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@bengood921 I have a lot of reading to catch up on! Just wanted to let you know that I’m not ignoring this thread, the summer’s just been really crazy. Once the kiddo’s back in school I’m planning to do a deep read. 🙂
On a related note, since there are a handful of people also interested in learning Studio so I proposed at Q3 doing a working session on it either in person or online. Probably won’t be until October when all these conferences are over. We can also chat about it at BrickFair.
>> I have a lot of reading to catch up on! Just wanted to let you know that I’m not ignoring this thread, the summer’s just been really crazy.
Nope, too late 😛 At the party at Adam’s place, I met Renee’s husband Dan, and so I’ve already told him that Renee is my favorite person in the LUG now, because she’s the only one who reads all my Studio posts. (Shortly after that, Dan told me that Renee is his favorite person in the LUG too. I passed that on to Rachel, because I knew her response would include stuff like ‘Aaaw!’ and ‘That’s adorable!’ @legoleia51)
>> On a related note, since there are a handful of people also interested in learning Studio so I proposed at Q3 doing a working session on it either in person or online. Probably won’t be until October when all these conferences are over. We can also chat about it at BrickFair.
What about the CCAC class? Is that happening this fall? There’s a GBC guy I met at BWC and we’ve talked on the GBC Discord server and also a lot at BFVA, and I told him that anybody can sign up for the class when it’s offered, and he was quite interested, even though he knows some basics. (It came up cause he would come up with suggestions for how I could do my gearbox, and he’d send me Studio files of these complicated builds but they were all one step, so in order for me to figure out what was going on, I’d have to delete a bunch of stuff out, and then undo the deletions to put it all back. So I said to him ‘Thanks, I see somebody’s not a fan of Step View though’, and that’s when we talked about the class, cause he said he barely knows how to use the program, and he didn’t know what Step View was. I don’t think my explanation was adequate, cause then he’d send me complex gearboxes where Step 1 would be two bricks, and then Step 2 would be about 50 parts, and Step 3 would be one more part. So it was still pretty much the same problem.)
So now I have a real problem. I’m hoping somebody here will have the answer.
I order to reduce scrolling among the BL categories in the upper left, I hid a bunch of categories that I know I’m not gonna be using any time soon, as well as some where I knew I’d only need maybe one or two parts very rarely, so it was easier to just go to the Hidden Parts list and pick them out that way.
Tonight I decided I didn’t want the Cone category hidden after all. When you right click on a hidden category, the only option that comes up is ‘Restore All’. I’d never done it before. So I did it with Cone. I had assume that the category and all the parts in it would return to them Main parts list.
But instead it disappeared. I didn’t go back to the Main main, but it also no longer appears on the Hidden Parts list either. Which means, as of right now, I can’t use cones of any kind, even though that’s exactly what I want to use right now.
I haven’t figured out a solution or any workaround. If I do a parts search for a specific part using the BL number, such as 4589b for Cone 1×1 with Top Groove, I simply get no matches. Choosing ‘Shapes’ instead of ‘BL Categories’ doesn’t work either, cones never come up as an option.
Okay, the only workaround I’ve found is to go to the ADP palette – archived. I’m not even sure what that means. I’m pretty sure that’s part of the program, and not a custom pallete that I made.
I am doing some searching on Google. I am not optimistic. The internet is great for answering common questions. It’s terrible for answering unusual questions.
So now I have a real problem. I’m hoping somebody here will have the answer.
@bengood921 I found this problem intriguing so I thought I’d try it out myself.The first problem I had is that after I hid the Cones, I didn’t have a Hidden Parts list. I fixed this by exiting Stud.io and re-opening it.
I Restored the Cones, and they didn’t show up in the Main palette, just like you said.
Because of the first problem I had, I decided to exit and reopen Stud.io. Voila! The Cones were back in the main palette.
It’s definitely a bug that the Main palette list doesn’t update when hiding parts or restoring the Hidden Parts.
>> I fixed this by exiting Stud.io and re-opening it.
Sweet! Thanks, tell Dan you’re still my favorite person in the LUG.
I ran into this issue late last night when I was doing the whole ‘I’m tired and I should really go to bed but let’s try one more thing in Studio’, so I tried to not spend too much time on it. Apparently, though, I had enough time to both post here about it, and find the BrickLink Help Center (they don’t make it easy) and send them a message about it also. And yet, I also apparently didn’t have enough time to try closing and reopening the program.
