I really like the visual style of the program. It doesn’t try to do a photo-realistic rendering of plastic LEGO bricks, but rather does a sort of sketch-style approach. Basically, it’s what you’d expect the instruction drawings in a LEGO booklet to look like. It also has an awesome connection system – you just drag and drop the bricks it detects the “legal”connections and snaps on. You can, however, override that with the coordinate system, which lets you position the bricks any way that you want to. Most impressive, this is one of the few LEGO CAD programs I’ve seen that allows you to collaborate live with up to three other builders over a network. That means if you have a team of builders who are working on a design together, you don’t have to waste your time with a round-robin approach. You can also chat in real time to facilitate the process – very modern for a program like this. Moving over to Stud.io is also simple, because it reads the two most common formats from other programs – LDD and LDraw. The software is currently in free open Beta, so why not give it a try? Honestly, I think Stud.io may be one of my favorites.

Lego digital designer lxf