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I thought we had a topic for this when it first came out, but maybe we just talked about it in other threads.
I just went through Stud.io and made instructions for the cathedral of learning in a couple of hours. They’re not perfect, but they WAY better than what I was able to do with LDD.
I didn’t even know Stud.io had instruction builder capability until yesterday. It also has the ability to make photo like renders and a cool “stability” tool that is like a heat graph of where things might be too weak.
I just felt this realization of mine deserved a thread because it’s not just a ‘3d modeling’ tool. It’s like all of the 3rd party tools all wrapped into one, and now owned by LEGO, so I’m expecting more awesomeness. If you were shying away from it, I’d suggest you play around with it!
I have questions:
What’s the learning curve like? How difficult is it to find parts? Can you find parts via part number, or is it better to search by description? What color names are used?
And most importantly: can stud.io import from LDD?
Same as any modeling software. Can import ldd files. Uses bricklink colors. I thought it was easy to find parts in the collapsible side navigation, but I wasn’t looking for many different parts.
Weren’t there some licensing hiccups (like a “we own whatever you make”) or is that only if you export your models to a public market? I may be misremembering, but I vaguely recall something about that.
Any model that is uploaded to BrickLink becomes LEGO’s intellectual property in perpetuity, and without credit. I will not be doing that for any model I plan to do anything else with, which includes the G-Fighters. If I upload anything there, it will be models that are one offs or variants of my main work.
Since this thread already exists, I’m gonna bump it instead of creating a brand new thread.
I took Krista’s CCAC course on Studio (along with a few other Steel City LUG members) and I’ve been using Studio a lot and plan to use it a whole lot more. So I wanted a thread for talking about Studio, and discussing difficulties and questions and getting advice and maybe cool stuff we’ve discovered.
My main issue lately has been with rotating submodels. Apparently Studio doesn’t do well with it, it seems to consider the original rotation to be part of the submodel, and if you try to rotate it, it often doesn’t find an axis to rotate around, even if it’s fairly obvious. I have had success with using copy and mirror on the submodels, but if you want a rotation outside what you can achieve with that, it looks like the only way to do it is to create a new submodel for every rotation you use. In this particular case (I’ve been making submodels of space planets, cause duh), the Studio file is just an approximation of the final build, so it’s not a big deal, but I think it must be not too difficult to come up with a situation where it is a big deal.
@bengood921 Thanks for reviving this thread! I think you’re right in that Studio needs to consider it it’s own submodel. However a quick workaround would be if you copy and paste a submodel, select “unlink submodel” then at the bottom right of the viewport and it will add “copy” to the end of your submodel name (which you could rename). Looking forward to see what you’re building. 🙂
I have questions:
What’s the learning curve like? How difficult is it to find parts? Can you find parts via part number, or is it better to search by description? What color names are used?
And most importantly: can stud.io import from LDD?
@zaximillian I’m not sure if you ever got answers to your questions, but it’s not too hard to use and pretty easy to find parts. You can search via name, dimension, or BrickLink part number. It uses the color names from BrickLink. Yes, it can import from LDD.Any model that is uploaded to BrickLink becomes LEGO’s intellectual property in perpetuity, and without credit.
Interestingly that also applies to the wanted lists on the site as well. From BrickLink’s terms:
You may post, display or publish images, captions, titles, materials, information, data, designs, models, build instructions, videos and other content (collectively, “content”) to public areas of the Site, including but not limited to Catalog, Studio Gallery and forums of the Site. You hereby grant to BrickLink an irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, assignable, and sub-licensable right and license, for the duration of applicable legal protection of any intellectual property right attached to the content, to use, modify and translate as necessary, reproduce, publish, communicate and display such content in any manner as BrickLink deems appropriate in relation to the operation of the Site. You hereby waive your moral rights in the content, to the extent necessary to give effect to the above license.
When you upload any content to any private areas of the Site including but not limited to My Studio and Wanted List of the Site, where no other users have access to your content without your explicit permission, you hereby grant to BrickLink a worldwide, assignable, royalty-free, non-exclusive right and license to reproduce, modify and translate as necessary, publish, communicate and display such content solely in your private areas of the Site.
