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.
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.
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.
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.
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.