Learn How to Turn Your Ideas Into 3D Prints using TinkerCAD

hey everybody Chris here and today we are doing an in-depth tutorial on tinkercad we're going to go from concept to completion so let's go ahead and get started on this tutorial [Music] all right so before you get started with any kind of 3D model it's always a good idea to just get your ideas on paper now this doesn't have to be beautiful and you have to be this amazing artist I find graph paperworks amazing when it comes to making kind of any kind of schematics graph paper is one of the musts that I always have I like to use either a really good pen or in this case a Sharpie but what I'm making today is I've got a bunch of brushes and I need to have some brush holders and I want to be able to make something to where I can put a bunch of brushes in and it's easy to 3D print so my stipulations are pretty easy now I do have an older brush holder so I do have this brush holder and it's kind of like one of those optical illusion ones where there's only one support in the back I really do like this brush holder so this is going to be kind of my inspiration now I'm not going to make it exactly like this because I kind of want to make it my own but I can see here that it's got a flat bottom it's got holes in the bottom here and then there's through holes in the top and obviously there has to be some type of support now this was multiple pieces and I printed this a long time ago but I want to make something like this now I've already sketched something up I want to be able to make this really wide so I was thinking about making it 150 millimeters wide now it's always a good thing to be able to have some calipers or a ruler now when I turn this on here I can actually see 150 is about that wide so it's going to be pretty wide and I want it to be wide because I want to hold a lot of brushes in it then I was going to have it 75 deep so for 75 that is right about here so it's going to be about this deep now I've got these measurements denoted right here and I was just Ball parking so even along the way if I decide to change some of these measurements fine it's not that big of a deal now I did note that all of my brushes are smaller than 11 millimeters so if I would make everything every single hole here 11 millimeters I'm going to be perfectly fine and be able to hold almost all of my brushes so when it comes to drawing out your schematic I find the best views are your top view your side view and your front view I like to always do like a three-dimensional view just so I can get an idea of what I'm looking at but also I want to be able to have all of these Dimensions written down so I get an idea so now that we got an idea of all of of the different views that we need to have to be able to make this brush holder let's jump over to the computer and open up tinkercad and get started on this brush holder so after you've created your own profile in Autodesk tinkercad you will land on this page right here and all you have to do is go to your top right corner and this blue button click new plus and then you're going to click 3D design and that will automatically create a new workspace for you now the first thing I like to do is I like to name my project because it gives you this you know weird little name every single time so let's go ahead and call this brush holder so I also have my sketch right beside me so I know all the sizes that I generally want to go with another thing before you get started is some of the navigation I recommend using a mouse for this a trackpad is pretty difficult to use with some of these commands so the first thing is when you right click on your mouse click and drag so right click hold it down and drag around and that is your orbit so you can spin around your workspace the other thing is your mouse button your middle Mouse button the roller wheel so if I use my roller on my mouse to go back and forth I can actually zoom in and zoom out the nice thing is is if I actually press on my mouse wheel it will pan or move around for me then if I click and drag with my left Mouse button that will actually make a selection box and that'll be very helpful when once we get started on your top left here you can see that there is this Cube that says top front and all the other sides you can actually just click on these and they will jump right to that view so you can see left right and you can also click and hold so if I left click and hold and drag around I can move my plane all around as well this is really great for just quick reference if I gotta jump to the front view or the top view real quick you can click these arrows as well then you've got your home button your home just brings you right back to your original start point then you have your fit and View and we'll get to that later you have the plus and minus and that Zooms in and zooms out then the other thing which is super important is you can switch your views so here let's throw down a couple of shapes here and I can show you what we're talking about so if I go to my front view I actually already have it on perspective right now so you can see that this is closer than the one back here so when I zoom in and I go to my front view I can see that this is bigger and the box is smaller because it's farther back now if you go to orthographic View and that's what this does it toggles between perspective and orthographic orthographic is a perfect