Funny enough, I just had this conversation with a friend of mine who is getting back into the hobby. I personally do not like Stud.io. There’s just something about it, I find it hard to use (which honestly is mostly user error) and personally wish Lego would re launch digital designer. Now with that said I also view it is a blessing in disguise. I realized with the fall of LDD just how much time I was spending building digitally when I could have been building in person. Definitely a big plus.
I liked LDD and made found it useful for experimenting without having the parts in hand. I was able to sell LDD directions of my Christmas tree on eBay for awhile … but I don’t know anything about STUD.IO
After the Carvana model was put on display, someone from Carvana contacted Josh and said that he wanted digital plans so the company could build models for Carvana customers. I left a message a week ago and have not heard back, but that is fine with me because I don’t have time to be learning STUD.IO
I recently upgraded my laptop and was going to start dabbling in STUD.IO to try and build an MOC of one of my favorite sets as a kid, a bigger & better version of 6563 Gator Landing.
Back in the day I tried to learn one of the programs – it was either LDraw or LDD but it’s been so long that I can’t remember – but the camera controls were so poor that I considered the program unusable, and I quickly gave up on it. A couple of years I tried learning Studio on my own using the built-in tutorial, but I didn’t have the patience for it and gave up on that pretty quickly too. So I was glad for Krista’s class, and I recommend it for anybody interested, she told us the current plan is to run it again this spring.
Studio isn’t a perfect program but it’s got a lot going for it and I can definitely work with it. I wouldn’t ever upload something to BrickLink. And if you’re selling instructions, I’d advise that you sell them in .pdf form, which Studio can do, rather than selling .io files. If you give them the .io file, you’re also giving them a way to easily modify your design.
One of the most useful things I’ve found in Studio is that it keeps a running list of every part in the build. I like to build big scenes, with big buildings and extensive landscaping, and after years of saving up parts and buying large lots, I’ve been wondering: do I have enough? If I don’t buy more now, will I regret it later? But if I buy more now, will I have buyer’s remorse later if I don’t need them all? For different parts that I have lots of for the same build, do I have them in the right proportions? Some of the files I’ve already made in Studio have started to give me some insight into those questions, and I plan to continue with it. For example, I worked on one file in October, and there was a certain wedge plate I kept using that’s hard to get (I’m probably gonna have to order them from Germany), and at the end I thought hmm, I probably used that part maybe twenty times. And then I checked the model inventory and I’d actually used it about fifty times. So that kind of thing is definitely good to know. (I also admittedly like the idea of taking a giant display to a convention or whatever, and then when people ask how many parts are in it, being able to blow their minds by giving an exact number. We’ll see if that actually works out.)
Landscaping in Studio is slow and tedious, but landscaping with real parts is also slow and tedious, with one big difference (and I really can’t emphasize enough how important this is to me): Studio does not create a giant mess in my house that needs to be cleaned up later (and I know every single one of you knows what I’m talking about here), and does not result in a group of parts that needs to be resorted if I need to rebuild.
Studio is also helping me with planning. With landscaping, it’s easiest to design from the top down, but when you actually assemble, you need to do it from the bottom up. That means when you’re building the underlying support structure, you need to try and predict where the design is going to go, and it’s not easy, at least it’s not for me. When I did my two-LUG-table park in 2014, I got good results, but it was very disorganized and inefficient underneath, and when I did Space Plants 2.0 in early 2020, it was also very disorganized and inefficient underneath, and I didn’t get good results. I’m hoping Studio will help solve that, and so far it’s looking good.
I haven’t used it as much lately, but the main hangup is not Studio, but my computers: my laptop and my desktop are both old, and both are puny and weak, and as such, both struggle to run a graphics-heavy program like Studio. Things are in motion to replace them, but in the meantime it’s limiting my progress.
I did get a big file made though. I think I’ll detail that in a separate post.
Long-time viewers of the show will be familiar with my Travis-brick pine trees. (And if you’re not, there’s several links to photos at the end, cause none of this will make any sense if you’re not picturing the build that I’m talking about. I may also attach a screenshot of my Studio file, either in this post or a separate one.) It’s a common design and I didn’t come up with it; I’ve been using them since 2014, and the design wasn’t new then either. I have them organized into bags with instruction cards for easy assembly, and I currently have 137 of them of 24 different types. I have a naming system for all of them, based on the height and volume of the tree.
The first thing I did was make a big file containing all 24 types of tree. All the trees were converted to submodels. The trees are arranged in an organized fashion, and they’re all labeled using 1×1 black tiles with letters printed on them.
