Tinkercad: Key Points
This page is part of the 3Dsf.info review of Tinkercad.
AKA: Stuff To Know.
Here are some important things about Tinkercad to keep in mind. Understanding these key points, related to fundamental design principles and user interface elements, make it much easier to learn and use Tinkercad.
Tinkercad is not an engineering tool
Many CAD programs are built for engineers. They're constructed around strict rules and constraints, have complex measurement systems, and so on. They're tools for professionals such as mechanical engineers and architects.
Tinkercad is more of a sketching program than a rigorous mathematical drafting program. That isn't to say that it isn't capable of producing precise results – just that it lacks the tools and frameworks to make that easy or necessary.
A red outline means a group is loading
Normally Tinkercad outlines each object or group with a thin dark blue-grey line. However, if it's in the middle of calculating a group it will switch to a thin red line. The parts of the group outlined in red can change as the grouping calculation progresses, in the case of large complex groups.
Sometimes you just need to wait a while for the groups to load correctly, and eventually the red line will vanish. But if a group fails to assemble together, then the red line will stay permanently around the group. The group is effectively unusable at this point.
A complex group is one that has a whole bunch of objects in it, or a group that consists of groups which consists of groups etc. There is no obvious hard limit to the number of groups you can nest, but you soon run into performance limits that make your complex group unusable. So when working on a project it's worth thinking through how you're going to create your groups, and what nesting you'll do. It's often possible to rework an object to have a simplified group structure that will load successfully, though it adds extra work.
Note that you can select a red-outlined group that's loading by clicking on it directly. However, if you click in a blank area of the canvas and drag a rectangle to select multiple objects, Tinkercad will not select any red-outlined loading objects.
The pain! Any experienced Tinkercad user will know these red-outlined groups well.
The three Working Zones
There are three different zones in a Tinkercad workspace. Your model can be built within these zones, and the zones place different constraints on different things.
Understanding how the zones work is really important to using Tinkercad effectively. It doesn't seem documented anywhere, so here's my description of it.
Of course, all this “zone” terminology is mine; I have no idea what Autodesk calls them themselves.
The Blue “workplane” Zone
First there's a little zone marked by a blue grid. This has “Workplane” marked on it. You can see it in the centre of the diagram.
The size of the grid is user-configurable, and comes with certain presets matching the print bed sizes of common 3D printers.
Click the “Settings” button in the lower right corner. Choose the “Presets” menu to select a popular 3D printer. Mine, the Formlabs Form2, was not listed here, so I put in a Custom one as a default. This is fortunately remembered by Tinkercad for newly created projects.
This Blue Zone is mostly for visual convenience – it doesn't restrict where you can put things. Note that the blue grid will vanish if you go into Cruise mode and change the angle of the workplane to something else. In that case the new workplane grid appears as an angled yellow-orange grid.
One area where the Blue Zone matters is when exporting an object as an SVG. Since an SVG is a 2D image, the exported image is basically a slice of your object slightly across the workplane.
The Groupable Zone
Next there's an invisible area within which objects can be moved and groups can be built. I call this the Groupable Zone. This area is particularly confusing.
First, it's mostly invisible - it's not marked on the screen by a grid or by boundary lines or anything. I say mostly because if you move an object outside the Groupable Zone then any part of the object that lies outside it will have a subtle grey colour applied to it.
In my diagram above I've drawn a red square which shows the size of the Groupable Zone. I've also added two white bar objects which extend out of the Groupable Zone, and you can see how they turn a pale grey colour when they pass the Zone boundary. Remember that the Zone extends above and below the horizontal plane of the Blue Zone – it's 3D space!
And second, anything in the Groupable Zone can be grouped. But if you try to create a new group where any part of the group falls outside the Groupable Zone, then the grouping action will fail. You can move objects and groups outside the Blue Zone if you wish, because the Blue Zone is really just part of the Groupable Zone; it simply contains the blue grid.
Really, I guess “Working Zone” probably makes more sense than “Groupable”. I named it Groupable since grouping failures are the primary way in which it affects you as a user.
The failed group can fail in different ways. Sometimes you get the error message “Object exceeds the size limit”, which is very badly phrased since it sounds like the object is too big, rather than outside the invisible Groupable Zone. Or sometimes the group will go ahead, but the part of the group that's outside the Groupable Zone will simply be sliced off and be missing. Or sometimes the group will fail and simply vanish. In this latter case you have to undo immediately, or else your work will simply appear to be gone, even though it's not.
