Buried at the bottom of the article, my favorite thing about modern Lego kits:
> One of the most intriguing features is unlocked when you press the ‘build together’ button on select sets in the app. This allows consumers to build a LEGO set as a team by delegating each builder a building task to complete.
My partner and I enjoy assembling Lego kits together, but with paper instructions parallelizing the work is pretty tricky (usually we end up alternating one person doing the actual assembly and the other picking out the correct parts for them). But with the LEGO Builder app, it dynamically generates two parallel sets of instructions. It works great even if you're working at different paces.
This is one of those software features that delights me both as a user and as an engineer. It probably was not that complex to implement (once they had the building steps in a machine-readable format), but it's a great use of its medium, something that you genuinely couldn't do without software.
If you've ever made a digital model of Lego it can be quite surprising just how hard it is to make good instructions at the quality of Lego's - because you have to not only consider how the model goes together (can't place a brick after the bricks on top of it) but also how you can even SEE what the piece is and where it's going.
It's a skill, but it's not too hard to get decently good at it. It's mostly a matter of actually building your model in the real world and iteratively improving your digital model and instructions from there, and changing the camera angle for steps that need it.
Most of the time is spent fighting with Stud.io (the software) and dealing with its bugs (it runs OK in Bottles (i.e., managed Wine environments), but stupid rendering bugs mean you may have to do the final export step on a device with a different GPU).
When you also want to print a booklet of instructions, getting the generated steps neatly out of Stud.io's instruction maker and into a sane pipeline for making the print-ready PDFs takes some work (as well as CMYK conversions), but that is mostly a matter of setting up some scripts to wire up pdftk and ImageMagick and friends.
Indeed, it's hard to find a balance between what's too verbose and what's too hard. For relatively complex models it's also almost impossible to do "quality control" without actually building it.
However, I agree with the other poster that you can get good at it. And you really have to do it anyway, since creating instructions will find bugs in anything but the simplest models and you want to solve those before paying for the pieces.
I learned this when trying to put together a Lego Baneblade, there was a BrickLink Studio file which contained the fully built BaneBlade, but the instructions were not put together for it. I did the automatically generated instructions for each part of the Baneblade, but they were all over the place, including instructions to place a brick after bricks on top of it. Still got it built though.
I would love simpler (harder) instructions! It's too easy tbh brick by brick as it is today. 1964 looks lovely. I also have a gripe with the complexity of modern bricks (besides "basic bricks" sets). It's getting harder to build something else than what the model is.
Might as well mention a couple of lego projects I've been working on, a parts browser TUI and a 3D model (eg .stl or .obj) to lego model (ldraw) converter:
Buried at the bottom of the article, my favorite thing about modern Lego kits:
> One of the most intriguing features is unlocked when you press the ‘build together’ button on select sets in the app. This allows consumers to build a LEGO set as a team by delegating each builder a building task to complete.
My partner and I enjoy assembling Lego kits together, but with paper instructions parallelizing the work is pretty tricky (usually we end up alternating one person doing the actual assembly and the other picking out the correct parts for them). But with the LEGO Builder app, it dynamically generates two parallel sets of instructions. It works great even if you're working at different paces.
This is one of those software features that delights me both as a user and as an engineer. It probably was not that complex to implement (once they had the building steps in a machine-readable format), but it's a great use of its medium, something that you genuinely couldn't do without software.
Had no idea this was a thing, sounds like it’d be fun with the kids. Who gets the next piece has been a problem as long as there’s been lego
If you've ever made a digital model of Lego it can be quite surprising just how hard it is to make good instructions at the quality of Lego's - because you have to not only consider how the model goes together (can't place a brick after the bricks on top of it) but also how you can even SEE what the piece is and where it's going.
It's a skill, but it's not too hard to get decently good at it. It's mostly a matter of actually building your model in the real world and iteratively improving your digital model and instructions from there, and changing the camera angle for steps that need it.
Most of the time is spent fighting with Stud.io (the software) and dealing with its bugs (it runs OK in Bottles (i.e., managed Wine environments), but stupid rendering bugs mean you may have to do the final export step on a device with a different GPU).
When you also want to print a booklet of instructions, getting the generated steps neatly out of Stud.io's instruction maker and into a sane pipeline for making the print-ready PDFs takes some work (as well as CMYK conversions), but that is mostly a matter of setting up some scripts to wire up pdftk and ImageMagick and friends.
Indeed, it's hard to find a balance between what's too verbose and what's too hard. For relatively complex models it's also almost impossible to do "quality control" without actually building it.
However, I agree with the other poster that you can get good at it. And you really have to do it anyway, since creating instructions will find bugs in anything but the simplest models and you want to solve those before paying for the pieces.
I learned this when trying to put together a Lego Baneblade, there was a BrickLink Studio file which contained the fully built BaneBlade, but the instructions were not put together for it. I did the automatically generated instructions for each part of the Baneblade, but they were all over the place, including instructions to place a brick after bricks on top of it. Still got it built though.
I would love simpler (harder) instructions! It's too easy tbh brick by brick as it is today. 1964 looks lovely. I also have a gripe with the complexity of modern bricks (besides "basic bricks" sets). It's getting harder to build something else than what the model is.
This 1980 style was also lovely. I rebuilt this model a few years ago - these instructions strike the balance just right. They make you think.
https://lego.brickinstructions.com/lego_instructions/set/886...
But maybe if you want to sell more you must have instructions that anyone can follow?
Those sets were marketed as 'Expert Builder' in the USA, so maybe the challenge was part of the point?
Might as well mention a couple of lego projects I've been working on, a parts browser TUI and a 3D model (eg .stl or .obj) to lego model (ldraw) converter:
https://github.com/hbmartin/pyldraw3/
https://github.com/hbmartin/legolization/
I'm actively trying to get good instructions out of the legolization project now