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Published By ahui on Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - 11:56 PM
| An Introduction to Creating Building Instructions
Images |
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| What are Building
Instruction Images? |
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| Building instructions images (BIIs), in terms of LDraw and LEGO, are
a series of images that show how to create a model. Each image is progressive
in which it shows the parts in the previous image plus the newly added parts.
Example 1, shows a simple set of BIIs |
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| How Do I
Create Building Instrcution Images? |
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These steps-by-steps will be used to create the BIs in example 1. This
article requires that you have MLCad, L3P, LPub, and POV-Ray installed on
your computer. (Clcik on any image in the steps to enlarge).
| Step 1 |
Open MLCad and place two 2x4 bricks as shown in figure 1.
Figure 1: BI Step 1 - Two 2x4 yellow bricks |
| Step 2 |
On the MLCad file menu click on "Edit" then "Add"
then "Step" to add a step to your file, or use the STEP
menu icon which looks like this  .
Your file should now look like figure 2.
Figure 2: "STEP" added AFTER step 1 of BI
The term "STEP" is used to seperate the various BI steps
in a model. Not all LDraw applciations can process a "STEP"
command, like LDView, but it they can not processes it they will just
ignore it. For our example we will be 3 STEP keywords in our file
to get 4 BIIs. |
| Step 3 |
Add one 2x2 brick as shown in figure 3.
Figure 3: Step 2 - Added one 2x2 blue brick |
| Step 4 |
Add another "STEP" command after the 2x2 brick. (Hint:
use the MLCad menu icon button ) |
| Step 5 |
Add one 1x10 plate as shown in figure 4.
Figure 3: Step 3 - Added one 1x10 green plate |
| Step 6 |
Add another "STEP" command after the 1x10 plater. (Hint:
use the MLCad menu icon button ) |
| Step 7 |
Add the final part, a 1x1 red brick as shown in figure 5.
Figure 5: Step 4 - Added one 1x1 red brick |
| Step 8 |
Save your file in MLCad (for this example we used
bi-test.ldr)
and close MLCad.
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| Step 9 |
Open LPub and load the bi-test.ldr (Hint: Click on "File ->
Open LDraw File" to load the bi.ldr file) |
| Step 10 |
Click on the Building Instructions tab and then the sub-tab called
Steps. Change the Scale Control value from 3000 to 500. Also the slider
under the Previous Step Color Scaling move it to the right so it says
100%/0%. |
| Step 11 |
Click on "Generate -> Instruction Images" and watch
as LPub will open up POV-Ray and begin to create your BIIs. Once it's
done you will have the images shown in example 1. |
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| LPub is a very powerful application with many different options for controling
the output of how BIIs are done. In this tutorial, we use LPub in its simplest
form. |
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Help Desk Tutorial: An Introduction to Creating Building Instruction
Images
Version 1.0
Created by Ahui Herrera, LDraw Help Desk
http://www.ldraw.org/
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Want to learn more about LDraw? Check out the following books:
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