This image of three servomotors shows how objects appear when you move them across the invisible Groupable Zone boundary.
On the left is an object that you'll be able to group successfully. The object in the middle will probably be sliced in half if you attempt to group it, because half of it falls within the Wilderness – the part shaded in grey. The object on the right will probably vanish altogether if you attempt to group it, since it's entirely within the Wilderness.
The Wilderness
Finally, outside the Groupable Zone is what I call the Wilderness. You can move stuff here, no problem. I often use it as a kind of “outside the pasteboard” area to store things that I might use in the future. It’s a deep freeze storage locker.
But if you were to perform a group action on anything that falls in the Wilderness, it will get sliced off or will vanish entirely!
So it's group creation that's the issue, strangely enough. You can move stuff out of the Wilderness into the Groupable Zone, group it, and then move it back to the Wilderness without problems. You can even move the grouped objects while the group is still being calculated and it's red-outlined.
The perimeter of the Wilderness is not visible – you can't zoom out to it, but it is there. No object can be moved past this invisible boundary. (try making a long object and pushing it as far away as you can!)
This zone could be thought of as the Storage Zone, I guess, since you can put objects there but you can't group them further.
This hapless object consists of a number of sphere objects that were grouped. Because the group occurred on the boundary between the Groupable Zone and the Wilderness, all the portions of the sphere which fell in the Wilderness territory were sliced off when the group calculation was finished.
It feels rather science fictiony, like this is some dreadful injury caused in a Forbidden Region – the terrifying Wilderness!
Fixing the Zone confusion
This whole Zone situation can cause massive confusion for new users, especially when groups suddenly vanish.
I suspect Tinkercad's designers figured most people wouldn't be working in an area that far out. I design a lot of larger objects, and frequently find parts of my work in progress bumping up against the borders of the Groupable Zone!
The best way to solve it would be to make the Groupable Zone the entire workspace. The inability to zoom out further places natural UI constraints on the areas that users can put objects.
You must move an object up and down vertically using the arrow tool
The Tinkercad UI for object movement takes a little getting used to.
You can move an object around anywhere on a flat horizontal plane - the X and Y axes - simply by clicking and dragging. However, the object will be constrained in the Z axis, meaning you can't move it up or down from the horizontal plane.
If you want to move it on the Z axis you need to click the tiny triangular arrow that appears above or below the object. This lets you move it vertically relative to the horizon.
Complicating matters, the tiny arrow points up if you view the object from above, and points down if you view the object from below. It's contextual. And if you're viewing from the plane of the horizon the arrow usually points up. But sometimes no arrow appears, and you have to move your view up and down a bit before the arrow shows up.
I think the reasoning behind the arrow is because it can be difficult to move an object in 3D space using an input device like a mouse that controls 2D movement only.
The cube on the plane can be moved left and right, forward and back, simply by clicking and dragging the mouse.
However, to move it up or down relative to the workplane you need to find the teeny tiny arrowhead at the top and click it.
Resizing vertically differs from horizontal resizing
Resizing an object in the vertical (Z) plane is different from resizing an object by grabbing one of its corners! You can make an object longer or shorter by resizing in the Z plane, and that affects the entire plane - it doesn't affect a side. The resize movement is also constrained to the Z axis.
The vertical resize handle often vanishes as well. Sometimes you need to take the view angle cube in the upper left and tilt it up and down before the vertical resize handle reappears.
Resizing horizontal corners and sides works like a 2D draw program
Like in a 2D draw program, if you drag the corner handle you can resize two sides of an object simultaneously. If you drag the handle on the side you can slide back and forth and only resize that side of the object.
The key thing is that resizing with a white square handle in the corner of an object behaves differently from resizing by grabbing a black square handle on the side of an object.
Resizing rotated objects gets really confusing (resizing a rotated object skews and distorts it)
Where it gets super messy is if the object is rotated, and is no longer on a 90° intersection with the grid. (ie: if the object is not square on the grid)
In this case, if you corner-drag an object to resize, it calculates the resize based on an imaginary rectangle which encloses the whole object. It does NOT calculate the resize based on the object itself.
The result is that if you resize the rotated object, your rectangle will end up as a parallelogram! The sides will end up angled in, and your corners will no longer all be 90°. The object gets really screwed up.
This is an awkward situation. The solution that Autodesk devised was the cruise (magnet icon, described in the tips chapter) function, which lets you change the working plane based on one specific object (or part of it). This works, and the cruise feature is actually quite powerful, but it does take a little getting used to.