The second thing I did was make 24 additional files, with one tree each. That way when I’m landscaping, I can simply import the relevant tree file, and I have the whole tree right there, again as a single submodel, that I can easily move around and copy.
I’m hoping that will work well, but I haven’t really done anything with it, except a couple tests. As far as I can tell, when you import an outside model, it doesn’t give you the option of deciding where it’s gonna go; instead, it just appears in the file and then you have to move it. In fact, I had trouble moving it, I had to copy it, move the copy, and delete the original. If there’s a better way to do it, I haven’t figured it out yet, I don’t know if Krista will have advice for me there or not @knb112. Importing was mentioned in class, but we didn’t ever use it for our homework assignments, so I hadn’t actually used it til recently.
One thing I did learn is that Studio doesn’t keep a list of submodels somewhere that you can call up so that you can pick one off the list to insert. I somehow thought that this was the case, probably because that’s how it works in AutoCAD. In AutoCAD, you can use the insert command – which is different from importing a submodel from outside the file – and it will bring up a list of every submodel created in that drawing, even ones were created but currently don’t actually appear in the drawing, and you can then pick a submodel from that list to insert into the drawing.
Studio has nothing like that – or if it does, I couldn’t find it, and I’d definitely like to know where it is. If I make submodel J3, and then I delete it, I can’t call it up later – as far as Studio is concerned, it no longer exists. The only way to bring it back is to undo the deletion, or remake it from scratch. Likewise, if J3 does exist in the drawing, and I want to put another J3 somewhere else, I need to find an existing J3 somewhere in the drawing and click on it and copy it. If the existing J3’s are not easily accessible, especially if they’ve been incorporated into larger submodels that would have to be released in order to copy their component part, then the easiest way is to have an extra J3 off to the side for easy access. I did in fact use this method to make my pine trees.
The basic premise of the design is Travis bricks stacked on top of each other, with stacks of the classic 3-prong flower stem on all four sides of each brick, with the stem stacks ranging from 1 to 6. So the first thing I did was make six submodels, called Stem-1, Stem-2, etc., which were the stacks of stems. I had to rotate each stem part relative to the previous ones in the stack to give a reasonable approximation of how they’re gonna appear in actual trees, but that worked out – I didn’t have any of the rotation problems that plagued me with my Space Plants submodels (which I have not yet gone back to, that’s a conversation for another day). Next I copied and rotated each of the Stem submodels to attach to the four sides of a Travis brick to create six more submodels, Travis-1, Travis-2, etc. (Because I just copied the Stem submodels, they’re all identical and don’t have the variation that inevitably occurs when assembling the trees by hand, which helps give them a more natural and less mechanical look, but it doesn’t matter here; the Studio files are just for planning purposes.) I was happy with how the Travis submodels came out. I then assembled them into the different trees, but for the reasons mentioned above, I had to keep a copy of all six of them arranged off to the side for easy access.
What’s not apparent in the photo is that the trees contain umbrella stands inside the Travis bricks for additional support. (Technically it’s the 6L bar with stop ring, which is actually a different part from the old 6.6L Fabuland umbrella stand, but people still call them that anyway). I don’t really need the umbrella stands in the Studio file – I already have more than I need, so I won’t need to buy more, and they’re already installed in the tree trunks as needed, and of course the Studio pine trees are gonna hold together whether they’re there or not – but I thought I’d put them in anyway (for one thing, it would give me a total count on them, see ‘blowing people’s minds’ in the previous post). But I ran into problems. Putting the part into the first Travis brick, so that it stops at the ring, was easy. But then I would slide the next Travis brick down the umbrella stand until it hits, and clicks onto, the first Travis brick. This seems like it should be easy, but Studio struggled with it. Since you can slide a Travis brick to any point on the umbrella stand, Studio let me drag it up and down as desired, but it did not do a good job of finding the lower Travis brick and clicking to it. Frequently it would go too far, so they’d overlap and get grayed out, and I’d have to move the top one back up a little. Most of the time it did click properly in the end, but sometimes there was a small gap between them, and it happened often enough and was enough of a hassle to detect and fix that I got frustrated with it pretty quickly and deleted out all the umbrella stands. Currently there are none in any of my pine tree files. Is there a way to make that work better? I remember we talked a bit about the collision settings in class, but I seem to remember that Krista was not a fan of messing with them, and I have not looked into what might be accomplished with them, if anything. I also tried putting the Travis submodels together first and then adding the umbrella stand afterwards (which would not actually be physically possible in real life), but that didn’t work either.
