 Welcome to Building with Digital Bricks. I'm Dennis Payne. I have always enjoyed Legos, but I haven't been building with them very much as I grew older until my son got really into Legos. And so one year for his birthday, I thought it would be neat to do a mini-build as a party favor to give out. So I took what Legos he had and I tried to build this tripod vehicle. And my son went over and gave that vehicle to Wonder Woman. My son played with Batman, so having Wonder Woman get the vehicle is pretty much a failure. I tried again and creating a flying vehicle. My son asked for it and gave it to Batman. Now it did not look like this. It is what is called a rainbow warrior build. It used whatever colors were available and so I don't think it even had the saw blades on it. But after I went over and built this design, I was able to start up the Lego Digital Designer on my wife's computer because it did not run under Linux. I built the vehicle in two different colors. The Lego Digital Designer automatically fits bricks in in a reasonable fashion and generates instructions for you. The instructions, they're not always the best. I had to go over and replace one of the images with an image that was clearer as to what you were supposed to do. I was then able to import this build into Rebrictable and it could go over and help me find the pieces on Bricklink. Now over the years, I have created a variety of party favors. After the first build that I did, I purchased some older collections of Legos on eBay so that I could build the Robot Command Center. My kids really liked the Robot Command Center. It's fun to play with, but you couldn't actually build this in the Lego Digital Designer because it does not have some of the older parts available. And if you don't have those parts, how are you going to go over and build the Batman Robot Command Center or the Pirate Robot Command Center? Luckily, the Lego community had a solution to this. They created Eldraw, which is a set of models for all the various Lego pieces, or at least most of them. There are various programs that allow you to build using these models. The program you see here is Leocad. It is the one I use. It runs under Linux. It is not currently packaged for Fedora. Over here are the list of parts. You have the colors that are available. And then there are various controls up here for like rotating, zooming in, painting, that sort of thing. So we are going to recreate an alternate build I did for the Ultimate Robin set. Now, first thing we're going to do is this chicken mech has two legs. So we are going to put them as a separate sub-model. You don't have to do this, but it can be helpful in organizing things. So there, now we are on the legs sub-model. We need to put down the pieces for the legs. So they use plates. And we are looking for this type of plate. Now there are a bunch of different versions of this. You need to just pick one. You can go over and find out which one is the most common one used now, but you may need to tweak it later. So we will just put this down and we will rotate it so that it is facing that way. And it has two other round pieces on top and we will just place them. It does a pretty good job of placing things when you're building directly up as you would typically do in a Lego build. Or at least the simple Lego builds you would build that way. Now I'm not doing anything about the color right now. So we've got one leg. The legs are the same, so we don't need to build the second one. We can just reuse that same leg. Alright, let's build the body. For the body, we have some sloped pieces at the bottom. Now I don't have the model next to me, but I've looked up what pieces the Ultimate Robin set has. So these are probably the pieces. Again, there are more variations, so I didn't bother checking to see which variation it actually uses. Now we need two of them, so we can just copy and paste and move this one over. As you can see, it allows you to keep pieces inside each other, which Lego Digital Designer doesn't do. That's an advantage of Lego Digital Designer, but this is the one that I have that runs under Linux. Alright, so now we need to go add two plates. We want two by two plates this time. So there's a two by two. We add one onto here. Now it automatically has some snapping in that where it goes over in places thing, so snap is enabled. If we disabled it, we can move things in an arbitrary amount, but that's not what we want to have. So we will leave that on for now. Again, we will duplicate this piece and move it over here. Now for the back, it has a wedge. Now we could go over and try to find it in the parts list. I don't exactly know where it is, so I will just allow searching to find it for me. And it is a four by four pointed wedge. So we will take that and add that to the model. Let's see here. I'll need to move that down, move it over, ups back. Now that's probably not right yet. Let's see what we have here. Let's go back and lift it up. Alright, so it looks like that is the right place, but I think in the model it actually has another plate in between there. So why don't we just find another plate, look for a one by two. And we'll just place this one in here. We will move it over. Alright, now we can move this over. I believe that will make it at the right position we want it. We need a one by four to put over here. Again, it doesn't do the placement exactly right, so you just need to move it afterwards. I think we actually want to have this up one. And we need to have a, let's go with one by two. And we want to have this version of the socket. Place that down, and we just need to fiddle with where it goes. Now it does, this particular socket does not tend to be placed properly because of the fact that it sticks up a bit because of the socket part here. It's a little bit below where the plate would be. And we will duplicate that, bend it around, and move it to the other side. We have probably a one by, or probably a two by two in the middle here. So we will just go over and find one of those, and place it into the middle, and move it over. You have various buttons that will automatically center the model. So here I just put H, which brings you the viewpoint of home. Which zooms you in a little bit if you don't have a very big model. And we need, I think, only one more piece. One more piece to really build this out. We need a hinge. Let's get rid of that. Search for the type of hinge we want. We are looking for one of