view of your objects without any perspective now when I'm doing you know sketches of schematics that I've got drawn out I like to stay in this view because the perspective can kind of mess with you sometimes so for this tutorial let's go ahead and switch it to orthographic and just keep it there then the last thing that I think you really should know is if you come down here in the bottom right you see your settings so let's click settings and it'll give you this dialog box and this is where you can change some of the settings of the actual project now for those of us that are 3D printers this is where you can actually change this work plane to the size of your print bed so I'm on an Ender three so my bed volume is 220 X and 220y so once you have that you can actually click this and make it your default so all of your projects moving forward will always be at this size so you know how big it'll be on your actual 3D printer so the other thing is you can go to your units switch to millimeters or inches since a lot of 3D printers use millimeters actually all of them I would just keep it in millimeters because using decimal points with inches can kind of be difficult sometimes so let's just keep it in millimeters then you can also mess with your Zoom speed you can make it zoom in fast or slow I like to just kind of keep it right there in the middle and then you can actually show your grid which is this plane right here I recommend keeping that on and then showing shadows and it just shows Shadows which is kind of fun to see so once you have that you can just close this out then the other thing is your snap grid your snap grid is how things are moving so when you're moving it it's snapping to a one millimeter uh unit so I would just keep it on one millimeter if you wanted to just free form and move it around without snapping you can hit off so to select an object you just click on that actual object and you can see that it gives it a blue outline so you can see right here when I zoom in it's actually not going into where I want to actually see so I need to fit this to my view and that's where this button over here on the left works out great you can actually just hit this button and now it's centered that so when I orbit around it's focused on that object this is going to be super helpful so anytime you have another object so if I zoom out and I click on this and I zoom in again up I can't see it and it's way over there in the background so I can actually click this button and now I'm going to move around this object this is very helpful and I use this a lot and the keyboard shortcut to be able to do that is f so if I zoom in here and if I hit F on my keyboard there we go I move over to the cone and then I can orbit around that so let's go ahead and I want to select all of these so I'm going to just click and drag a box all the way around everything and you can see that I've got this big box all the way around them and they're all highlighted light blue that means I've got them all selected so I don't want them here so I'm just going to hit delete and then let's hit the home button over here now we're on the home home View and over here on your right side you've got a panel of all of your basic shapes you can actually change this drop down to change it to other shapes that are already pre-made so you can see here are some Hardware design starters there's some really cool things in here like a pill letters and you can kind of toggle through here and see the different types so I recommend kind of going through here to just kind of see some of the things that are in all of these different panels but we're going to stick in basic shapes for this whole tutorial the next thing is we have the work playing tool and I'll get into that later and then we have the ruler tool and we also have the notes tool so first I want to just drag a box over here so I'm going to grab the cube I'm going to click and drag and wherever I let go it's going to drop it on our work plane and you can see it is already highlighted and when you drop it you can see numbers automatically showing up and those are your Dimensions let's go ahead and zoom in and I'm going to go ahead and hit F and now I'm centered on this object now there's a few things that you need to know for the navigation of tinkercad when you have an object there are a bunch of little things all around these shapes now the first thing is these little arrows with the curved arrows these are your rotations on the different axes so you can see if I just click this I can rotate my object then if I click on this one up here I'm rotating it on this axis and this one on this axis now when you're rotating there's something that is very helpful if I am actually inside the circle so you see that Circle that shows up if my mouse is on the inside of it it will actually snap the rotations so it's an even amount and then if I move my mouse outside of the circle it goes to the specific degrees so if you're trying to get something to say 30 degrees you can just drag it this way and the nice thing is is you can also just click on that number and let's say 30. and then hit enter and it automatically will rotate it to 30 degrees so for this I actually want to bring it back so I'm going to move out here and I'm going to go to negative 30 degrees and then we're right back to where we started now to move this box around all we do is we click in an