Without Renee’s help though, I still might not have figured it out. In the Main parts list, the BL categories are listed alphabetically, like they are on the website, except for my favorites, which are at the top. When I opened Studio today, the Cones were restored just like Renee said, but at the very end of the list, down below Zebra Wedge, or whatever category is last, rather than appearing after Cockpit and before Container like you’d expect. I had to drag it the whole way back up, which involved a lot of mouse wheel action.
Dragging it back reminded me that doing so is possible. You can drag the regular categories around to rearrange the order how you like, but you can’t drag the favorites. I’m not seeing the logic of that at all, looks like questionable design to me. I considered simply removing my favorites and rearranging the regular list to essentially get the same effect, but that has its own complications. A lot of the categories are really subcategories under a main category. You can favorite a subcategories without favoriting its friends in the same category, and I have done that quite a bit. When you’re rearranging the main list, it’s an all-or-nothing prospect: the subcategories all collapse into the main category, and although subcategories can be hidden without affecting their friends, they can not be dragged around separately. So my favorites are still in place at the top.
I sent a message to BL last night. We’ll see if they respond. They claim 1-2 business days. Incidentally, I placed some orders Sunday night (for my BFPA build) and one of them wouldn’t go through, I kept getting an error message where it said that payment couldn’t be processed because something had changed in the cart, such as a sale price or an available quantity, and I had to go back and fix it. But there was nothing to fix, and so I kept trying, and getting the same error. I sent a message to the seller, who responded almost immediately and said that it was a BL technical error and that I should contact them. Which I did, they have until the end of today before they’re officially late. (I eventually solved the problem with that store by removing everything from the cart and then putting it all back in, which was a giant hassle that required me to save screen shots of the order so I could make sure it was the same.)
I seem to remember contacting BL customer service in the past and not being impressed, although I don’t remember what it was about. With regards to Studio, there’s no separate help section for it on the website. Anything I clicked on about it would take me to BL’s regular help section, and so I submitted a question on the standard form, choosing ‘Studio’ as the general topic. That’s pretty much all there is. Their FAQ and tips for using the program are very basic. I clicked on a link to a forum about Studio, still on the BL website, and it said there was 1 user and 0 posts. So that was a dead end also. If there’s an actual active Studio forum, I was not able to find it. If there is one, I think I need to get on it; I don’t know if you guys have noticed, but I have a lot to complain about with regards to Studio.
I think that’s it for now. Despite my complaints, I’m getting lots done with it. The one other thing I’ve struggled with recently is how the transparent parts render on the screen. I used trans-light blue tiles for the surface of the water in my build. When I followed my own Studio file to start assembling, for the tan plates it was quick and easy, for the trans-clear plates it was quick and easy, but for the trans-light blue tiles, because of the way they appeared, I had trouble telling where the edges of the pieces were, and I had to sometimes click on them to highlight them to figure it out. It was enough of a problem that when doing water in the future, I might simply substitute a different solid color to represent the parts. I haven’t decided on that one yet, we have a while to think about it before the next design. As it is, I still have the majority of the trans-blue tiles yet to assemble (we’re held up while we wait for more 1×1 tiles to arrive in the mail), so we’ll see how it goes.
Not sure if this happened to anyone else, but the 11/16 update crashed Studio for me. I had to revert back to the 10/27 version. Just wanted to put the word out so you can avoid the hassle.
I have a new problem. At some point, I remember checking a box that said something along the lines of ‘Hide unavailable parts’, referring to color. So if you set the active color to dark pink on the palette menu down on the left side, and they don’t make a 2×3 brick in dark park, then the 2×3 brick won’t show up when you select the brick palette. I only use Studio for designing stuff that I plan to build in real life, so parts that don’t actually exist don’t do me any good, and they just clutter up the palettes. I’ve recently starting hiding parts that are incredibly obscure and I’m never gonna use, especially the ones that are indistinguishable from regular parts based on their icon, and so you have to hover the part to get the written description to figure out which is which.
