Guide How to make your own 3D printable models - Beginners - All Ages - TinkerCAD tutorial

[Eric]

3D printing at home is great fun but to really unlock the potential of your 3D printer is to be able to make your own models for your particular set of needs. This has historically been an entire career path to learn how to do and not very easy for your average person to get into. There are lots of very complicated software solutions for making 3d Models but the time spent trying to learn is often not worthwhile when all you wanted a special part to fix that curtain rod, or broken latch of your car's glove box.

For me this all changed when I learned how quickly and easily you can get a 3D model from TinkerCAD.com a free web browser based 3d modeling program designed to be safe and easy for children to use. Although designed to be easy enough for children to use, there is no reason it can't be used by adults and for real world objects, you can make really simple designs or really complex designs, your limit is mostly going to be in your imagination. Let's take a look at how easy it is get started 3D printing your own designs!

Step by Step Tutorial for working with TinkerCAD:​

The first step is to open a web browser on your desktop or laptop and go to https://www.tinkercad.com/


Go ahead and click on Sign Up! on the top right of the screen. You need to register a free account where your files can be saved to work on again later. You will be able to export your 3D models from the website but your editable save files will be saved online under this account you create.



In our case you can just choose the blue Botton option of "Create a personal account". If you already have an Autodesk account for some reason you can use that to sign in, if not you will create one. Follow the instructions and verify your email if asked. Sign in to your new account if you're not logged in already.


I have lots of TinkerCAD designs saved but your new account page will not have any. Whenever you need to reopen a saved design you can do so from this first page after logging in.

We are going to create a new design so click the blue button labeled "Create new design".


Welcome to the design space! You can close any tips or popups like the "Add Notes to your design" window seen in the above screenshot.

Lets drag an object from the right hand menu onto the work plane. Grab any of the colorful objects that doesn't have grey and white stripes and drag it onto the blue grid labeled "Workplane".


I dragged a box but you can pick whatever shape you would like. Once you bring it onto the workplane there are some little white boxes on the "corners" of the object and on top.

Click and drag one of the corners and you will be able to resize the shape you chose. If you pick the white square on the top of the shape you can make it taller! The numbers it shows while you're resizing a shape are the dimensions of that shape in millimeters. This is really handy so you can make sure your design will fit on your 3d printer or it's place in the real world.

 

[Eric]

Too far away to see your object? Use your mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and out. You can also use the + and - buttons on the left hand menu. If you need to rotate your view of the object hold down the right mouse button with the cursor on the work plane and you can spin your design around to get whatever view you need. You can also hold down the left mouse button and click and drag the the grey box on the left menu that has it's sides labeled like "TOP" and "FRONT" in the screenshot below:

Now that we know how to "move around" and look at workplane I'm going to go ahead and resize my cube to be closer to a door placard shape. I chose to make it 125 x 60 and 2 high. These are millimeters so that is nice and small enough to fit on a 3d pinter. Most 3d printers are limited to about 180x180x180mm but you can check your specific model to find it's limits.


Now let's bring another shape onto the workplane. Let's try the Text shape!



Just like any shape you can click and drag it to place it wherever you want. Let's leave the white boxes alone for now and not resize just yet though.

Instead let's click on that little down carat arrow next the red circle and grey and white stripe circle in the box at the top that shows up when we have selected the text by click on it. When you cursor is over the down carat it will say "Show/hide the Inspector".


Here we have the Inspector open! Lets go ahead and change what the text says by erasing the contents of the input box labeled "Text:"

I changed mine to my name! There are some other options we can adjust in here too like the height the text bumps out into 3d space, that is the Height slider. The bevel slider will change how thick each character of the text is, the segments changes how detailed it is but we can leave that one alone.

Now that Height number is not a very friendly number for design, 13.31 is awfully specific for name placard. To make our lives easier later on lets change that 13. If you use the slider you will see it's very hard to land on 13 perfectly. Instead lets click the part that says 13.31 and it will change to a input box where we can type in 13 on keyboard.


Using round numbers make your life easier. It's very hard to measure 13.31 on a ruler, but we can do 13! That's just 1cm and 3 little lines after it.

 

[Eric]

Now if we left-click somewhere on the blue grid (just not on any shapes we put there!) we can deselect the text and make that Inspector go away.


Now we have a basic name plate but if we tried to export it we would get either the rectangle or the text that says Eric, but not both. What we need to do is group them together and make them one object. Hold down left-click somewhere on the work plane and drag a box around the two objects to select them both at once.

Now the Inspector window is back and says Shapes(2), so we have successfully selected shapes. If you left-click anywhere on the workplane you will deselect them again. You can reselect them by holding down left-click and dragging and box around them again. You can also click one shape, hold down the shift key on the keyboard and then left-click the other shape to select them both.

Let's group them though so we don't have to keep reselecting them both. Click on the group button which has on icon of the circle and square shape that are merged together. When you hover over the button it says "Group" and tells you the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl + G. Either click that button or press the CTRL and while holding it down then press the G key. Release both keys and you will have grouped those two shapes together!