area where there's none of these little icons or nodes so I'm going to just click on the red right here you click and drag and it will move it along that plane that it is sitting on now if you notice I can't move it up now what you do to move it up you see this little arrow and you can click and drag and move it up that way now a nice thing to know is you have your work plane and something is suspended you can actually drop this down onto the work plane so all you have to do is hit D for drop and then it will just drop it right there on your work plane again now you can also click on these white Corner nodes if you just click on it once so once I have that clicked and it's red I can click on any one of these numbers and let's say the 20 let's make it wider and hit 40. so I have 40 and then I can hit enter so now that is a 40 by 20 Cube and the nice thing is is let's say that I want this to be 40 and the other one a little wider you can hit Tab and it'll jump over to that one and I can hit 50 now so now I've actually got this to the right size that I wanted now to make it taller same thing right here if you see you can see the height right there I'm going to click on that node then I'm going to click on the box and let's say I want this short so I'm going to say 10. so there we go so the other thing is these black nodes I can actually click on the black node and I can still type in here 50 but if I kind of want to Freestyle it I can just click and drag it and I can make it whatever size I want so I can click here drag this and I also can click on the height and just click and drag then some very useful things is you can click on the corners and drag both dimensions at the same time so let's go ahead and delete this one and bring in a perfect Cube again and I can click on this corner I can hold shift and click and drag and it will scale everything perfectly for me or let's say I want to make this wider but I want to keep this Center if you hold your your ALT key or option and click on that it will actually scale it proportionally on each side this is very helpful sometimes so now we've got the basics down let's go ahead and get started with our brush holder all right real quick I just gotta say thank you thank you to all of these amazing people for supporting me on patreon this month if you want to be like these awesome people you will get exclusive access to all of my private Discord channels where we talk about 3D printing painting 3D prints and honestly everything else in between but you'll also get access to all of my behind the scenes content on patreon and be able to see some of the stuff that I'm working on right now and some of the videos that are coming up so if you're interested I'll put a link below other than that let's get back to this video I've cleared the entire workspace and we're ready to get started on our brush holder now the one thing I will say I would just follow along when you're just getting started and just put in all of the same measurements that I'm putting in just so you can kind of get comfortable with this program to start out I'm going to go ahead and bring in a cube so I'm going to just drop it right here in the middle and I'm looking at my line drawing that I did of how I want this to look and I've got the rough measurements already laid out so I'm just going to follow along with that so the height of this is going to be eight millimeters so I'm just going to type in I'm going to click on this and then click over here and hit eight and hit enter now it's eight millimeters tall because we're going to work on the base first so now what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to click on the Red Corner and I want this to be a hundred and fifty millimeters wide by 75. all right then I hit enter and I'm going to move this right in the middle of the plane again and that is going to be the size of our brush holder so now what we're going to do is make the holes for the brushes to actually go in so I'm going to grab a cylinder right here so I'm just going to click and drag it and bring it right here on the workspace now I've already measured a lot of my brushes and it seems like almost all of my brushes except for some of the bigger ones will fit within an 11 millimeter hole so I'm just going to click here on the corner and type in 11 and then go to the other one and by hitting Tab and hitting 11 again there we go so there is our 11 millimeter hole for our brushes to fit into now I'm going to go to the top view and I am going to put this right up here now first what I'm going to do is I want to make sure that I can get this even so now what that we're on the top view I need to align this to both corners and then I'm going to move it out a certain amount so what I'm going to do is like let's go ahead and make it not aligned and I'm going to click and drag a box around both of these so now they're both selected I'm going to go right up here to the top of the menu bar and I'm going to click this align button or you can hit l and here you can see that there's these little nodes that show up now this is where it's going to align to so I actually want this to align to this Edge and this top Edge so if I click this little node it will automatically move this to the edge and then if I come over here to this one I'll click it and it moves it right there so now it is perfectly aligned to that top corner to get out of your align mode