After that though the tree assembly was pretty smooth. The basic premise of the tree design is that each Travis brick is rotated 45 degrees relative to the one below it, so that they flip back and forth. (And again, Studio’s ability to hit 45 degrees exactly every time creates very sterile-looking trees; in real life slight variations that are inevitable and can also be helped along deliberately create a more natural-looking tree.) What slowed me down is that every time, Studio wanted to align with the rotation of the Travis-submodel with the one below it, whether it had a 45-degree rotation or not. I can’t complain about that, Studio has no way of knowing which way I want it, and I have to think in most applications, you’re gonna want an added part to align with what it’s clicking to. But it was a bit slow, there was a lot of copying and then manually rotating every other one.
One other minor hassle occurred when I made the individual import files for each tree. First I did a ‘save us’ on the master tree file to create a temporary copy. Then I deleted out every tree except the one I wanted to keep, and saved that under the file name I wanted for it. Then I reopened the temp copy of all the trees, and repeated the process for the next tree. (Every six trees I would eliminate the trees already done in the master copy to reduce the overall amount of deleting.) In doing this, the easiest way of course was to keep the view of all the trees in a generally isometric one. But the minor hassle was that every time I reopened the master copy file, it would revert to a side view, despite the fact that I had never once used that particular view for that file, much less saved it that way. And so every time I would have to manually rotate it to a view that was more convenient (the isometric view button is still not working for me and really never has, which is another issue); it was a small inconvenience, to be sure, but I had to do it over and over, but more importantly, it was perplexing, because I couldn’t think of any reason why this would be happening or anything that I could do about it. So again, I don’t know if Krista has any advice for me on that one or not @knb112.
And of course, now that I have them made, I have not actually gotten around to sitting down and working on a landscape file that will use them. But I have high hopes for them. Both Space plants and Earth plants are a similar situation to the one I described with landscaping in the previous post, where design and assembly are somewhat at odds with each other: my experience with plants has been that it’s easiest to decide where the biggest plants go first, but once they’re in place, they’re physically in the way when you’re putting smaller plants around them, so you’re constantly putting plants in and then removing them and then putting them back in to check that it looks okay and things aren’t bonking into each other and then removing them again to put more plants in, etc., and it’s pretty slow and tedious. I’m hoping that Studio will help make this easier, as well as be useful for coming with an order of operations when it does come time to assemble. Pine trees especially are almost impossible to transport assembled and have to be done on site, and knowing ahead of time what order to place them on the build will be a big help in the convention hall. (You can see it in the Greenberg links attached at the end of this post, which was another build made quickly on the spot, there’s tons of small plants along the water’s edge, but almost none farther back below the larger trees or near the pine trees.)
Additionally, I want to see how far my trees will actually go in a display. The first link below is from BWC in 2019, Rachel had reserved more table space than she could fill, and I improvised a display to use up the rest of the table (it’s easily the least impressive thing I’ve ever put on public display). At the time I had 68 pine trees (of 13 different types) and I was surprised how easily I fit all of them on just nine baseplates, which led me to create more. (As far as I know, though, Lego has stopped making that particular plant stem part, so I’m probably at my limit for that kind of tree, although there’s still unused stems at my house.) But assembling all 68 took hours and hours, so I’m hoping that Studio will streamline that process; it will be nice to know in any given display exactly how much space I can expect to be coverable (not a real word) by pine trees.
Here’s the links. The first, as mentioned, is BrickWorld Chicago 2019. The other two, which give a better views of the pine trees closer up, is from the Greenberg Train Show in Monroeville in November 2017.
Long-time viewers of the show will be familiar with my Travis-brick pine trees. (And if you’re not, there’s several links to photos at the end, cause none of this will make any sense if you’re not picturing the build that I’m talking about. I may also attach a screenshot of my Studio file, either in this post or a separate one.) It’s a common design and I didn’t come up with it; I’ve been using them since 2014, and the design wasn’t new then either. I have them organized into bags with instruction cards for easy assembly, and I currently have 137 of them of 24 different types. I have a naming system for all of them, based on the height and volume of the tree.
