Tinkercad Drawbacks

This page is part of the 3Dsf.info review of Tinkercad.

While free and surprisingly easy to use, Tinkercad also has a lot of severe limitations.

Reliant on corporate goodwill

If Autodesk decide they want to kill the product one day, then all your projects will vanish forever. This is another of the big risks of all cloud-based services. It’s not like that program you bought on physical media (remember that?) that you can run in perpetuity, regardless of what the manufacturer decides to do.

For now Autodesk seems to be viewing Tinkercad as both a loss leader and a way of training up a new generation of kids who will one day buy their products. So even though they’re undoubtedly losing money on it, for now hobbyists like me can enjoy access to it, which is frankly fantastic. But in the future? Who knows?

In short, all your files are stored on Autodesk's servers and you cannot store them on your computer. Is it worth investing your hard-earned labour into a program like this? That's up to you!

Autodesk are under no obligation to keep supporting this product. I only hope that, if they do decide to discontinue it, they give us some time to make the transition away to something else.

Online only

As noted, everything is stored on the web. It can’t be used by a computer that’s not actively online; there's no offline sync capability. That’s usually not a massive problem, but can limit use when travelling or if your connection is flaky. Remember - the cloud is just somebody else’s computer, and you don’t know where it is.

It can also take some time to add a save point for files with large complex objects, especially on slow internet connections or if the Tinkercad servers are overloaded. When this happens a page can crash, or force-reload, before a save is complete, and you’ll lose work.

No support to speak of

Since it's a free product, you basically have no support in the event of problems. You can't pick up the phone and get someone to fix the problem for you. There was a discussion forum that you could sometimes get responses from, if you're reporting a bug or something like that, but it appears to be gone.

There's a basic help centre online.

Since it's a free service for me as a hobbyist I accept that as part of the tradeoff. But I understand that educational users do have access to support, which is good to know.

Meant for simple 3D models, especially ones that may get printed

Complex stuff is obviously out. But so are models for 3D animation, gaming, etc. It's not great at that. Stuff like parametric modelling? It'll never feature anything like that.

Making dollhouse furniture or model spaceships? No problem! Want to make realistic human figures or curved modern car models? Well, basically no. That sort of thing is outside its remit.

Tinkercad grouped objects are slow

Very slow.

Very very very slow.

Like, imagine the slowest program you can think of. Tinkercad can be slower than that.

To clarify, it’s perfectly zippy when dealing with a small number of objects just sitting around. But it becomes outrageously slow when you have complex grouped objects, especially groups of groups, which any reasonably sophisticated design will require. It can easily take 10 minutes for a complicated model to load. Creating a group can take just as long.

Most of the time I've lost on my projects is because I've had forced waits for 5-15 minutes each time I make a small change to a group.

Having a faster computer or faster network connection won’t fix this. (Though a slow computer definitely will slow you down)

This really needs to be resolved. I have no idea why it’s so horrendously slow. I presume it must offload the bulk of the calculations to Autodesk’s servers, and given by the amount of network traffic I see it must move large rendered models. If that’s true it strikes me as a really regrettable way to do things. Not only is it a bad user experience (especially for the children the product is aimed at) but it’s going to cost Autodesk a lot of CPU time. Given how fast everybody’s computers are these days, especially when you consider GPUs are everywhere, it would be great to transfer more of the CPU burden locally.

If the speed problem is local, which seems unlikely to me since Tinkercad is painfully slow regardless of what computer it’s used on, then I urge Autodesk to fix this.

No editable exports

This problem is particularly risky for the end user since Tinkercad does not have the ability to export whole projects in any editable format. (their Fusion export option is sadly useless – see next bit) It’s not like exporting files from Microsoft Word so you can switch away to some other word processing program or whatever.

You can export as STL, OBJ and GLTF files for printing. But those are exports as uneditable objects/meshes, not collections of alterable components.

Export to Fusion 360 does not work

A much vaunted Tinkercad feature is its ability to export projects to Fusion 360; a more advanced CAD program, also from Autodesk.

Unfortunately the export feature is extremely limited, since it only works if your project consists of a few primitive objects. It can’t export shape generator objects, imported SVGs, or complex groups. I honestly can't see this feature being useful to anybody as it is today.

