Easily Customize 3D Models Using TinkerCAD - Modify .stl Files for 3D Printing - Beginner Tutorial

hey everybody welcome back to rc with adam my name is adam and today i'm going to show you how to easily modify a 3d model to fit your specific need using tinkercad in this example i'll be modifying this gopro mount from dye aero mechanics that i got off of thingiverse to fit my source one quadcopter frame now the first thing we need to do is actually measure where the mounting holes need to be to fit on this quadcopter frame like many quadcopter frames the source one has four holes for screws in the front of the frame now i'll be using these to mount the gopro mount so we need to measure the distance between the screws and in this case these are actually the same distance apart about 30 millimeters and we'll also measure the distance between the two sets of screws so in this case it's about 41 millimeters but in some cases the distance between the holes side to side will be different for the front set and the back set either way i'm going to show you an easy way of translating these holes onto the new model once you've measured these distances write down a little diagram so that we can reference it later when we're making our modifications to the 3d model next you can go to thingiverse and download your model and then let's jump into tinkercad okay here we are in tinkercad now i'm assuming you kind of know your way around tinkercad some this is this won't be like a full in-depth tutorial into tinkercad but i'm going to bring you along and show you what i'm going to do the first thing we can do is we can go ahead and import our model select our file and import it okay now that we have our file in here we don't actually need to mess with it right now we can just kind of set it off to the side we do need to grab a ruler and drag it down to right about the center of our workspace it doesn't really matter if it's directly in the center now what we want to do is create four uh basically holes or four negative cylinders so i'm going to grab the negative cylinder i'm going to increase the sides up to 64 so it's nice and smooth and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to make the diameter 2.5 millimeters so it's very uh very skinny right there 2.5 millimeters just like that and then down at the bottom right hand corner and on the snap grid i'm going to change it to 0.1 so we have some good good precision there and now what i want to do is we're going to use the center of our ruler or the uh the the yeah the center point of the ruler sort of our the y-axis is going to be sort of going away from us and the x-axis is going to be left and right so this little three-lined circle right there that changes from the midpoint measurement to the endpoint measurement we are going to use midpoint so right now it's measuring the middle of that cylinder so now what we want to do is we can go ahead and zero it on the x-axis so i'll type in zero for that for that little box right there and now we want it to be half the distance um that it that it is between the two front we'll make this the front the two front holes so we'll go ahead and type in 15 which so it's it's nice and easy using pretty round numbers and since we're going to be printing this with tpu the exact you know whole spacing and hole size is not going to be that big of a deal because we'll have quite a bit of flex and also i would rather have these holes as far as the actual diameter i'd rather have it be a little bit smaller because it's a lot easier to make the hole larger after it's printed if if if necessary so we have one of those in place right now and so what we're going to do is uh to create the other uh the other hole i'm going to go up here and click the duplicate and repeat button right there and so now we have another duplicate right on top of that one and instead of uh instead of positive 15 on the x axis i'm going to change this to negative 15 and press enter or click somewhere else and then sha bam we have another one and we have 15 or we have 30 millimeters in between them because we have 15 millimeters from uh the center of the of the uh cylinder to the center line of our project now because uh this this particular uh whole spacing is symmetrical it's like a just a rectangle that's going to make this pretty easy because what we can actually do is we can actually select let's see let me click away let me click that one so we can actually select both of these these two because we know that the the rear uh the rear to the the rear pair of mounting holes um is going to be the same distance like a part uh like left and right so what we can do is duplicate both of these uh holes right here and then still using the midpoint measuring we can go over to this little box right here which is going to give us our basically our y-axis distance um and we can type in uh let's see 41 41 millimeters so what that's going to give us is 41 millimeters center to center so from the center of these uh of the from the center of the rear and again since it's a rectangle it doesn't quite matter whether it's the front or the back but we'll say from the center of the rear uh pair of mounting holes to the front pair of mounting holes is millimeters so that's pretty darn easy really um and if you have uh if you have some like say if these two were actually you know the distance between them was actually like 20 millimeters you could just type in 20 and