The first thing I did was make a big file containing all 24 types of tree. All the trees were converted to submodels. The trees are arranged in an organized fashion, and they’re all labeled using 1×1 black tiles with letters printed on them.
The second thing I did was make 24 additional files, with one tree each. That way when I’m landscaping, I can simply import the relevant tree file, and I have the whole tree right there, again as a single submodel, that I can easily move around and copy.
I’m hoping that will work well, but I haven’t really done anything with it, except a couple tests. As far as I can tell, when you import an outside model, it doesn’t give you the option of deciding where it’s gonna go; instead, it just appears in the file and then you have to move it. In fact, I had trouble moving it, I had to copy it, move the copy, and delete the original. If there’s a better way to do it, I haven’t figured it out yet, I don’t know if Krista will have advice for me there or not @knb112. Importing was mentioned in class, but we didn’t ever use it for our homework assignments, so I hadn’t actually used it til recently.
One thing I did learn is that Studio doesn’t keep a list of submodels somewhere that you can call up so that you can pick one off the list to insert. I somehow thought that this was the case, probably because that’s how it works in AutoCAD. In AutoCAD, you can use the insert command – which is different from importing a submodel from outside the file – and it will bring up a list of every submodel created in that drawing, even ones were created but currently don’t actually appear in the drawing, and you can then pick a submodel from that list to insert into the drawing.
Studio has nothing like that – or if it does, I couldn’t find it, and I’d definitely like to know where it is. If I make submodel J3, and then I delete it, I can’t call it up later – as far as Studio is concerned, it no longer exists. The only way to bring it back is to undo the deletion, or remake it from scratch. Likewise, if J3 does exist in the drawing, and I want to put another J3 somewhere else, I need to find an existing J3 somewhere in the drawing and click on it and copy it. If the existing J3’s are not easily accessible, especially if they’ve been incorporated into larger submodels that would have to be released in order to copy their component part, then the easiest way is to have an extra J3 off to the side for easy access. I did in fact use this method to make my pine trees.
The basic premise of the design is Travis bricks stacked on top of each other, with stacks of the classic 3-prong flower stem on all four sides of each brick, with the stem stacks ranging from 1 to 6. So the first thing I did was make six submodels, called Stem-1, Stem-2, etc., which were the stacks of stems. I had to rotate each stem part relative to the previous ones in the stack to give a reasonable approximation of how they’re gonna appear in actual trees, but that worked out – I didn’t have any of the rotation problems that plagued me with my Space Plants submodels (which I have not yet gone back to, that’s a conversation for another day). Next I copied and rotated each of the Stem submodels to attach to the four sides of a Travis brick to create six more submodels, Travis-1, Travis-2, etc. (Because I just copied the Stem submodels, they’re all identical and don’t have the variation that inevitably occurs when assembling the trees by hand, which helps give them a more natural and less mechanical look, but it doesn’t matter here; the Studio files are just for planning purposes.) I was happy with how the Travis submodels came out. I then assembled them into the different trees, but for the reasons mentioned above, I had to keep a copy of all six of them arranged off to the side for easy access.
What’s not apparent in the photo is that the trees contain umbrella stands inside the Travis bricks for additional support. (Technically it’s the 6L bar with stop ring, which is actually a different part from the old 6.6L Fabuland umbrella stand, but people still call them that anyway). I don’t really need the umbrella stands in the Studio file – I already have more than I need, so I won’t need to buy more, and they’re already installed in the tree trunks as needed, and of course the Studio pine trees are gonna hold together whether they’re there or not – but I thought I’d put them in anyway (for one thing, it would give me a total count on them, see ‘blowing people’s minds’ in the previous post). But I ran into problems. Putting the part into the first Travis brick, so that it stops at the ring, was easy. But then I would slide the next Travis brick down the umbrella stand until it hits, and clicks onto, the first Travis brick. This seems like it should be easy, but Studio struggled with it. Since you can slide a Travis brick to any point on the umbrella stand, Studio let me drag it up and down as desired, but it did not do a good job of finding the lower Travis brick and clicking to it. Frequently it would go too far, so they’d overlap and get grayed out, and I’d have to move the top one back up a little. Most of the time it did click properly in the end, but sometimes there was a small gap between them, and it happened often enough and was enough of a hassle to detect and fix that I got frustrated with it pretty quickly and deleted out all the umbrella stands. Currently there are none in any of my pine tree files. Is there a way to make that work better? I remember we talked a bit about the collision settings in class, but I seem to remember that Krista was not a fan of messing with them, and I have not looked into what might be accomplished with them, if anything. I also tried putting the Travis submodels together first and then adding the umbrella stand afterwards (which would not actually be physically possible in real life), but that didn’t work either.