Only the simplest of simple Tinkercad designs - a handful of primitive objects slapped together - actually worked for me as advertised. Otherwise it's just the helpful message “Sorry, we were not able to send your design to Autodesk Fusion at this time. Please try again.” This is not going to make it any easier for students to migrate to Fusion 360. And even if it worked you'd have to export all your projects one at a time.

More about this problem in the future of Tinkercad section.

No custom objects

The most useful and crucial feature of Tinkercad has also been deprecated.

Some time ago Tinkercad introduced a feature called a shape generator. This is a way of coding up a new object type written as a simple Javascript program. The Tinkercad community quickly wrote all kinds of incredibly useful shape generators, which let you make all kinds of interesting objects.

Unfortunately Tinkercad killed this algorithmic feature a few years ago, apparently owing to issues with maintenance. They have kept a legacy library of shape generators available to the public, but they can't be edited or altered, and no new shape generators can be made.

I can't state how problematic this is. Or maybe I can - this is really really bad. Shape generators transform Tinkercad from a children’s toy to something that’s often very useful. All of my projects rely entirely on these shape generators. What if you want a sphere with a higher resolution than the supplied one? Or an object like a tube?

This situation is very troubling, because I have no idea if Tinkercad will drop legacy shape generators altogether in the future, completely breaking every single one of my existing designs. I'm very concerned that Autodesk might try to move everybody to Codeblocks, removing legacy shape generators.

STL imports are limited

Tinkercad can import pre-rendered STL files, which is great. Tinkercad says it can import STLs up to 25MV in size. But in my experience anything larger than 2.5MB or so always fails. Objects also get simplified (meshes are sharply reduced) and so they render roughly. Imports are thus lossy in nature.

No textures

There is no support for textures or surface maps of any kind. You can change the colour of an object or group, including making your own custom colour, and you can make an object semi-transparent, but that's it. This is not a program intended for making detailed renderings.

Memory limitations

Tinkercad involves tremendous memory usage. If you’re using a web browser that force-reloads pages that use lots of RAM, such as Safari on a Mac, then you’ll find your Tinkercad pages suddenly reloading, losing work. I don’t know of any way to prevent Safari from doing this. Chrome tends to do the same for pages that haven’t been used a few minutes, though you can disable that feature.

I've found Opera works pretty well with Tinkercad on a Mac. The main problem with Opera is if you option-scroll your input device it will change the zoom percentage of the whole window, which forces a time-consuming redraw. If you're used to the Adobe Illustrator UI of option-scroll to zoom, then you'll accidentally trigger this behaviour over and over.

Low resolution objects only

Basic objects containing curved surfaces - spheres, cylinders, etc, are actually constructed from a handful of flat planes. Unfortunately they typically default to a mere 20 sides, which is really chunky and low resolution. And looks awful when printed. You can increase that to 64 sides, which is still too low to look very good. So it’s doubly annoying. Each time you create a sphere or cylinder it’s set to 20 sides, and you have to increase it manually, but only to 64. No idea why the default is so low when it doesn’t seem to make much difference in terms of performance.

There are some better objects available - a cylinder that has up to 100 sides, a sphere with increased resolution (5 arbitrary levels of surface complexity), a cone with 300 sides. But these are still a bit rough and ready when it comes to printing. Especially if only part of the object is used in a print. They also rely upon shape generators, which have an uncertain future.

Crude object editing

You also can't alter much about the primitive shapes. Some shapes have a handful of adjustable parameters, but they're pretty limited.

The hole cutting method is simple and intuitive, and works surprisingly well, but becomes really cumbersome and time-consuming for multiple or nested groups.

Geometric shapes only; no compound shapes

The basic shapes consist of things like cubes and spheres. There are a few other shapes you can adapt, such as tapered (parabolic) curves and eggs. But there are no tools to design simple compound curves. I really wish for simple Bezier or spline editing.

You can import complex flat .SVG files that you've drawn in a 2D illustration program. That will give you the ability to have compound curves in a flat or extruded plane. However, you can't have an object with compound curves in three directions.

No meshes and organic shapes

As noted above, Tinkercad is limited to simple geometric shapes. You can't use it to design a convincing human being or otherwise natural or organic thing. It's simply not that sophisticated. You can of course import an STL file of your organic shape made elsewhere and exported as a bunch of triangles, but that won't be editable.

iii.   Tinkercad Key POints

COPYRIGHT

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CONTACT

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Note: I am not Autodesk, and I'm afraid I'm not able to assist with problems or requests for help with Tinkercad.