Subject:
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LEGO's acknowledgement of LDraw
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad
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Date:
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Fri, 26 May 2006 01:44:32 GMT
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Highlighted:
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Recently we learned that LEGO respects the LDraw CAD family enough to invest its
own software development time and energies so that LDD can import and export
LDraw models. I was very proud of us and our efforts when this happened.
I recently participated in another activity that affirms LEGO's respect for the
LDraw family of tools. I created building instructions of models created for
the official LEGO magazine. Geoff Gray our prolific author friend was contacted
by someone from LEGO to see if he would create BIs for the magazine. Geoff was
taken away from home suddenly (I hope everthing is OK there....) and he asked me
if I would pick up the ball for him.
Geoff had entered all but one of the models into LDraw, but had not started on
the building instruction part. I have some task relevent experience there so I
said yes. After I had created instructions for two models of geese and a
pelican, I took a bit of time to chat with our LEGO contact.
I asked him why he was outsourcing the instructions, and he indicated that there
was a lack of resource to do these things in-house. He said he liked the
results from the LDraw tools, and hoped to do this for the foreeable future.
For me there was unspoken stuff that was important to notice:
Using the LDraw tools, we can create building instructions that meet LEGO's
standard of quality. I think this is a huge complement to the LDraw community!
Geoff caught me with my pants down a little bit in that I had just rewritten the
layout code to do some new things, and it was not debugged much. Needless to
say I was fixing bugs as fast as I was touching things up in the LDraw files.
The new feature is part-list-images for each step in a callout, and the same for
each step in a multi-step page.
Our LEGO contact is very pleased!
We used ldglite as our renderer and suspect that that will not change. It is
very fast and the quality has a very similar feel to LEGO's renderings. Edge
lines are great.
The smallest model took 5 pages, and the largest, the flytrap took 13. There
were easily a hundred steps expressed across the 13 pages of the flytrap.
If you get a chance, check out the models in the upcoming LEGO magazines and
smile knowing that we, the LDraw community, made them possible.
Kevin
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