I need some 3D design tutorials

In My Humble Opinion
1

and I need them to aimed at beginners. Like, whatever the 3D version of Hello World is, I need to start there.
That’s the TLDR version of this post.

To expand a bit. For a few years now, I’ve had a 3D printer that I really like and I’ve probably printed a few hundred things with it. However, I completely lack the ability to create anything. Nearly everything I’ve printed has come from Thingiverse and only modified to the extent that Cura allows me to. So, changing the size is easy enough. I’ve managed to do some very basic ‘cropping’ by simply dropping the unwanted area below the build plate. I’ve merged a few things by overlapping them in Cura and hoping for the best (which works more often than I’d have expected it to work).

My problem is when I want to print something that I can’t find online. One of the first things I wanted to print when I got this printer was a simple rectangular box with some holes on top and a removable top or bottom. I was hoping to use it as the housing for a Nixie Clock. Turns out I didn’t even know where to start.

I’m not looking to do anything complex, but I’d like to be able to create some basic things without hoping thingiverse has something close to what I need.

For example, on a project I’m currently working on, I need a u-clamp. In fact, this is the one I used. It’s a scad file, but if it’s written well and explained well, I can usually make them work. Now, I need to make a second one with slightly different dimensions that aren’t playing nice with that file and creating some glitches that are likely easy to remove, but I just don’t know how.

In any case, that’s the kind of simple stuff I’m looking to be able to do. Presumably, making a U clamp, to my specifications, shouldn’t be all that difficult. But I’ve never managed to wrap my head around it.

Over the years I’ve played with Blender, Meshmixer and TinkerCad and gone through a handful of tutorials for them but never really got anywhere. I always felt like I was missing something.

So, where do I start?
For what it’s worth (and because I really like what I made here), the u-clamp in question is shown here. It’s towards the front, going under his neck. You can see it running between his legs and his vest. And, to go back to what I was saying earlier about the extent of what I can do. This was on thingiverse, meant for an actual dog. I just scaled it down to fit a stuffed animal.

*Also, while looking for that thingiverse link, I saw Thing (Addams Family) on the front page…might have to make that tonight. On the other hand, it looks like it’s about a 15ish hour print and I’m kinda over those long/multi day print jobs. I’ll have to see if I can speed it up a bit.

2

Try Sketchup

Google bought it about ten years ago and I fiddled around with it a bit back then. Google then sold it off and it kinda dropped off the radar for me. It’s fairly easy to use, though I have no idea if it will export files that you can use.

Warning: Blender and Unreal are free 3d software with an insanely high threshold to get started and an even insaner learning curve.

3

I’ve done a lot of 3D modeling, both for 3D printing and for woodworking projects. Mostly I’ve used SketchUp. It’s fairly easy to get started with, with a pretty simple and intuitive UI. Recently I’ve been playing around with Fusion 360. It is much more powerful than SketchUp and can do things that are hard or impossible in SketchUp, but is correspondingly harder to use. For simple projects and for ease of use, I would start with SketchUp.

4

TinkerCad is just a matter of visualizing all of the simple shapes that will make your end object. Like, for the u-clamp you showed, in TinkerCad I would start with two cuboids and three cylinders:

[Album] imgur.com

That’s to make a 10mm wide, 40mm long clamp, with a material thickness of 2mm. So I have a 10x wide, 30mm long cuboid that is 2mm tall, capped on the ends with 2mm tall cylinders with a radius of 5mm; then a 10mm wide, 20mm long cuboid with a height of 10mm, capped on top with a cylinder that has a 10mm radius and 10mm height, turned 90 degrees sideways to sit on the body cuboid.

I am then going to grab the two central pieces by shift-clicking (the top cylinder and the tall cuboid) and group them (Ctrl + G) to turn them into one shape:

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I then want to duplicate that shape, using the duplicate button (or Ctrl + D) in TinkerCad:

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Then, on the duplicated piece, I select it then use the white grips (boxes) to pull the top and short side back by 2mm (ETA: that 8mm width is supposed to be 10mm, FYI):

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I will then finish combining my starting shapes (not the new, smaller, duplicated shape) into one piece:

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Then select the smaller piece and change it to a “hole”, which means it is subtracted from non-“hole” objects when they are grouped:

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Then select everything, group them (Ctrl + G or group button), and you’ll have the clamp, minus screw holes!

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To add screw holes, you just apply the same basic principles; add in two cylinders of the appropriate size, in the appropriate locations, change them to “holes”, and group:

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Those are just 2mm diameter holes, can be whatever is needed…

Finished!

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ETA: I’m not an expert in TinkerCad, by any means… I do all of my designs for my 3D printer in AutoCAD.

5

Thanks, I’ll walk through that a little later and see if it works. It’ll be interesting to see how it works with detailed steps for something I’m actually looking to make. Sometimes it’s hard to understand how the tutorials will relate to the thing you actually want to make.

If I can get that to work…I’ll likely have some follow up questions since the one I’m going to make will deviate from this a bit (not just in size, it’ll be shaped a bit differently).

6

No problem!