Therefore, I’ve always had ‘Hide unavailable parts’ turned on. I think we covered it in class, I remember doing it, and it’s always worked, until recently. Lately I’ve run into a situation where I have a particular BrickLink category palette open, say for example, brackets. The color is set to reddish-brown, and all the brackets that come in reddish brown are listed in the palette. Then I change the active color to light bluish gray. What *used* to happen is that all the brackets that come in light bluish gray would appear. What’s frequently happening now (and I’m not sure if there’s a pattern to it, or if it’s happening more often than I’ve noticed, or if it’s happening all the time) is that the set of reddish brown brackets in the palette are simply recolored to light bluish gray, without changing the list of parts. This is a problem because 1) there’s reddish brown brackets that don’t exist in light bluish gray, so those parts should disappear from the list, but don’t; and 2) there’s light bluish gray brackets that don’t exist in reddish brown, and so those parts should appear on the list, but don’t.
The second one is the big problem, because if I’m specifically looking for a part that I know exists and doesn’t show up, then I need an alternate way to find it. The workaround is pretty easy, I do a search for ‘brackets’, and the correct list shows up. But it’s another situation where it’s a small hassle repeated frequently and therefore has become a big hassle.
So finally I started looking for the ‘Hide unavailable parts’ box, thinking maybe it had somehow gotten unchecked, and I can’t find it. Over on the right, above the step view, is a thing called Color Validator. I can’t remember if that was there before or not. When I click on it, it just tells me I have zero unavailable parts, which I already knew. I vaguely recall doing an update of Studio not that long ago, I think in December, and I’m wondering if this is somehow connected to that. I am currently working on my project for Brick Convention in March, and this is the first time I’ve used Studio heavily since September when I was attempting (unsuccessfully) to get my (different) project done for BFPA22.
Anybody have any ideas on what’s going on here? I searched through the program and I couldn’t find anything. There’s no Settings dialogue box that I could find. The Preferences box is surprisingly limited (although now that I more experience with the program, I went through and changed some of the shortcut keys). I’m not sure where else to look.
@bengood921 I’m not sure if this is a good answer or not, but some of the updates over the past few months have had some issues. Things that work have just stopped or parts are not showing up unless you search them by number (so they’re clearly there).
I’m going to do some digging today to see what the last stable version was. This current one has some quirks.
On a good note, I’m loving the split and merge feature. The replace feature is cool too but not as robust as I would want it to be.
Putting this here too. Here’s a draft of the first part of my Studio Walkthrough. I’ll keep updating but here’s link if you want to take a look: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eVyI0WEDlwv1RdI2G0-ye2UeqoCGvpeG/view?usp=sharing
To be added: submodels, step views, instructions, rendering, and more.
Okay, so sad day. My computer decided that it didn’t like my CCAC files and I totally lost my entire Studio course files. So… I’m at a cross-roads. If there were enough interest, I wouldn’t mind trying to cobble it back together from what I do have and try running it through Discord in the late spring/early summer. If there’s not, I might just pour all my focus back into the walkthough and call it a day.
Oh no! If you think they were recently deleted/lost you may be able to use Recuva to recover them. I’ve not had a need for it recently, but used it in the past.
@randomdan That’s usually my go to, but I’m not sure when I lost them and wasn’t able to find anything. Fortunately, I have some hard copies and found some digital materials, but not the most current versions.
@knb112 I have the weekly handout pdf’s and air hockey file from Oct ’21
Thanks @legoleia51! I’m going to dig through some external drives over the weekend and see if I maybe backed everything up somewhere. 🤞
I thought I would be able to help out but I have surprisingly little on my computer, my CCAC folder only has the air hockey files and the homework files that I created. I’m not sure what happened to the weekly handouts, I may have been able to read them in the web browser without downloading them, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t realize at the time that CCAC was going to delete the folder after the class ended, and I wouldn’t be able to access them later. I looked through the emails you sent us that fall and I can’t find anything with attachments in them, just links to the CCAC folder. I’m sorry I can’t be of more assistance.
Thanks @bengood921! I really appreciate everyone’s assistance. Good news is that I found a backup on an old hard drive and I’m pretty sure it was the last time the class ran. I’m definitely better off than I was before. Now to figure out what’s next for the course. 🙂
Important question. If I’ve asked this before or it came up elsewhere, I don’t remember it. Do we have any idea of the recommended system requirements for Studio?
