Viddler

LDView Cocoa beta

Fixing a goof.

Positioning at proper landing height.

Bricksmith remembers your last minifig, making it easy to reuse common configurations.

Positioning the minifig squarely relative to the submodel origin makes it easier to place in other models.

The Move panel is useful for moving a multi-part selection by some increment impractical (or impossible) with the the normal nudge controls.

The minifig editor doesn't do visors, so you have to add them manually. Happily, the visor origin matches the helmet's, so as you long as you select the helmet first, it will be positioned properly.

Bricksmith bug: parts listed later in the model (such as the head) are not visible through transparent parts that appear earlier in the file (such as this visor).

Starting with a template model. Duplicated using my Open As AppleScript for the Finder.

Cheating on this dude since not all the "Sullustan" parts are available in LDraw format.

Orient hinges along the relevant axis so the submodel can be rotated (or "posed") freely without needing to continously correct its position.

The keyboard shortcuts are displayed with Mousepose, by the way. It might have been informative to display all keypresses (not just control sequences), but I think it would have annoyed me.

Not too deft with the color panel keyboard controls.

Each part of the model that can move independently gets its own submodel.

The Part Inspector is useful for rotating parts (or submodels) by specific amounts or by increments impractical with the normal rotation controls.

This component could have been built right-side-up (and rotated as a whole where referenced), but it is just as easy to build it this way since new parts inherit the previous part's orientation.

Once things are lined up properly, I can delete my reference lines.

So iShowU may start recording before the "countdown" is complete. Oh well.

So the port wing is a mirror of the starboard wing with a few asymmetrical parts exchanged. There are probably a couple ways to do this, but I simply move and/or rotate the parts manually one step at a time.

Like these wings, most asymmetrical parts come in pairs with consecutive LDraw part numbers. Therefore, switching them is just a matter of incrementing or decrementing the part number by one. I never remember which is which I so I use trial and error.

The rails on these little plates will lock the pin-hinge-mounted "belly" submodel in position.