[bombcar]

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.

[Freak_NL]

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.

[interpol_p]

It’s incredible some of the little details in LEGO instructions.

My son and I were assembling a set, and one of the corner pieces was strangely absent. My son asked, “why can’t we put this piece in yet?”

The answer came when we turned the page and saw the model had to be flipped. That missing corner piece was the only thing we could use to guide our placement of pieces on the underside of the model.

Similar things in more complex sets include using different, bright colours for bricks on the left/right sides of the internal parts of models. It makes it easy to keep your place as the model rotates through the steps.

[bombcar]

The rotations and the color bricks are some of the most difficult to get right - and yet you never really notice them until someone points it out.

[bonzini]

Indeed, it's hard to find a balance between what's too verbose and what's too hard. For relatively complex models it's also almost impossible to do "quality control" without actually building it.

However, I agree with the other poster that you can get good at it. And you really have to do it anyway, since creating instructions will find bugs in anything but the simplest models and you want to solve those before paying for the pieces.

[robotnikman]

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.