Modify Existing STL files easily using TinkerCAD

alright what's up YouTube today we're gonna talk about how to easily manipulate modify add to and subtract from STL files that you obtain on the Internet this is in reference to making remixes on Thingiverse or just modifying previously designed STL's in CAD program to make your life a little bit easier so if that's something you're into go ahead and stick around [Music] all right so I'm in the Tinkercad environment it's a little bit different it's a tinkerer block setup it's a visual type thing it's provided for free from Autodesk you can go to Tinkercad comm get a username and password for free free software this isn't gonna be as complex as something like a non shape AutoCAD fusion 360 anything like that but what it is good for is for visual people and I'm a visual person so basically what you do is you add and subtract from this workplane environment and Tinkercad just kind of doing it visually not really off of pure specific measurements it works really great for beginners and for me it works really well for just easily adding subtracting or modifying STL files so a little disclaimer here obviously STL files are someone's intellectual property if they have marked it as a copyright don't use it and modify it and use it as your own I mean just common sense guys like be a good person it's very simple okay so let's say I found an STL so for example we use one of mine it found an STL I brought it into the Tinkercad using import and then just bring in STL file and for some reason it's all grouped up because the person that made it wanted you to print it that way or whatever but you want to modify it a little bit and it comes in grouped in four pieces like this one this right so now after we import it into Tinkercad it just becomes another object so this is just technically another object and we can modify it however we want we can't ungroup it right because to Tinkercad this is all one large object it's like a block or a cylinder that you added into the program but what we can do is let's say we wanted to isolate just this cut portion of this STL so what I'm going to do is control V I'm going to duplicate it all right I'm duplicating it in place so right now there's one over another so there's two versions of this thing on the work plane so if I bring this down you can see that I'll change the color see there's two of those now because I didn't control B and duplicated in place so let's say I just wanted this circle what we have to do then is we have to come in in in here and just cut out everything but the circle so what I'm using here is a block that is selected as a hole and that hole means it'll cut anything that it touches I'm just going to go in here a little bit carefully make sure it doesn't touch the thing we want I'm gonna go in here [Music] make sure that it doesn't influence this Cup at all and that would show up as a dark area on the cup if it was actually hitting the cup so I'm gonna come down hold on here I'll move my head around but right here is the snap grid area and I can click this I can turn this off and that gives me very fine resolution on where I can be or where I can move this arrow so large small it gives me what is that a tenth of a millimeter movement instead of or actually that gives me a 1/100 movement of a millimeter instead of this high or low resolution snapping to the build plate which is one millimeter so I'm going to turn that off I'll put my head back here in the corner then I'm gonna move this in and out until I don't see any gray see how that turns gray that means that's intersecting with that shape and I want to preserve my cup so I'm gonna bring that away from the cup and making sure that I get over this part without touching the cup oh and I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do it I don't know if I can do it oh that's gonna be a big pain well that's good it's a tutorial so I'm just gonna take this square and I'm just gonna move it at a slight angle and I'll put it like that then it gets rid of that and doesn't touch the cup and then I'm just gonna control D the square or rectangle I guess it would be and then I want to bring it like this and like that so now I have it down to the base of the workplane all the way up to the top and what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to select them all I just clicked and dragged the mouse so selected everything I'm gonna group those and there we go okay come on go back there we go okay so now that I have everything together here and I have the blocks cutting away the portions that I don't want I'm going to go in and I'm going to duplicate with a control D so now I have two sets of everything except the portions that are going to cut away so now I'm going to select everything in there and I'm going to do a shift and select the cup now I'm going to group so that's getting away that's taking away one set of these peripherals around the cup so now we can go in and remove the duplicate of the whole STL file and what we're left with is just a free-standing cup with no peripherals okay so that's how you separate them apart so now let's say I just wanted to have this one peripheral on this this STL file well it's the same exact process that we just did I'm going to take it I'm just going to duplicate it I don't have to duplicate it in place for this one but I'll keep this TL over here and then all we're gonna do again is take the square or a rectangle we're gonna remove everything we don't want [Music] just using a series of of rectangles cubes as it were and then we're just gonna group that again so that gets rid of everything but this right then he can go on so forth on and on and on so then adding and subtracting to these is at this point now this individual cup is just a basic object as if it were in Tinkercad so as if you created it yourself so let's say we wanted to maybe have this be some sort of cup holder that you could get something out of I don't really know but let's just put a circular cutout in the front so it's the same principle here as it is with any other Tinkercad object you come up with what you want it to look like in your head so let's just say I don't know something like that maybe a little thinner and we'll align them with the line tool so I know it's centered I like this a whole I'll group these two and now it's got to cut out so I could grab something out of that container or something if I wanted so this is the same with adding to this individual container no big deal just throw it whatever you would want to add to it and then what I do when I when I try and add things that are thin like an outer perimeter thin outer perimeter what I like to do is slow down because it's a tutorial what I like to do is I take this object I want the outer perimeter to go I duplicate that send this one out I make this a hole and I take this piece I'm going to add to it [Music] and I move it in to the hole version to the cutout version of the the thing I want to add that to you you can put this one then in there or have the duplicate separate and group it but I'm just going to do this to make it easier to understand I'm gonna group that now I have that curve that I know will be the curve for this on that piece already so I know when it comes in it's not going to go through that thin wall and it'll just match up perfectly do it alright I'm going to group those two and then they're gonna become one STL file like that and then this of course can be modified again and again and again so it's just it's a building block scenario you know just putting in what you want figuring out how you want it to go you can do anything in Tinkercad you just have to figure out how to do it in certain steps that's what makes some of this other CAD software so powerful like fusion 360 things like those programs because you can basically have the program do some of the thinking for you so and especially with like assemblies or anything like that any parts that need to move together fusion 360 is gonna gonna trump Tinkercad just because you know you're doing a visual representation on Tinkercad you can do those things but it's a little bit tougher because you're not getting really high dimensional accuracy but I've been using Tinkercad now for I don't know how long like seven months now or something and it's it works you can design things and make it work so yeah so basically that's how we can isolate individual files from a imported STL file that's how we can add and subtract from STL files as if they were just normal shapes in the Tinkercad environment and yeah you can apply these processes to anything so if you wanted to add text or if you wanted to import an SVG and add it to some wire subtract it this all works that way and Tinkercad is a great way to easily modify small STL files so if you enjoyed this please drop a like maybe you subscribe loved to have you aboard keep your amps up and your filament dry [Music]

Channel: Revamped Outdoors

Views: 144,609

Keywords: Modify STL, modify existing stl, TinkerCAD, easily change an STL file, how to modify any stl file, using tinkercad on already deisgned models, how to do a thingiverse remix, how do i remix something on thingiverse, how do i modify a stl, change an stl file, using tinkerCAD, TinkerCAD tutorial, modifying 3d files, using tinkercad to modify an stl file, how to modify a 3d model file, seperating stl files, how to seperate an stl file, seperate parts of an stl file

Id: OvHiLiEo1bY

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 18 2018