Thursday, March 12, 2009

Jay Kinzie's Lego Digital Designer Building Tips

Hello Community,

I wanted to share some tips that I have found in my experience with Lego Digital Designer(LDD):

I build in a sequence that LDD will work with. I have noticed that LDD does not build in true regular LEGO units. Instead, when you place a piece, it is placed very close to a true unit. Over time, these slight variations will add up to a point where you will not be able to align parts properly. This could be observed as not being able to put a peg in a beam, or not being able to place an axle. The rotation feature will make the most error because it is continuous. This makes it very hard to align parts by using rotation because it is hard to see how far a part should be rotated exactly by eye. However, there are some work-arounds for this problem. One useful building schemes that I have found is to build from the outside in. If you are having problems setting something towards the outside of your model, build temporary scaffolding around what you intend to build. This helps to set the error at that particular build stage. Depending on the complexity of the model, this may work, but it is possible that it may just give you the same problem but in reverse towards the middle of the robot. Altering where you start building your model will have an effect on how and where the error accumulates. Another Way to build complex models in LDD is to build them in modules and then connect the modules together. Starting from scratch for each module prevents the error from accumulating to an unworkable level. Cut and paste works in LDD. If you have a file open containing a module, select it all, use the copy command, open the main file, and paste in the module to be placed.

- Jay “click-click” Kinzie

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