After that though the tree assembly was pretty smooth. The basic premise of the tree design is that each Travis brick is rotated 45 degrees relative to the one below it, so that they flip back and forth. (And again, Studio’s ability to hit 45 degrees exactly every time creates very sterile-looking trees; in real life slight variations that are inevitable and can also be helped along deliberately to create a more natural-looking tree.) What slowed me down is that every time, Studio wanted to align with the rotation of the Travis-submodel with the one below it, whether it had a 45-degree rotation or not. I can’t complain about that, Studio has no way of knowing which way I want it, and I have to think in most applications, you’re gonna want an added part to align with what it’s clicking to. But it was a bit slow, there was a lot of copying and then manually rotating every other one.
One other minor hassle occurred when I made the individual import files for each tree. First I did a ‘save us’ on the master tree file to create a temporary copy. Then I deleted out every tree except the one I wanted to keep, and saved that under the file name I wanted for it. Then I reopened the temp copy of all the trees, and repeated the process for the next tree. (Every six trees I would eliminate the trees already done in the master copy to reduce the overall amount of deleting.) In doing this, the easiest way of course was to keep the view of all the trees in a generally isometric one. But the minor hassle was that every time I reopened the master copy file, it would revert to a side view, despite the fact that I had never once used that particular view for that file, much less saved it that way. And so every time I would have to manually rotate it to a view that was more convenient (the isometric view button is still not working for me and really never has, which is another issue); it was a small inconvenience, to be sure, but I had to do it over and over, but more importantly, it was perplexing, because I couldn’t think of any reason why this would be happening or anything that I could do about it. So again, I don’t know if Krista has any advice for me on that one or not @knb112.
And of course, now that I have them made, I have not actually gotten around to sitting down and working on a landscape file that will use them. But I have high hopes for them. Both Space plants and Earth plants are a similar situation to the one I described with landscaping in the previous post, where design and assembly are somewhat at odds with each other: my experience with plants has been that it’s easiest to decide where the biggest plants go first, but once they’re in place, they’re physically in the way when you’re putting smaller plants around them, so you’re constantly putting plants in and then removing them and then putting them back in to check that it looks okay and things aren’t bonking into each other and then removing them again to put more plants in, etc., and it’s pretty slow and tedious. I’m hoping that Studio will help make this easier, as well as be useful for coming with an order of operations when it does come time to assemble. Pine trees especially are almost impossible to transport assembled and have to be done on site, and knowing ahead of time what order to place them on the build will be a big help in the convention hall. (You can see it in the Greenberg links attached at the end of this post, which was another build made quickly on the spot, there’s tons of small plants along the water’s edge, but almost none farther back below the larger trees or near the pine trees.)
Additionally, I want to see how far my trees will actually go in a display. The first link below is from BWC in 2019, Rachel had reserved more table space than she could fill, and I improvised a display to use up the rest of the table (it’s easily the least impressive thing I’ve ever put on public display). At the time I had 68 pine trees (of 13 different types) and I was surprised how easily I fit all of them on just nine baseplates, which led me to create more. (As far as I know, though, Lego has stopped making that particular plant stem part, so I’m probably at my limit for that kind of tree, although there’s still unused stems at my house.) But assembling all 68 took hours and hours, so I’m hoping that Studio will streamline that process; it will be nice to know in any given display exactly how much space I can expect to be coverable (not a real word) by pine trees.
Here’s the links. The first, as mentioned, is BrickWorld Chicago 2019. The other two, which give a better views of the pine trees closer up, is from the Greenberg Train Show in Monroeville in November 2017.
Ugh, this post didn’t go through, good thing I knew to save a copy of it first because I’ve run into this before. As far as I can tell, because of the file size limits on the site, it doesn’t like my post because it contained links to Flickr photos that are too big, even though I’m not actually attaching the actual photo files to the post. It’s a giant pain in the butt, I know I’m not the only person who’s had problems with it, and nobody’s come up with a solution. So I’ll have to figure out something out in a subsequent post, but I’m gonna go ahead and post this one before I lose it.