all you have to do is click in a blank area and there we go so now what I'm going to do is I am going to zoom in here so if you remember all I have to do is hit f and it'll move me right over here and I want to move this evenly so when you click and drag in any of the area of the object you can see that these numbers are showing up so I am going to move this in three millimeters to give me a little bit of an edge on it and there we go now I need to duplicate this I need to copy and paste it or duplicate so to copy it you can come up here into the top left corner and click this copy button or Ctrl C or command C depending on Windows or Mac now you can paste it or and this is Ctrl V or command V for pasting and you can see that it actually creates an object and pastes it right there for you but we don't want that I'm going to go ahead and delete this I'm going to click it again and I'm going to click duplicate duplicate and repeat is control D so I've duplicated this and now it doesn't look like it's there but if you see here when you click and drag it away it actually created it in the exact same place so let's go ahead and delete that and I'm going to duplicate it one more time now what I'm going to do is move it straight down now see how I'm clicking and dragging it's moving everywhere if I hold shift on my computer it will lock it to only the X and Y plane so it's either going to go y or X so I'm going to move this straight down while holding shift and let's say 13 is my number that's the Gap I want to have now if I go here again and hit duplicate again it will keep repeating the space that I just moved it to so let's just keep going up and it looks like that is too much so I'm going to hit delete so having all of this wasted space is something I don't want to have but I am going to stagger these so let's see what that looks like so if I click on all of these I can hold shift and keep clicking and it'll select all of the ones I click or I could click and drag and it'll select everything but if I don't want that I can hold shift again and click the spot that I don't want so now it's just selecting these as you can see now if you accidentally move it you can come up here to your undo and it'll move it right back to what you just had it at or it's Ctrl Z or command Z now I can either duplicate this or I can hold alt or option and drag so I'm going to hold that and it will actually copy it for me so I kind of want to just see what looks good here it doesn't need to be perfect so I kind of like that I want these to be staggered like that now I'm looking at it I'm like hmm maybe this wasn't too big so now I'm going to select all of these again I'm going to hold shift and click on the box so it deselects that and now I only have my cylinders and I'm going to come up here to duplicate again now I'm going to move it and hold shift and it looks like that's my perfect spacing so now I come back up here and hit duplicate again and it will keep doing it for me and there we go so now that I'm looking at this it's off center a little bit and this is one thing that we can do so I am going to take all of my cylinders and I'm going to go to my front view and I'm going to click and drag a box around my cylinders and I'm going to come up here and hit group so I'm going to group all of those objects as one object so now when I click on one cylinder it selects all of them because they're all grouped together so let's go to our top view and let's select a box around everything and let's align this so I'm going to come up here to a line and I'm going to align it to the center so I'm going to hit this Center and then if you see this one is grayed out and that means it's already centered because if I click up here you can see now it's not grayed out and the top is grayed out so let's click it back here and now it is all centered up so now I have all of my holes done and I'm ready to actually cut them out now what we're going to do is we're going to click on the cylinders and you can see your little shape dialog box that comes up you have two options solid or whole so we're going to go ahead and click whole and that enables us to cut anything out that we group together so I'm going to now select everything now that those are holes and this is a solid and I'm going to group it together and there we go so it automatically Cuts everything out and we have our shape of our plate that the brushes are going to go through now the next step is we need to be able to make some braces for this brush holder to be able to hold the second shelf so I'm going to go ahead and use this round roof over here I'm just going to drag this over here and now I want it to be vertical so I'm going to kind of come over here on the side and I'm going to turn it by grabbing that rotating icon now it's in the floor so what I can do is I can hit D for drop and it will automatically move it up so now what I'm going to do is I want to place this here so it's cutting through and I don't really want it to cut through right there I want to actually set it on this surface now this is where I would use my work plane tool I'm going to go ahead and click work plane and then I'm going to click on the top surface of this and you can see how it is actually created another plane on top of the surface of this holder now I can hit D for drop and it will move it up to set right on top of that Cube that we made then if I want to