Use complex shapes in Tinkercad

now we're going to look beyond the basic shapes and explore what other shapes tinkercad offers us actually we'll stick on the basic shapes at first because I want to point out a few things here so if we drag out the cylinder we've already seen that This shape has properties that you can manipulate so instead of a rough sided cylinder we can increase the sides and make it nice and smooth there are also other options so we can make a bevel create a kind of pin with that and we can segment the bevel so that it makes a nice smooth pin drag the cylinder out excuse me the sphere and we only have one option and that is to make it a little bit smoother so there's no way to know necessarily without dragging out a shape to see what options there are for that shape you just need to drag it out and see so this one's got top radius bottom radius height and sides so again you can make it smoother or rougher and you can't assume make any assumptions so if I drag out the star for instance there are none there are no options if I drag out the star next to it you would think maybe there are no options but in fact there are a bunch of options I can increase the number of points I can increase the radius and the I can decrease or increase the inner radius so you actually have quite a few options for that shape and again there's no way to know without simply dragging the shape out and looking at the options there's a tube looks like it's got rough sides like the cylinder so we would assume that we can smooth that or make it less but interestingly as I decrease the sides it goes all the way down to a triangular tube then a square tube then a hexagon or a pentagon hexagon and so forth all the way up to completely smooth circular tube radius is what you might expect wall thickness so you can specify a specific well thickness say four millimeters bevel as we saw with a cylinder I can create a chamfer or if I segment that bevel then I have a fillet so I have a nice round shape there this scribble shape is for odd and very unique probably has limited use but if you do need it it is uniquely suited for certain things right away we can see that it's different I'm looking at I have basically a drawing surface and I have a preview screen actually I'm going to close this because I want to drag out another shape get rid of the scribble drag this another new scribble out and so you can see the cube that I already have on my work playlist there so as I draw I get a preview of what that shape looks like and in relation to the shape I already have so if I draw a cross piece so this is creating as you can see a solid shape the bottom I have a pencil and an eraser so I can cut off pieces or add pieces that's rough drawing shape and I also have the option to draw shape this works a little bit differently this I create a sort of area or I can also delete an area and you could combine those tools and then when you're done say done now interestingly maybe not intuitively those appear to be two different shapes but if I click on either one of them they're both selected so if my intent was to create two custom organic shapes then I would have had to use the scribble tool twice and if I need to go in and fine-tune the scribble at any time I can click edit scribble and go in and fix it and say done and I'm back to my scribble so that can be handy if you have an odd hole that you need to fill an odd shaped hole or if you need to connect two pieces two separate shapes with a little joining piece when trying to manipulate these set shapes it might be a hassle but if you use this method then you can create potentially exactly what you're looking for now in addition to these shapes when you scroll down and there's more down below but you'll notice that if you click the arrows you've got all kinds of categories you can explore big six shapes is what we've been working with up until this point designs design starters lots of shapes here and then you can either see more shapes by clicking below or you can click on these subcategories which has the same effect of see more shapes so it's a real grab bag of what you're going to find in there some stuff might be useful many of those shapes will not be many of them are meant for educational use let me just jump down to hardware so if you want to create an easy movable joint These are nice to know about so I can drag these out and so these are these are already made to precisely fit one another to snap in so if I wanted this Cube to snap onto it a sphere and be able to move around I could just combine I gotta move that up a little more I probably should have put this on the cube instead so if I combine the shape and combine these shapes this sphere socket or receptacle will now receive this Cube ball so it's a ball and socket Arrangement so you obviously you could create your own snap fits but it's really handy to have these already made for you another category that I would point out is the shape generators at the bottom these look fairly straightforward but they're not they're anything but straightforward so for instance if I drag this shape out it looks like a cylinder right big deal but if I click on properties you can see I've got this spline effect going on here so that if I grab one of these points and pull it out and I grab another point and Pull It in and pull this out I can really customize this shape I can also in addition to grabbing the square center points I can grab the control points the circulus control points and drag out to inflate I'm going to drag in to deflate or I can rotate those points so between all of these options you can really create highly customized organic shapes right and even once it's created you can still do the basic resizing the height the width and the length and so forth to really get what you're looking for so that's really handy to know about isometric thread again