I've managed to construct an double 'A' frame (download here) but am unable to find a way of attaching certain pieces to others which aren't at right angles to the base. For example I'm trying to add 1x8 tiles to the side of the technic bricks forming the main frame sides, using some Technic Pins 1/2. Managed to get one of them to 'stick' (on the reinforcement support) but not the others.

Is there a special technique required to get this these things to click into place?

Edited December 13, 20168 yr by quilkin
corrected link for download

Can’t download the file, so I’ll shoot in the dark:

If it’s because you can’t approach and snap the tile, make a small build with plates with clips and handles to temporarily attach your tile in order to rotate it about the right angles before moving it to its final position. Also, maybe you can copy a part that’s already in the right orientation (or easily turned to be).

If it’s because LDD snap parts so that they are rotated by 0°, 90°, 180°, or 270° only, and your part don’t want to snap because of collisions or you’d want to place it in another orientation, you can force LDD to snap the part if you place it with another part that will be the one that snaps at Nx90°. On the screenshot below, the blue plates are the base I can’t move, and I wanted to place the red plate in that way. I placed the green round plate and the red plate elsewhere, in the correct position relatively to each other. I selected both and placed the green round plate on the blue 1x1 (drag&drop with the green round plate, dragging the red plate along; if you drag&drop by the red plate, you can’t do it).

Oh, and as you used half pins, turn them the right way (aligned with the beam you want the tile to cover, I guess). As they are pins, they don’t snap at Nx90°. The tile will try to snap on one half-pin and it they are not aligned, it won’t snap to all of them.

HTH

Edited December 12, 20168 yr by SylvainLS
forgot the image…

Sorry about the link, corrected now. I don't understand what you mean about the half pins, do they have some sort of non-symmetry in the circular section?

Okay, so your problem is with the pins.

When you snap a part, LDD automatically orient it to be aligned to the target brick. But not the pins. They will stay rotated as you present them. They won’t orient to the hole. (But note that half-pins will orient if you connect them by their stud. Studs align. Pins don’t.)

On your model, if you select one of your half-pins, you’ll see that the light blue “selected” box around it is aligned with the floor (a few aren’t). Or, if you use the rotate tool, you’ll see it’s rotated -67.42° (or something like that modulo 90°) relatively to the technic brick.

Just turn all your half-pins to be oriented 0° (or 90°, or 180°, or 270°). When you approach a vertical tile, it will orient with the stud of the half-pin and snap to several half-pins because, now, they are aligned.

Brilliant, thank you. I would never had noticed that on my own.

So in LDD the half-pins don't have rotational symmetry, unlike in real life. Is this a bug, or is the only mechanism that will allow parts to snap to pins if the pins are placed in angled beams?

But I'm still not quite understanding this. I re-oriented the pins in the beams in one corner of the structure (the one nearest to the viewer as downloaded) and that worked fine. But the same method didn't work for the beams opposite.

Edited December 13, 20168 yr by quilkin

2 hours ago, quilkin said:

So in LDD the half-pins don't have rotational symmetry, unlike in real life. Is this a bug, or is the only mechanism that will allow parts to snap to pins if the pins are placed in angled beams?

LDD has to orient parts for stud-connections, else it would be impossible to build at angles with regular plates and bricks with LDD’s auto-snapping and collision detection. So I’d say it’s the only mechanism that will allow parts to snap to studs if the target part is angled. 

It’s not necessary for pins. And if you replace your half-pins with full pins and the tile with a beam, you’ll see LDD doesn’t care about the orientation of the pin, the beam will always try to connect as is. That can bring its own troubles sometimes 

3 hours ago, quilkin said:

But the same method didn't work for the beams opposite.

No problem here  You sure all the studs are correctly oriented? (It should also work if only one stud is correctly oriented, if you present the tile on this stud (which is not always easy to do), a bit like the trick I tried to explain with screenshot above.)

30 minutes ago, SylvainLS said:

You sure all the studs are correctly oriented?

Well I thought they were. I set one of them at 90 degrees, then used the clone function. But some of the cloned studs (on the half-pins) came out at random angles, seemingly dependent on an irrelevant part sitting behind the beam,  not connected to the pin directly. You live and learn. Thanks again.

I now have to find out why my mouse right-click-shift pan action has stopped working (well, it pans at one hundredth of the speed it used to!) . But that's another story.

6 minutes ago, quilkin said:

I now have to find out why my mouse right-click-shift pan action has stopped working (well, it pans at one hundredth of the speed it used to!) . But that's another story.

Sometimes, if you’re zooming in too much, panning is a pain. Zoom out, pan, zoom in.

i have a different type of problem with the hinge tool,  im trying to chain together hero factory limbs in an arc but the angle commands are being uncooperative, i spawned in the pieces and attatched them to a base structure, then when i opened up the hinge tool and selected the joint, i saw several decimal angle values already present all random, which in and of itself wouldnt be a bother if it would let me get rid of those arbitrary values, but i cannot, in fact, attempting to change the value to a regular whole number and pressing enter causes the number to rise a small bit over the previous value, and it often skews the other axis' as well, i cannot comprehend why it is doing this, the parts are completely unobstructed and there is no logical reason for this to be happening

Edited December 10, 20204 yr by Calabar
Moved from the LDD New Bricks topic.