With LDD Being Discontinued I've elected to migrate to LDraw and would like some help

[Roland Melkert]

My needs are simple:
-easy to use
-not completely hideous
-legal part colours only
-collision detection/snapping

Any help would be appreciated, this is all quite overwhelming and I'm a bit lost.

Welcome to LDraw,

LDraw is by its very nature more complicated then LDD as LDD was designed for kids and LDraw is/was targeted at adults. This also means LDraw (imho) has more to offer trough its many available tools and editors.

Personally I think LDCad is only slightly hideous If you want you could tweak the colors by editing the main.gui file, as the default colors try to mimic the LEGO building booklet colors.

You could limit yourself to using the physical color parts but it will increase part bin seeking unless you set up your own custom bins (In LDCad)

SR3DBuilder and LDCad have part snapping and bricksmith is working on it I believe. Non of these (far as I  know) use collision detection though.

In LDCad snapping is disabled by default and I choose not to implement collision detection on purpose, see also:

http://www.melkert.net/LDCad/faq#faq_ps2

Above is partially bias as I'm the author of LDCad.