you would you would uh you could easily oops those got changed somehow how'd that happen oh i must have hit the wrong thing but if you have uh if you have some other uh sized pairs and it's not a rectangle then it's pretty easy to make those adjustments this way so now what we can do what's going to make this really easy to to incorporate this into our model here is we can select all of them you can either click on each one or just drag over uh click click and drag uh to select all of them and then up in the right hand corner we're going to click group or control g like that so now all of these are grouped together so you click on one and you move everything so now what we can do is actually um now that we're still using the uh the center point and that's giving us the center of all of these like of of the entire footprint of of all four of these um cylinders here so what we can do is just center this out by these these green green shaded lines that tells you how far the center point is from the center of our ruler so we can click 0 or type 0 we don't want to mess with the vertical green line because that doesn't really matter right now and then for the on the x-axis i wish it was actually labeled x-axis but i guess it's not but i'm calling it the x-axis we're gonna type in zero press enter or click away and boom there we go so that's on the center so now what we can do is get our model you could drag this to wherever you want it to match up or we can center the model that we're using uh in the same way and center it in the the sort of the centered right along with our negative cylinders when i say negative i just mean uh basically like what's going to happen when we add these or when we group them when we hit the group tool when you add the negative shape or the whole shape that's grayed out that's going to cause it to cut into the normal shape so you can see here our whole spacing is actually too large for the actual model so in this case like in some models you might just like you you might have enough actual material in the model already that you don't need to add material but in this case we will need to add material so there's there's a few ways that we could do this you know generally you want to stay away from like really hard sort of shapes like like 90 degree angles and that sort of thing but what we could do is you know you could get well for example you could get a cylinder a normal cylinder um increase the number of sides and then you could kind of play around with the actual shape so it's no longer a cylinder it's some sort of ellipse and then you could um drag that over here so that it encompasses our new mounting holes and then we can drag the shape down and you want to get it so that it's like just just about the right height again that's why we changed the snap grid to 0.1 millimeters so we have more control over that and then you could adjust this and get it so that you want to have a good edge distance from the hole so that means the the distance between the edge of the hole and the edge of the model so that way you have a lot of strength because this will be a gopro mount and it's going to go on a quadcopter and fpv quadcopter so it could get bashed around like a lot so this is this is one way you could do it but i don't like that let's not do that so here's what here's another thing that you could do uh still using the ellipse we could actually rotate the ellipse here we could rotate it maybe like this something like this and kind of put it have it come out so maybe something like that that could work because the other thing we want to do is we want to fill in the old holes um so that way we're not trying to print a hole there because one it will make the model weaker and two it'll take a lot more time to try and print that hole as opposed to just making it a solid a solid object so let's say we like that but we want to do the same exact thing on the other side assuming that this model is you know symmetrical well what you can do is you can uh you know select that ellipse shape that we're adding go and duplicate and repeat and then we can go over to the mirror tool click mirror and then you these these uh arrows pop up and you can say mirror basically left and right so we'll mirror it like that and then since we still have the uh we have the center we're using the center point of the object or the we're using the midpoint of the object as the uh as the measuring reference what i can do is instead of right here where it says 8.59 the the distance of this object from the center of that axis uh i can do negative 8.598.59 and bam it will bring it over to this side and since we already mirrored it it should be a nice you know should be a symmetrical uh mirrored shape although in this case of having it be symmetrical it doesn't really matter and then what we could do let's say we want to let's get another cylinder and then let's make it a hole shape and what we could do is actually add this to sort of cut away uh cut away this front material because what we're doing we're doing a couple things when we do that one we're we're lightening the object which is always important when you're talking about things that fly and we are also uh decreasing the weird shapes in there so when we're printing this it will just be a nice smooth uh a nice smooth movement um for our printer instead of trying to print a bunch of weird little you know little uh jagged edges and that sort of thing so