(2022-02-13, 17:02)Jeremie Guillaume Wrote: In fact, I understand that you took care for LDRs to match the building steps from the original instructions, but IMHO a compromise should be found with ease of manipulating the resulting MPD.
I know that a possibility (though not very usual) is the use of LDCad parts groups; as an example you can have a look at the set 6919 (in the OMR).
AFAIK there's no golden rule as to how to deal with this dilemma though, so I repeat, I would be happy to hear from other models authors about this...
There was a thread on this some time ago, and yes—it seems to come down to personal preference among modelers.
I also use submodels to reflect the official instructions, because that's the only way to accurately show building steps. And I use LDCad groups for parts that are meant to be rotated or otherwise moved as a unit. This is not ideal, and especially so for OMR purposes. That's partly because LDCad groups seem a little under-developed as a feature (by Roland's own admission, I believe), and it would be nice to be able to edit them directly more like you can with subfiles.
But I live with this limitation because I'm not building models primarily with the OMR in mind; most of what I build has already been built by other authors. (But I will submit a model if I built something that hasn't.)
I think that in the "perfect" all-in-one LDraw modeling program (at this point entirely fictional), you would be able to build a model pretty much however you want, and then interact with it in two more or less completely independent ways: one for posing or displaying, and another for rendering building instructions, which you would do by enabling distinct modes of the program. In other words, just what we currently do by using separate programs (and sometimes polling between them), except unified into one piece of software.