Many of you may be familiar with reading both minimum and recommended system requirements for things like games and other software, which usually covers things like processors, RAM, and graphics cards. If you go to the official Studio page on BrickLink to download it, it will tell you, rather unhelpfully, that Studio requires Windows XP or higher, if you’re on a PC.
Several weeks ago, after talking about it for years, I finally actually for real got rolling on the research and solicitation of advice for what laptop I should buy to replace my current one. Since I don’t plan to do any gaming on it, the most demanding program by far will be Studio, but I want the laptop to be able to run it, and run it well.
I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner to post this question here, but I’m hoping maybe somebody’s been reading on the official Studio forums (which I still haven’t done) and happens to know the answer. I did find a Reddit on Studio and asked there and I haven’t gotten a response. I did find some other Reddit posts on the topic and there wasn’t much there, although a couple people have posted in the past that Studio doesn’t require much RAM, which I’m not sure is true, and that pretty much any laptop should be able to handle it, which definitely is not true.
I don’t want this to become a threadjack on what laptop I’m going to buy, which can be continued on the ‘What is Ben building’ thread if anybody has any suggestions, and where I could discuss additional requirements for the laptop. But system requirements for Studio are definitely appropriate here if anybody has anything to post.
UPDATE:
There’s a lot to scroll through here, and a lot of people are asking questions that don’t help me, such as Mac stuff.
2nd Update:
I read through all the posts on the forum topic I included in the previous post. It didn’t take as long as I thought. A lot of people ask very specific questions, and so it was easy to go through them quickly.
What I’ve gathered is that they’re not more specific about system requirements because it makes a big difference as to how you’re using Studio. A lot of discussion is about rendering, which isn’t something I need, but basically it matters how big your model is, how much of the screen it takes up, and how fast you want it to render. For design work, the number of parts in your model makes a big difference. If you’re doing lots of stuff that’s 300 pieces or less, you don’t need much in the way of computer, but if, like me, your builds are measured in tens of thousands of pieces, it can be pretty demanding.
In a post several years ago, a moderator stated that 20000 pieces in a model would be pushing it on a Mac. They didn’t give a corresponding number for PC. They said they couldn’t give specific numbers though – somebody asked for an actual piece limit in a single file – and they said it depends on your system, the pieces you’re using, and how you’re using them. (For me, such a limit is actually a problem, and I’ve started brainstorming ways to work around it, although it would be way easier if that limit just didn’t exist.)
I’m gonna post something and see what kind of reply I get from the moderators.
3rd update:
I never got a response on Reddit, which was clearly not the place to go, and I only got one response on the Studio system requirements thread, and it wasn’t from a moderator. The moderator replied to other posts on the thread nearly 36 hours ago without replying to mine, so I’m not sure if I should expect a response at this point or not, or if he considered the response from the non-moderator to be sufficient.
For the non-moderator, BrickLink lists him as having more than 1400 forum posts at a rate of .47 per day, and scrolling through them and sometimes the full thread, I didn’t find anything to indicate that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or that he’s just a busybody that the moderators wish would go away, and in at least one post, the aforementioned moderator referred the OP to a reply that the non-moderator had posted.
I had posted the specs (but not the brand or model) of the laptop I was considering, as well as how I expected to use Studio (no rendering, but lots of design work for large complicated models with high part counts), and asked if this enough computer, or too much. The non-moderator clearly considered it to be too much.
Anybody who wants to read my post or his reply can follow the link above and go to page 10 of the thread, but basically he said that he uses a 2018 laptop with 8GB of RAM that cost $500, and it works fine, even for large models. I was a bit skeptical. I had been advised by multiple sources that I would need 16GB of RAM and preferably 32GB of RAM.
The non-moderator’s response also seemed to be at odds with an older post made by the moderator where somebody asked about a computer he was considering, and the moderator said that Studio actually doesn’t use a lot of RAM, but skimping out on RAM to save money is always a bad idea. He didn’t elaborate further, though. But in another post, he once again said that Studio doesn’t use a lot of RAM directly, but that having plenty of RAM makes a big difference if you’re running other programs simultaneously. In my case, I always have a webbrowser running, and although it’s an old version and I’m only doing 2D, on both my laptop and desktop running AutoCAD at the same time as Studio slowed down everything (which was already slow to begin with) so much that I had to avoid doing it. (The workaround was to run AutoCAD on the laptop and Studio on the desktop, but that won’t help me when I’m traveling, which is when the laptop is going to get most of its use.) I’m also running Excel at the same time as Studio.
