Lego Digital Designer Alternatives

Question

I am been using LDD (Lego Digital Designer) for my latest NXT project and noticed a major delay in building and making instructions for my Projects (My Mindstorm projects contain well over 500 pieces) and the instructions look all weird for my big projects. And LDD is discontinued so I doubt Lego will make an EV3 update.

I am curios if you guys know any paid or free software that allows you to make projects for Lego (Mindstorm). I am looking for something fast, (optional) that will work for Mac and PC, have animation to present my projects, and finally make instructions for my projects.

Answer 1

There are several editors which are based on the open LDraw part database.

I believe that the most popular are MLCAD and LeoCAD. I personally use LDD, so I can't speak to the quality of the instruction generation from these tools, but they do at least offer the ability to create instructions.

LeoCAD is probably your best bet for doing animations, but I don't think that it has a Mac version. I believe that it is just Windows and Linux.

Answer 2

There is also another solution called Mecabricks which is online based and works with WebGL. Therefore, you only need a browser to start building or check the 3D models already published by the other builders. However it is not compatible with LDD or Ldraw and part library is different and doesn't include as much parts as the others yet.

Answer 3

SR 3D builder is another good alternative I like to use, it uses the Ldraw parts library, but has a more intuitive connection system than MLCad, without the connection restrictions LDD has.

I don't know that SR 3D builder supports mac, but I believe it fits your other requirements nicely.