So you have your rectangle. You rotate the rectangle. If you then resize the rotated rectangle by grabbing one of the corners, you'll notice the imaginary box that's drawn around the rectangle as you resize. And the resize operation is calculated on that, resulting in a distorted image that's skewed.
Shift-resize is also confusing
Shift resize also affects the resize, since as mentioned above non-shift resize on a tilted object screws it completely by parallelogramming it.
In other words, if you have an object that's rotated off 90 degrees, and you aren't in cruise (magnet icon) mode, you can resize it by grabbing a corner and holding down the shift key. This increases (or decreases) the overall size of the object without distorting it.
Shift-resize a side handle will also increase or decrease the whole object without distorting it, but the original of the scale will be the handle on the opposite side of the object.
Double-click an object to temporarily release a group
If you double-click a group of objects, the group will temporarily be converted back to its constituent objects (or constituent subgroups, if there is more than one level of grouping) Clicking outside the object on whitespace rebuilds the group.
This is a handy way of editing a group, since you can go in and move objects around and so on. Since the group doesn't get restored when you click other objects or groups you can also move other things to line up with the released group.
However, although you can edit the group you can't add or remove objects to it this way – you can only rearrange them or resize them.
Double secondary-click the page hides the tool palettes
If you double-click the page with your secondary mouse button (or double finger tap on a Mac trackpad) then Tinkercad hides the title bar and tool palettes. (though oddly the nav buttons in the upper left remain visible)
This is handy for viewing a project in its entirety, but can be confusing if you don't expect it, of course. Double-click the page again to return to the normal view.
When is Tinkercad autosaving?
You can tell what the autosave status is by looking in the upper right corner. If it says “Saving...” in grey text then your project is being written to Autodesk's cloud servers. Closing or reloading the window at this point will cause the write to fail, and your project will revert to whatever state it was in immediately prior to the last change. If it says “All changes saved” then the last change will have been safely written to the cloud servers, and you can close the window without risk of losing anything.
If the window stays stuck at Saving... for an interminable period, then something has gone wrong and chances are the write will never succeed. Reloading the window will cause your last change to be lost.
When does Tinkercad update the last-saved datestamp?
It doesn’t mark a project as saved unless you click on the Tinkercad icon in the upper left and return to the dashboard view. Then this view will list your projects from most recently saved to oldest.
Your document will probably have auto-saved internally, so you shouldn't have lost anything, but this fact won’t be recognized by the dashboard list.
Undo is not stored
Keep in mind that, like a word processor or whatever, the undo history is kept in RAM only, and is not preserved and saved to the cloud. That means that if you quit or close the browser and come back to your project, (or even go back to the Tinkercad dashboard page) your undo history will be gone.
Snap grid setting not stored
Failure to retain the "snap grid" setting in a project. Tinkercad doesn't remember the “snap grid” setting and reverts to 1mm every single time I open a project. This is super aggravating for me, as I only work on small models.
The Shapes Library
There's a feature called the Shapes Library. Here you can find many different shapes and elements that you can build into your project. Select the thing you want and drag it to the workspace.
Your Creations. This is where you can store stuff you make, such as complex grouped shapes that you can use later.
Favorites. This is where you can put in shortcuts to shapes found elsewhere that you like.
Basic Shapes. These are the low-resolution basic primitive shapes in Tinkercad.
Design Starters through to Featured Collections. These are premade shapes, generally multicolour groups of objects, that Autodesk have made as inspirations for children and other beginners. They're shapes like tables, penguins, houses, whatever.
Sim Lab. These are objects that can have physical relationships or connections between them, for physics simulations. Not much here actually.
Shape Generators. These are legacy deprecated shapes that Tinkercad fans wrote in years gone by. They vary from useless fun objects to utterly invaluable high-resolution objects.
At the top is a magnifying glass, useful for searching to see if there are existing objects that could be useful to you.
COPYRIGHT
This text was written entirely by and for 3Dsf.info. Feel free to make copies for your own use, but I ask that you not repost it for download elsewhere. The reason is I'm updating these pages all the time for accuracy and development purposes. So the most up to date page should always be available at 3Dsf.info!
CONTACT
If you have any corrections or comments, feel free to drop a line:
Note: I am not Autodesk, and I'm afraid I'm not able to assist with problems or requests for help with Tinkercad.