We can tell it worked now because both are selected and have that blue outline that selected shapes have, but the Inspector window only says Shape now instead of Shapes(2). Now they are one single object if we move it around or resize it they both will be changed.



If this was what you wanted to print we could just select it and click the export button on the top right. That will bring up this menu where we can choose what type of file we want. For 3D printing you can choose either OBJ or STL, both work equally for 3d printing.


From here you would open your STL or OBJ file with the software bundled with your 3d printer and it would make it into a file you can put on the printer to have it be printed.

There is one more important part of TinkerCAD we haven't covered yet though. HOLES!

 

[Eric]

Let's click on the shapes we grouped together earlier. The Inspector window pops up again and let's click the "Ungroup" button:


The Inspector will change to saying "Shapes(2)" again showing we successfully ungrouped the shapes.

Let's click somewhere on the blue grid to unselect both shapes.



Select the text only this time and when the Inspector window shows up this time let's click that grey and white striped circle that says "Hole".

The Inspector window will disappear and the text will look white and grey striped and transparent like glass. This is now "Hole" shape. That means when we group it with another object again it will remove that shape from the others rather than joining it like we did before.



So let's go ahead and see what will do. Let's drag a box around both shapes again and select the Group button once more. That was the Square and Circle merged together icon.


Now the text is just missing from the rectangle instead of sticking out of! This method is really hand for making stencils or signs, you could put some cool wrapping paper on the backside of the sign to have a patterned text on your sign.

Maybe we want to make it a keychain instead of a door sign though?

 

[Eric]

It's a little big to be a keychain, let's click on grouped shape and make it smaller. Click the shape and then click and drag a white square on the corner to resize it. If you hold down the Shift key on the keyboard while you drag the corner it will force the shape to stay to resize evenly in height and width so you don't make it look squished by accident.


16x33.33mm sounds good for a keychain. If we let go of the shift key we could resize that 33.33 back to a nice round number like 33mm instead but for a keychain we don't really need to worry about that.

Now to be a keychain it's going to need a hole to placed onto a keyring. With what we have learned we can probably just drag a cylinder shape onto the design to put a hole in it but let's make it a little easier for us to put on that key ring by making it have it's own ring.

Put a cylinder on the corner and make it about 10x10 wide, Let's make the height of the cylinder 2mm by dragging the white box on the middle top of the cylinder until it says 2.



That could work! Let's put a hole in that cylinder by dragging another cylinder on top of it and clicking "hole" in the Inspect window to make it transparent and ready to be a hole. Resize the cylinder to be 5x5mm any height that is bigger than 2mm.


That's looking pretty good but the text seems a little small now that it's a keychain? There's a lot of wasted space in that rectangle so it would be nice to make the text bigger. Fortunately it's not too late to do that! Let's left click the rectangle with text that is too small and then click on the "Ungroup" button.


We now are back to having two separate shapes we can adjust independently. Let's click on the workplane to deselect everything and then just click on the transparent text so we can make it bigger by dragging the white square in the corner of it again.



There we go! Now THAT'S a keychain! The orange cylinder is bigger taller than the rectangle though! The rectangle was supposed to 2mm thick too, so it must have gotten thinner when we resized it while holding the shift key. Let's click on the rectangle alone and make it thicker by dragging the center white square "up" until it says 2 just like the orange cylinder did.


Perfect! Now the only thing we need to do is drag a box around the whole thing by left clicking somewhere on the workplane and dragging the box so that it covers all the shapes. Once they are all selected let's press the Group button again and merge them into one shape.



Perfect! Notice how the color of the shape changed? The shape colors are not important, the colors just tell what shapes are part of the same group and which are not. Every distinct shape in TinkerCAD gets it's own color so you can tell them apart. Once you group them together they are one shape and one color. If you don't like the color it chose for your shape you can click on the circle the same color as it in the Inspector window that says "Solid" and change that color. It doesn't change the color of your 3d print, the 3d model will have no colors in the file we export, it just's in TinkerCAD that we see it. I don't prefer this orange color but I can pick the real color of the keychain when we go to 3d print it!

 

[Eric]

Your tinkerCAD design is automatically saved as you work. You might want to rename it something you can remember though, in my case you can see the file is named Glorious Snaget-Wluff but I want to rename it Keychain.

Just click the area where the name is near the top left. The title will turn into a input box so you can rename it.

Now mine is named Keychain now.

This way when my friends get jealous of my great keychain and want one too I can go back to https://tinkercad.com and when I login I will see a file called Keychain with a small preview image. I can open it up and work from where we left off. I can click on my keychain shape and press the "Ungroup" button again to unmerge all those shapes. I can click on the "Eric" text and put in my friends name "Bill Nye". Using what we learned earlier I could make the rectangle longer to fit his big name. Once I am done with my changes I can just select everything and hit the group button once more to make it a single shape and ready to be exported to the 3d printer.