Additionally, there are other considerations besides Studio. Maybe things have changed since I last bought a computer (admittedly, eight years ago), and it’s arguably a small sample size, but my experience with budget electronics – including desktops, laptops, printers, and smartphones – has been overwhelmingly bad, and besides having a lesser performance straight out of the box, I’ve found that they very quickly wear out and very quickly become obsolete, which may minimize or even eliminate any savings when they need to be replaced sooner. With my first smartphone and my current laptop, they have frustrated me so much over the years that I’ve had “Office Space”-style fantasies about taking them outside and gleefully destroying them. Unless your use of the devices will be truly undemanding, or your financial situation allows for no other option, I find them something to be avoided. Also, the way the non-moderator phrased his reply, he seemed to somewhat imply a false dichotomy of “budget” and “top-notch” as the only options, but the computer I was proposing is neither, although it’s definitely above average.
So I ignored his advice and ordered my laptop today, I don’t plan to reply to his post on the forum. It might take more than a week to arrive, but I plan to Studio the crap out of some serious Lego designs, and we’ll see how it goes. Once my computers aren’t holding me back anymore, I should be able to get a lot more done.
@bengood921 I’m looking forward to hearing how it goes. It does bother me that there aren’t any hard specs out there. I know the GPU makes a difference, especially for rendering, but that’s about the extent of my computer knowledge. I used to be better with that but other useless knowledge has overwritten my IT days since I haven’t used them in years. I defer to Will now on that stuff. In my opinion, it’s probably better to have an “overkill” setup that might last you another 8 years.
>> I’m looking forward to hearing how it goes.
I’ll let you know. The window for when my laptop might arrive goes as late as June 2, so I’m not sure if I should expect it before then.
>> In my opinion, it’s probably better to have an “overkill” setup that might last you another 8 years.
That had been my thinking, too. I was worried about paying for more computer than I need, but I was even more worried about paying significantly more than I would have for a budget computer, but still having it underperform, which would be a total waste. I sent the specs of what I was looking at (and ultimately ordered) to Rachel, who ran them by some of her friends, and she said Jim said that 32GB of RAM might be overkill, but Scott immediately shushed him. I had other people telling me it would be preferable even if it wasn’t necessary. And the upgrade from 16 to 32 was less than ten percent of the base price of the model, so again, did I want to risk getting an inadequate machine because I cheaped out?
I was also thinking about how long it’s gonna last. Coincidentally (or maybe not completely, given my procrastination on replacing computers), my desktop computer failed less than a week before I ordered the new laptop, to the point that I could not even copy files from one folder to another, if I could get the computer to boot Windows at all. At the repair place, they told me that the processor was failing, and that they are only designed to run for 5 to 10 years. My desktop was purchased in May 2010.
But when I pulled the tower out and cleaned it up to take it to the repair place, I also noticed that it had its original stickers on the side, and one of them said quite clearly: Windows 7. The repair tech also told me that a processor like that wasn’t designed to handle more recent versions of Windows. I couldn’t remember for sure if it ever updated to Windows 11, but it definitely ran Windows 10 for years, and he was amazed that it could even do that, and thought it was part of the problem when it came to the processor failing. (The only option he could think of that might work was trying to restore the computer to Windows 8, which I passed on, and so I’m without a desktop right now.)
Again, I’m not super computer knowledgeable, but with Studio, I would have to think that the updates they are releasing are a lot less dramatic than the changes involved in going from one version of Windows to another. With my current laptop (purchased in 2015), the processor wasn’t even good at the time I bought it, so it’s no wonder that the computer has aged poorly. With the new laptop, I’m hoping it’s good enough that not only will it run Studio well right off the bat, but will continue to do so for years to come despite any changes that Studio throws at it. We’ll find out.
has anyone run through the instructions in this document on how to produce better renders from studio?
how to produce better renders from studio?
Sorry, no but as the article shows, renders processes have become so advanced that it’s hard to tell whether you are looking at something real or not.
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