough liberty so that, when you build the model, the LBG part could be “open” and you just “close” and connect it to the red parts? Finding an easy way to build is part of the design

It’d help to know where (and what) the “blue hinge” is exactly, in order to work the math rather than fumble in the dark with trial and error. Also, what are the possibilities for the connection/red parts? Can we put anything of anysize anywhere? How will it be built? Do you want the LBG plate to hinge close and click in the red parts?

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.

The error message shows the culprit(s): the first line of the file, there are two spurious characters before 0. You need to remove them. If you can’t see them while editing the file, it may be because they are the Unicode BOM (Byte Order Mark), special characters to mark the encoding of the file that Unicode-aware programs can use or ignore. It appears some tools (Notepad) always add a BOM. Now, if it’s a BOM you’ll need either a dumb ASCII editor that will show the characters or a smart editor that has a function to remove invisible BOMs.

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

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.

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).

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

CUDA is NVidia only.

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).

I was referring to anothergol’s comment: Shortening the phrase wasn’t a success

Actually, I’m starting to wonder if they will get enough contestants: Limited ADP palette, no IP, no warfare¹ (pretty usual with Lego but some AFOL like their guns), nothing that’s also on Ideas, no 3 stacked bricks, no no no… (¹ BTW, admin Jaclyn was clear: no warfare at all, “avoid submitting depictions of large or human-scale weapons or weapon replicas of any kind (past, present or future), including swords, knives, guns, sci-fi or fantasy blasters, etc.”)

It will surely make people think twice about supporting more than one project.