I took a couple screenshots of my Studio file. View 1 is an isometric view, it’s how I want the file to look when I open it. (In the lower left you can see the Travis submodels that I talked about a couple posts back.) In fact, on the welcome page, when it shows up as a thumbnail on the row of files that can be opened, it appears this way.
View 2 is how it looks when I open it. So just now, I moved it to View 1, and then saved it, and then closed the program, and when I opened it again, it did it correctly, bringing up View 1 again. But I’m not sure what I did differently this time that I got it to work, because I was trying that before, and it didn’t seem to make any difference. I’m thinking Krista might have advice for me here though @knb112, cause I remember in class when we talked about saving views in Step View, but clearly I no longer remember all the details and couldn’t figure them out again on my own.
Let’s see if the site lets me attach both these files in one post.
Crap, it’s been awhile since I’ve used Paint, I deleted the files from the previous post cause they weren’t coming in right. These should be better.
Assuming this works, I’m done asking questions for the night. Thanks for reading.
Success. All I did on the third one was save them as .jpg instead of .png. I’m not technically knowledgeable enough to know why that made a difference. In fact, I know I’ve read about the differences between the two file types, but I clearly didn’t retain any of it, because I couldn’t tell you anything about it.
Now I’m really done.
So I was glad for Krista’s class, and I recommend it for anybody interested, she told us the current plan is to run it again this spring.
Thanks Ben for the recommendation! CCAC picked it up again. It’ll start on 3/1 and meet via Zoom. You can find more information and register at https://shopcommunityed.ccac.edu/Courses/General_Interest/Build_Like_a_Lego_Master.aspx
As far as I can tell, when you import an outside model, it doesn’t give you the option of deciding where it’s gonna go; instead, it just appears in the file and then you have to move it. In fact, I had trouble moving it, I had to copy it, move the copy, and delete the original. If there’s a better way to do it, I haven’t figured it out yet, I don’t know if Krista will have advice for me there or not knb112. Importing was mentioned in class, but we didn’t ever use it for our homework assignments, so I hadn’t actually used it til recently.
@bengood921 so sorry for the delay. That was quite the read! 🙂As far as I know the import lets you pull in LDD or LDraw files. For some reason, importing inserts the file as a submodel. However, if you select open instead of import, you still open the file, but it’s now as a main model.
But the minor hassle was that every time I reopened the master copy file, it would revert to a side view, despite the fact that I had never once used that particular view for that file, much less saved it that way. And so every time I would have to manually rotate it to a view that was more convenient (the isometric view button is still not working for me and really never has, which is another issue); it was a small inconvenience, to be sure, but I had to do it over and over, but more importantly, it was perplexing, because I couldn’t think of any reason why this would be happening or anything that I could do about it. So again, I don’t know if Krista has any advice for me on that one or not knb112.
That is perplexing. The only thing that I can think is that maybe you have step view turned on and set that rotation for the first step or another thought is that was the last view that you were in when you last saved/closed the file.
View 2 is how it looks when I open it. So just now, I moved it to View 1, and then saved it, and then closed the program, and when I opened it again, it did it correctly, bringing up View 1 again. But I’m not sure what I did differently this time that I got it to work, because I was trying that before, and it didn’t seem to make any difference. I’m thinking Krista might have advice for me here though knb112, cause I remember in class when we talked about saving views in Step View, but clearly I no longer remember all the details and couldn’t figure them out again on my own.
Quick Step View review. Click the Step View button (right pane under Main Model and next to the search bar) to turn it on. You’ll then see the camera next to each step number. You can then right click on the step and click set rotation. Alternatively, you can set your rotation (using pan/zoom and rotate) and then click the camera button to set it.
Hope that helps a little! 🙂
So I’ve been working on my Studio skills and managed to piece together the Langham Place x LEGO Elf Cafe by Andy Hung. I still have to do the minifigs and some of the torsos aren’t in Studio. I’m going to clean up the instructions, but if anyone’s interested in the file let me know.
@bengood921 Here’s what I got so far. I still have a bit of work on the instructions, especially since some of the torsos aren’t available in Studio.
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