you have lots of options here make it big you can change the pitch and the segments to make it smoother or rougher the number of rotations tip scale is the where the thread ends right so you can make that go right in or have a more sharp cut the segments and you can rotate that around a little bit so you can see you can smooth that that way the tip comes in and this is the thread scale so if I look at it sideways you can see we get really thin or thick now keep in mind if you're 3D printing a thread you're going to have overhangs so if this is too large then you might need supports and you may run into other problems but it can be handy when you need it another interesting shape generator is this far noise and if you zoom in closely you can see it's actually like a crackled pavement type of fact and this is really meant to use as a negative so if I let's see it is 20 by 20 so I'll make it 20 millimeters tall and I'll go back to basic drag out a cube which is by default 20 by 20. so before I do that I'm going to turn that shape generator into a negative and I will align and group and you can see what you're doing is essentially creating it may be hard to see in this instance but it that pattern has the same dimensions of the Red Cube right you can see the outline on the work plane but it's been turned into a random sort of webbing type effect let's see I'm going to undo move that back because what I can do with this shape is I can alter it in a variety of ways through the property so randomizer you can just keep going until you find a particular effect that you like you can increase the number of cells which will also increase the printing time right the complexity of the print you can increase the size of the tile but I'll undo that the cell spacing so it's making you can see let me decrease the number of cells again so you can see that more clearly and I'll look from the top orthographic View zoom in okay so now if I look at cell spacing you can clearly see what's happening it's making larger gaps there and I can go to the randomizer again I'm gonna stick with that so you have lots of options here that you could use so now I can whoops I didn't want to group those I wanted to select both align a line now group and so I have this kind of crazy shape here this looks better this kind of effect it can look really cool if you have an organic shape so say something you sculpted in forger 3D if you bring it in and then you use the vornai to make it so that your model has the same general shape but it's filled with this kind of random webbing so again the ultimate point to remember is that there are lots of different shapes to explore and that each shape will have its own unique set of properties that can be adjusted I guess one last thing that I'll mention is that if I click on shapes you can see at the top it says your creations well before we do that favorites so if I click my favorites these are shapes that I use frequently so I've favorited them and how you can do that is when you hover over any shape you'll see that there's a outline of a star in the upper right hand corner if you click that it then gets added to your favorites so I've added the cone if I go to favorites there's the cone then I can unfavorite it I no longer want that to be in my favorites and your Creations so these are models that I've created in tinkercad and then you can add them to the shapes so that whenever you need them if there's a shape that you use over and over again I think I have this uh 3D printing Club logo that I put on different things so I can just drag it out and add it to another shape or manipulate it or whatnot and so how you add a shape a new shape to a new model to your Creations so let's say this this Cube joint that I created earlier I can click on it and choose create shape and there it is and you can add a description some tags and you could also lock the size so if it's something that you know that you're only going to use in a specific dimensions for then you can lock it in place otherwise if you don't click that then you'll be able to resize this so I'm going to say save shape and you'll see it's now added to my creations and so whenever I'm working on another model I can just drag it out I don't have to recreate it or I don't have to go into previous design in tinkercad and copy it and then come over here and paste it in that can be really handy to know about I'm going to click that and delete because it's not something that I want to add to my creations so do some exploring just take time and go through and see what's what there are like I say there are a lot of things in here that won't necessarily be helpful to you but you never know what you're going to find so for instance I just randomly clicked on structures and scenery and it turns out that there is one design in here this brick wall which can be really handy get rid of that so if you're looking to add texture to a print you can use the brick wall to do that or if you're creating a model architecture say for for a model train set or if you're making an architectural model for an actual building can be really handy you don't have to create your own brick texture it's right there so that's something you might want to add to favorites you'll be able to find it easily you won't have to remember where and here where in all these menus it was hiding so if nothing else you might want to go through exhaustively all the different shapes and click the yellow star for the ones that you think you might be interested in using later that way when you want to find them again all you have to do is click on favorites and you don't have to try to go through the menus and the sub menus of all the different shapes

Channel: Stephen LaRochelle

Views: 8,528

Keywords: tinkercad, complex, shapes, scribble, favorites

Id: 0Xt65DcxQEc

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 28 2023