Adventures in LDD: X-Wing 10240

I had some free time, so I fired up Lego Digital Designer and thought I'd try my hand at duplicating the Red Five X-Wing, the newest Star Wars Ultimate Collector set to come out. As I've mentioned before, the best way to learn the program is to download one of the instruction manuals from Lego's website and try to build the set in the program. You'll learn a lot about what the program can and can't do. Here's the results after a little work, rendered in POV-Ray.

POV-Ray Rendering of LDD model

Looks pretty nice, in my opinion. I had to make a few allowances to get it looking like this. For one thing, that windscreen is not the one used in the actual set. In the actual set, a new piece (it's one stud longer) was created and has custom decals on it. LDD doesn't have that piece available so I had to use the closest approximation. The other allowance is that it's missing 4 of these pieces.

Technic shock absorber

The picture is a screenshot from LDD of a shock absorber piece often used in Technic sets. It has a spring and the black part telescopes in and out of the white piece. On this set, it would be used to make it easier for the mechanism to open and close the wings to work more smoothly. However, in LDD, it's basically one solid piece of a fixed length. So you can't really adjust it to fit perfectly on the set like you would in real life. So I just left those pieces off. By the way, the 10179 UCS Millennium Falcon I did in LDD is FULL of shortcuts and pieces that were left off because of just how complicated that monster is.
Based on this build and others I've tried in the past, here's some of the things I've learned. Don't bother trying to build anything with a lot of Technic elements. A few Technic blocks, lift arms, and axels are fine, but once you add more than a few gears, the Hinge Tool and Align Hinge Tool start to slow down or give you really wacky results. The same goes for moveable parts like hinge plates or rocker style plates. The more of those that are in the model, the harder the program has to work to rotate them. Sometimes it's easier to break the model off into a simpler sub section to get all the rotations right, then add that sub section into the rest of the model.
LDD is perfect for building static, mostly stud-on-top models like the sets you see in Architecture, City, or those Modular buildings that are popular with the adult collectors. It's not as great for complicated Technic sets or anything that uses a lot of "unorthodox" building techniques. For example, one limitation is that LDD will only let you place bricks either on the gray building plane or on a suitable attachment point. For instance, you can place a sword on the ground, or in a minifigs hand, but you can't put it inside a barrel as if it was dropped there. This means you wouldn't be able to dump a bunch of clear studs in an empty space so that it looks like water as some AFOLs might do.
Where LDD really shines, is if you're making a model that has a lot of repetition like a mansion with a ton of identical windows or columns. In real life, it would take a while to build each individual feature and add it, but through the computer magic we all love, you can just copy and paste those bricks again and again.
Once you figure out what LDD can and can't do, it will really help you understand the possibilities of the program and give you an idea of what kind of models it would be useful for designing.

LDD to POV-Ray Converter

I explained in a previous post how to take a model in Lego Digital Designer and through several steps, create a realistic looking picture of your Lego creation via POV-Ray. While perusing MOCpages recently, I came across a very helpful article (LDD models rendering tutorial) that explains an easier way to achieve, in my opinion, better results. The method used in that article uses a program called LDD to POV-Ray Converter which, shockingly, converts LDD files into a format that POV-Ray can then use to render an image. It's very streamlined and you can setup almost everything you want (quality, lights, colors, etc.) in the Converter instead of fiddling with endless text files in POV-Ray. Once you have all the settings the way you want it, you just click Convert and let the program work its magic. Once it successfully completes, the Converter will even automatically launch POV-Ray and start rendering the scene right away. It's a great tool for both POV-Ray pros, and people who are intimidated by POV-Rays minimal interface. Depending on your quality settings and how big you make the final picture, it can take anywhere from a few seconds to an hour or two. With just a little fiddling with the controls, I turned this Turkey creation in LDD...

...into this glamour shot.

Not bad. Not bad at all. Now instead of the flat, shadowless colors in LDD, we now have shadows, textured surfaces on the sloped bricks, visible seams, and that shiny, plastic Lego brick sheen we all know and love. My favorite part of the finished results is that the light on the wing makes the LEGO logo easilty visible on the studs.