these. Now there are ones that are pre-built. This is only the base. And then you have the top. I am specifically going to use the base in this point. And you will see why in a little bit. So we have the body itself. And now we can go on to making the head. Now as I said, I only built the base here. So the first piece we are going to put down is actually the top of the hinge. Rotate that around. So the reason I am doing it this way is that as I said, this program builds on top of each other pretty well. But it doesn't necessarily like it when you place things at angles. So I find it's often easier to build things at angles with a sub-model. So we will go over and place a plate on here. Now when I built this particular alternate build, the plate that it has is one of these with only a single stud in the center. It means that the head piece that is attached to it is not very strong. If you really wanted to make it stronger, you would use a one by two with a stud in the center. But as I was trying to make an alternate build, an alternate build is stuck with the pieces that are in the set. So that's what we are going to go with here. And now we need a plate. We need a one by two. This is the beak. Move it out. And we need a round piece to represent the eye. Move that back. Then we need another sloped piece. Now I happen to know where a lot of these pieces are. You can use searching to help you out. Over time you just pick up how the bricks are organized. But it can be quite the challenge when you are first starting out to find the particular pieces you want. Here are the curved pieces. These are not the ones we are looking for. This is the one we are looking for. Place this up here. Get it around. And move it back. Now we still have the wing to do, but why don't we start looking at what the finished model might look like? So we start off by placing two legs. We just copy and paste them. And we take the body. Move that into position. Move it up. And now this is why I put the top onto this particular model. It allows us to put this here. And now the head is just directly up. But we could go over and move it down. And now you see it's shifted it. So you need to tweak it a little bit. And get rid of the snapping. And we can go over and move it up some to put it in the right position. And there we have the head hanging down. Now, I did this all in red initially. That's because I tend to not worry too much about the coloring when I'm initially building something digitally. Now we could go back and recolor it with the paint tool. And we could go through and do the correct colors of the model that we are building. But why don't we do something a little different? And we'll just go over and find, let's see, bright light orange. Let's see how that looks. Yeah, that's not dark enough, I think. Give it some orange legs. We'll go over and give it a white body. Now, the Leocat has no knowledge of what pieces are available and what color. So when you're recoloring things like this, it'll just let you do whatever. But you may find that those pieces are not available in that color once you try to look into it. But we could go over and recolor it like that. Now I did this on the submodels and it automatically changes the final model. You actually can't paint the colors here. So if you try to paint something here, for example, to make this not red, it won't actually change the color of it. So all you have to do is then do the each of the wings and we have the finished model. Now, if you want to see something more complex that you can do with the submodels, why you would use them, why don't I load up the Guardian from Zelda. We will just save this and click in and bring up the Guardian from Zelda. So the Guardian has six legs on it. And so rather than having to build each individual one and when you're making instructions, you don't want to have to tell them how to build them each time. You just want to have one set of instructions. Now that is something I didn't talk about yet. So if we go back to the chicken and you look at the timeline for the chicken and say look at the body, you will see that all of these are on step one, which means that there's no, you haven't gone over and separated them out into individual steps. Unlike the Lego Digital Designer, it does not automatically create the instructions for you. So you have to individually set up the steps. So you might go over and say, all right, I will insert a step here and move these two pieces down one. And then if you go over and go to the first step, this is just one block and then the rest of them at this point. If we go back to the Guardian, you will see that I have created a full set of instructions for it. So there's the first step, second step, third step, and you have the same features with the body and the head. Again, you can step through the construction. Now you can do this as you're building, but I tend to prefer to get it built and then figure out what the best way to build it is. And if I don't go over and build some models first, I might go over and go back and fix that and build the some models afterwards. Now, once you have gone through this, you can then go over and export it as HTML. I use LibreDraw to put all the images together and build a double-sided instructions for the mini builds. I draw out these boxes and arrows on the sub modules to determine where they're placed sometimes. I happen to tend to make things more difficult for myself by also doing an alternate build that you see there for the BatRazer. Or down below you see a combined vehicle for the Fantastic Car so it can split up into four individual vehicles. The front vehicle was given as party favor. It was up to the kids to go over and build their own vehicles if they wanted to go over and combine it together. Now, of course, this is the best case scenario. The party favors generally have an additional step between coloring and making the instructions. I've specifically tried to keep the price down to around $5 per build. The first version tends not to achieve that price. So I need to look over the prices of the individual pieces, see what changes can be made. Sometimes you can combine pieces together to make it cheaper. Sometimes you break them apart. And so it might take a few rounds of this to get a final mini build. Thanks for listening. If you have additional questions, we should have time for some questions now. If not, here are some information to contact me if you wish to do so.