let's say we extend it out to here i think that will give us i think that will give us a good amount of let's bring it in a little bit a good amount of uh edge distance right there like in terms of the strength and everything i think that will do so anyway let's uh let's try this out so let's combine all of these guys right here so we can just do a little drag box click and drag and create a little box select all of these objects and then actually well we'll test it out right now but we'll need to we'll need to do the other side before we combine everything for good so we'll hit combine and this is what we get so it's kind of a weird shape honestly i might change this but you get the idea now let's say we want to do the exact same thing on the other side or on the what would be the the front what we can do is select all of these objects that we added so these two ellipses um and this circular cut right there and we can actually um do do a duplicate and then we can mirror we can mirror it uh sort of front and back you could also just like rotate it but so what we'll do is we will i'm not sure exactly where it's going to need to be so what we'll do is i can actually um [Music] drag let's make it uh let's see let's make that zero where does that put us okay so let's make it like negative 20. now that actually works out pretty well so i just typed in negative 20 for the uh for the center point of these shapes so it moved all these shapes even though we haven't actually combined them yet yeah that actually that seems to work pretty well we do have some kind of some weirdness over here um maybe we'll bring it down to negative like 22 what does that look like no that's too much let's do negative 21. let's just kind of customize it for the front and the back just whatever you want it doesn't have to be doesn't have to be perfect you know and if if you're uh if you're new to 3d printing and stuff just play around with it see what you like see how it prints you know and a big part of how this will actually print will actually be in the slicer the slicer software so that's kind of kind of a weird shape to be honest but yeah okay all right and one more thing here um i appreciate that they put their logo on here or the the words arrow i mean because that's a cool that's just a cool word but maybe i don't actually want that to be on there because i don't really want to take the time for my printer to actually print out those letters so what i'm going to do is bring a whole box or a negative negative shape and we can make it doesn't really matter how tall we make it per se and but i'm going to bring it up to right about just above the level of the surface of this of this object and we'll we'll change the shape to about that that of the uh logo here so it's just above the surface of of this um so you can see it's like 6.15 i'm guessing this is probably six millimeters tall which is actually pretty tall this is probably a pretty beefy amount but let's say 6.6.2 yeah so it brings it just above the surface there and when we combine this with that shape you will see that the yeah so it doesn't quite disappear but it i'm not sure how well it will show up in the print but in any case that way our printer won't actually have to print out that that logo usually what i'd like to see is an embossed logo so so you're actually not printing material in order to get the lettering or the logo so all right this looks like a mess right now and it kind of is but let's go ahead and combine all of this now that everything is selected we'll click group and sometimes it can take a couple minutes uh to render if like the internet is slow or whatever anyway we are left with this kind of weird looking monstrosity i would say um but uh you know that that that might work but look hey you know what this is 3d printing we can just we print it we try it see how it works it probably won't even take that much filament really i'm going to cut that down a little bit more because if if my especially with tpu if if it tries to print lettering i don't think it will turn out very well so let's actually take this down to six millimeters and that should that should cut through all the way and totally get rid of the lettering yeah there we go so we do have kind of like this weird box and i'll go up here and change the name and we will change it to source one gopro screw mount aero remix check the description below so where it's where you can download this model uh just for funsies it's not an amazing model as as i have it here and the original model in case you're interested in that as well and finally i'll go ahead and click export and then we'll say the selected shape because there's only one shape in the in in on the workspace and then we'll select stl and then it will download and ta-da we are finished with this [Music] [Music] [Music] hopefully this helped you get your project going and uh you learned some good tips and tricks for tinkercad and improve your 3d printing projects thanks for watching everybody and i will see you again very soon you

Channel: RCwithAdam

Views: 71,345

Keywords: rcwithadam, rc with adam, quadcopter, drone, airplane, model airplane, RC, flight, race drone, freestyle fpv, aircraft, STEM, hobby, learning, education, positive, development, skills, foam board, DIY, flysky, tinkercad, thingiverse, 3d printing, tutorial

Id: mY84inJbc_4

Length: 19min 54sec (1194 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2021