LDD 4.3.5

I have been way out of the loop lately on all things LEGO. I'm really hoping that sometime in the near future, I will suddenly have more time to mess around some more in LDD, but that time has not arrived yet. I'm due for a Florida vacation next week, so maybe after then.
However, I did recently fire up LDD just because I haven't in a while and was excited to see that they have a new update, version 4.3.5. Sweet! The major change as far as I can tell is that they have reorganized the brick palette, as seen on the left. Most of the standars are unchanged, such as bricks and plates, but some of the huge, unwieldy categories have been broken up into more categories. In the previous version, everything that had to do with minifigs would be put in one category. So if you just wanted a torso or set of legs, you'd have to scroll threw a bunch of wigs and hats to get to them. Now it appears there are categories for heads, minifig body parts, wigs, hats, tools, animals, and other sub categories having to do with vehicles. This should make it much easier to get to the part that you want with a couple of clicks and less scrolling.
Other than that, it's not obvious what has been changed, but supposedly some other user interface improvements, connectibility enhancements, and a few other under the hood mechanics have been improved. The brick palette alone is worth the update, in my opinion. Enjoy creating!

Rural Church

Once again, I was playing around with LDD and on a whim decided to try to make a model for a simple rural church. This one in particular is modeled after a historical Methodist church in the Appalachian Mountains location of Cades Cove, Tennessee. Most of them are pretty much the same in their simplistic design, though. You can usually tell the old Methodist churches apart from the others by the two doors leading into the front of the building, one for men and one for women.

LDD Tips and Tricks: Getting Started

I've been playing around with Lego Digital Designer for a little while. I am really enjoying this program as both a 3D related software designer myself and a Lego fan. The program provides a very minimalistic user manual, and there's not a wealth of information on the net for how to use the program, but just by playing around with it, I think I've found a few helpful hints for using LDD. These tips assume you already know a little about LDD. If not, go Download It. You won't be sorry. Now, on to the tips.

1.Use the Extended LDD Theme

LDD provides three "themes": Lego Digital Designer, Lego MINDSTORMS, and Extended Lego Digital Designer. What these themes do is determine how the different pieces are displayed in the brick selector on the left hand side of the screen. The Lego MINDSTORMS shows only bricks available in MINDSTORMS (basically programmable robotic Lego sets). I haven't played with these theme much at all, so that's all I will say about that. The regular LDD theme shows all the bricks available in all of their available color and paint patterns. So if you want a black 2x2 brick, you look through the list of all the colors and find the black one. The Extended LDD theme shows all available bricks by type, and leave it up to you to pick the color, or paint the color later. What this means is with the extended theme, there's far fewer bricks to search through to find the one you are looking for. I found that just by enabling Extended, my computer ran much smoother (there's less work for it to do) and it was easier to find things without having to scroll through a multitude of brick color combinations.

2.Use the Search Bar

You'll find that the more you use LDD, the more quickly you'll be able to navigate to the exact piece you're looking for. However, some pieces are just plain hard to pick out of the huge lineup of available bricks. To aid with this problem, a handy little search bar has been included at the top of the brick panel. As you use pieces, try to recall what they're named so you can go right to them from the search bar. For example, let's say I'm looking for the Yoda minifig head. I can either search through the huge section of minifig accessories until I spot the tiny head, or I can type "yoda" in the search bar and go directly to it. This is a huge time saver.

3.Learn the Camera Control Shortcuts
It's kind of hard to work on a model if you don't know how to view it from the proper angle. LDD provides some camera controls on the screen for rotating the model and zooming in and out, but I don't use those. In fact, I usually turn those off so they don't get in the way. I use the mouse for almost everything related to the camera, and here's what I use:

• Holding down the right mouse button while moving causes the camera to rotate left/right and up/down around a focal point while maintaining the same distance. In some programs, this is called orbiting.
• Holding down Shift and the right mouse button while moving causes the model to pan or shift up/down and left/right. This is great for fine adjustments or when you want to look at one end or the other of a long model.
• The mouse wheel zooms in and out on the current focal point.
• If you hover over a brick on the model and click the right mouse button, this causes the focal point to shift to that brick. In other words, the camera will switch so that the brick you right clicked on will be in the center of your view. This is my favorite command and it's not even listed in the manual for some odd reason.

4.Practice with Actual Lego Instructions
In my opinion, this is the best possible way to learn how to use LDD, MLCad, or any other Lego based design program. Take an old set of Lego instructions from a set that you own, and try to build that model on your computer. If you don't have any handy, Lego.com has a huge stash of instructions in pdf format right here. I probably pieced together a dozen or so of the Star Wars and Architecture models using the online pdfs, and doing so gave me a good feel of LDD's capabilities and limitations.

Hopefully you will find these tips useful. Stay tuned and I will be posting additional tips, tricks, and tutorials in the near future.