Job Willins

Okay, I figured it out. I'll leave this here in case some poor fellow doesn't want to lose many hours of their life. First thing you need to do is export a LDD model as an LXFML with a couple groups already created. You should have only one main group that includes everything in your model. All other groups will then be subgroups under that. It's up to you how many subgroups you want to add, but the more detailed the subgroups, the better the instructions. Then, you need to: 1. Download hrondos' .zip file posted above. 2. Open the zip file and copy the .xslt file to any directory, I put mine in "C:\Users\jwillins" 3. Next you need to use an xml transform program. I downloaded MSXSL.exe from Micorsoft's website and put it in "C:\Users\jwillins" 4. Open a command prompt 5. Change the directory to the location of the MSXSL.exe ("cd C:\Users\jwillins") 6. Type 'msxsl.exe' into the command prompt, you should get a message describing how to use msxsl. Now that we know our parser is working, time to use it. 7. The command we want to run in the command prompt is: msxsl c:\path\to\your\lego\file.LXFML Groups2BIs.xslt -xw -o name_of_output_file msxsl - this calls the MSXSL.exe c:\path\to\your\lego\file.LXFML - the LDD LXFML file with your groups you want to turn into instructions Groups2BIs.xslt - this is the stylesheet hrondos created, it tells MSXSL.exe what to look for in the LDD LXFML and how to format it -xw - this removes any whitespaces that are leftover after the parsing -o name_of_output_file.txt - this outputs the build instructions to a text file 8. Now we have our new build instructions, we just paste them from your name_of_output_file.txt into the LDD LXFML at the very bottom into the build instructions tags and then save the file. You can leave this part out when copying over the instructions: "<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>" <BuildingInstructions> your code here </BuildingInstructions> 9. Here is where I lost many hours of my life. You can't just import the LXFML file into LDD b/c as soon as you hit Build Guide Mode, it generates brand new instructions. You have to rip open the .LXF file that you used to generate your LXFML in the first place. You can change the extension of the .LXF to .ZIP. Then you can unzip it and lo and behold, you can replace the .LXFML in the zip file with your own. Then change zip file's extension back to .LXF. 10. Now open the .LXF file in LDD. I don't know if this was common knowledge to rip open .LXF files but I sure didn't know this.

How do you get the edited LXFML back into LDD? If you import the .LXFML into a scene, and then go to "building guide mode", it generates brand new instructions, ignoring the ones you just created.