get rid of this all I have to do is click my work plane tool again and then click anywhere off of it and it will bring it all the way back to where it was so let's go to our top view and now I'm just going to free form this I'm going to hold shift and click on that corner and just drag it to where I think it's going to fit and that looks pretty good to me so to make sure that I actually have this properly aligned even though it looks like it I'm going to click and drag a box around it go to my align and I can see it's gray so I have it aligned so I'm going to now hit my duplicate I'm going to move this over to where it looks like it's centered and then I'm going to hit my duplicate again and then again and again so I'm looking at it with this design these are going to be a little off but I don't think it's that big of a deal so now we need to duplicate this and move it to the top so we have the top part of our brush holder so I wanted this to be 80 millimeters so first what I'm going to do is I am actually going to duplicate this and then I'm going to click on my height because I don't want this as thick for the the top part the base I wanted thick but this one I don't so I'm going to hit five millimeters and it's going to be shorter now I'm going to move it up but first let's move to the front view and here we go so I'm going to look to the right here and bring this up 80 millimeters and there we go now I can grab these half cylinders by dragging a box around it and then I'm just going to bring them all the way up but I need to see where it hits so I'm going to hit the front again and then bring it all the way up until it's touching and there we go so now I want all of this to be the exact same object so I'm going to drag a box click everything and I'm going to go ahead and hit group once it's grouped you'll see all of it's the same color and there we go so the last thing we're really missing is we need a base for this because if I actually start putting all my brushes in this and then I lift it up they're all going to fall through so this is going to be really easy all we have to do is go to the top view drag a cube in I'm going to put it right here in the corner I'm going to click and drag all the way out to cover up all of those holes then I'm going to go to my front view again and drag this down let's say to two millimeters thick and now it's got a nice flat bottom on all of those holes but it's a separate object so what we got to do is just select both of them so I'm just going to click and drag a box around it hit group and there we go so now we have a fully finished brush holder for our brushes so the best thing about this is is I actually designed this with 3D printing in mind this can be printed support free so all I'm going to do is rotate this on its side now I hit D for drop and now it's on the plane now this will print perfectly without supports now the last step is how do we get it out of here and into our slicer so we can 3D print it and all you do is you click on your model and you click export right here on the top right corner then you'll have this dialog box so you can download it or 3D print it if you use any of these softwares like Astro print or any kind of cloud printing that or any of these you can send it directly to your printer but I don't I'm going to just go ahead and download this as an STL you can actually download this as an obj or an STL when you're 3D printing if you're a laser cutter you can also download an SVG of it but before you click on which one you want to download you need to figure out do you want to put everything that's in your design into one STL or do you just want to export out what you have selected for this I'm just going to have the selected shape even though there's only one design in here so we click STL it will prepare the model and it will give you the STL so now that we actually have the STL let's jump over to Cura and get it ready for 3D printing I went ahead and dropped the model in Cura and I do know that when I'm printing circles like this I don't need any supports so even though it is red right there saying I need some I know I don't so I'm just going to go ahead and slice this at a 0.2 millimeter layer height and it's going to take 11 hours now that I have all of this sliced in Cura I'm going to go ahead throw it on an SD card hit print and we can see the final results of our 3D model that we just made of a brush holder [Applause] so tinkercad is an amazing piece of software and you saw how quick it took us to be able to create something like this I mean it's perfect it's simple and perfect for what I was needing so if you'd like to see some more tutorials like this please let me know in the comments other than that I wish you a great day and I'll see you guys in that next video

Channel: ItsMeaDMaDe

Views: 6,673

Keywords: tinkercad, tinkercad tutorial 3d printing, tinkercad 3d design for beginners, tinkercad 3d printing, tinkercad designs, tinkercad 3d design, 3d printing, tinkercad tutorial for beginners, tinkercad projects, tinkercad tutorial, how to use tinkercad, tinkercad tips and tricks, basic skills, 3d modeling, autodesk tinkercad, 3d printing ideas, tinkercad for beginners, 3d print tinkercad, 3d printable tinkercad, make useful parts 3d printing fast using tinkercad, beginners

Id: zIwrW4kcHTU

Length: 31min 53sec (1913 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 17 2023