7

Some other tips I’ll give, based on my experiences teaching people to use Tinkercad:

1: Learn how to look at your model from different points of view. In Tinkercad, you can do this either by holding down the right button and moving the mouse, or by clicking and dragging on the “view cube” in the corner of your screen. Newbies very often place shapes in places that look like they line up… from one point of view, but which are wildly off when seen from some other angle.

2: You can do everything by clicking and dragging until it looks about right, but you can also do things exactly, by typing in numbers. For things meant to serve some actual purpose, as opposed to just art, I strongly recommend using the numbers.

3: You can sort of fake it by using the grid. If, for instance, you set the grid to 5 mm, then you’ll only be able to move or resize things with the mouse in increments of 5 mm. This makes it a lot easier to get things to line up exactly. If needed, you can still type in numbers to get other increments, or temporarily switch to a finer grid.

4: Learn to love holes. Holes make things much easier. As an example, I often show my students a model of a simple table with four legs. It can be made from five pieces, four cuboids for the legs, lined up with the corners of another cuboid for the top… but it can also be made from three pieces. And your holes can themselves also be made from other pieces. It’s not uncommon in my designs that I’ll use a hole, that had a hole used in making its shape, and that hole was also made using another hole.

5: The part of a hole that doesn’t overlap with your “real” shape doesn’t matter at all, and it’s often easiest to make a hole that extends far beyond the real shape (precisely how far doesn’t matter). For instance, when @Kron made his screw holes, you see that the cylindrical hole-pieces are much taller than the thickness of the orange piece. He could have made them exactly the height of the thickness of the orange piece, but he didn’t need to bother.

8

It’s funny you mention that. I always struggle to get things how I want them. Not because I don’t understand what I’m trying to do, just because I can never remember what I need to do to get there. For example, I’ve got Cura open right now.
-Right Click plus moving the mouse rotates the object in 3D
-Right Click (or Left Click or clicking anywhere on my touchpad) plus shift moves the entire object in 3D space.
-Right Click plus Ctrl Rotates the object in 3D space

-Left click plus moving the mouse does nothing.
-Left click plus Ctrl does nothing.
-Left Click (or Right Click or clicking anywhere on my touchpad) plus shift moves the entire object in 3D space.

-Scrolling on the mouse zooms.
-Shift or Alt plus scrolling also zoom.

Because of this I tend to use orthogonal views, but that causes considerable parallax issues if you’re doing something that isn’t exactly in front of you. Also, right clicking while moving the mouse (and hitting other buttons) isn’t always that easy on a touchpad. [For me] Trying to right click with my index finger and move the mouse with my pointer finger is like trying to write something left handed.

That’s what I usually do (again, this is all in Cura). In fact, it’s the reason I bought a caliper when I started doing this. That dog wheelchair, for example, I nailed the sizes of every part on the first shot. Didn’t have to reprint anything. Without having a caliper and entering the actual numbers into cura when I scaled it, I’d certainly have taken two or three tries for some of those parts.

I don’t remember, does TinkerCad have a way to measure things? One of my gripes with them, and I’ve heard others say the same, is that there’s no way to measure anything. There’s a grid in mm scale, but that’s it. There’s no easy way to get it to tell you the distance between two specific points on the model. There’s a few tricks that sometimes work, but they’re not very elegant solutions.

That’s one of the random things I remember when I think about the last time I tried to learn it. IIRC, the reason I did that was so that I could size the objects bigger or smaller without worrying about the holes ending up inside the object, and thus, not really ‘holes’ in the sense I need them to be. I remember learning the hard way that if the object is 5mm tall and the hole is 5mm tall and then I change the object to 5.1mm but forget to change the hole, it caused problems. But if I set the hole to 30mm, I could play with the object size all day and be safe.

9

As it turns out, I really do need to start with something considerably more basic than that. I understand what you’re doing, I have very, very little grasp of the mechanics involved. For example, you said:

So, with this first step in mind, I fired up TinkerCad and…that was as far as I got. Like, I need a step by step of exactly how to get these objects onto the grid, how to line them up properly etc. I really do need the “hello world” style tutorial.

I’ve played with TinkerCad in the past, but it was years ago and I ran into a number of roadblocks and gave up. I’m looking for tutorials that are geared towards someone that’s never even heard of TinkerCad and has no concept for how to do any type of 3D design, none whatsoever.

I know they’re out there, I just have to find them. Come to think of it, I wonder of Teaching Tech has anything? He was my go to youtuber when I was learning how to print (and modify my printer’s hardware and firmware).

I’ll come back to your directions for the clamp, but I need some additional understanding of the program first. Oddly, this was almost exactly the problem I had when I first tried to teach myself how to do this. Many tutorials make the assumption that you some understanding of the program and skip the basic steps.
For example, even when I made the first cuboid (which, after poking around, I assume you’re referring to what tinkercad is calling a box), it wasn’t centered and I have no idea how to move the grid so I can see it. Every thing I tried just rotates the view.
To be clear, I’m not asking you to walk me through all those things, I’m looking for recommendations for tutorials that start with the absolute, rock bottom, fundamentals of the program.

10

Unrelated, the Thing I printed last night turned out well. I need to clean up all the strings, but I like it.

11

I was in the same boat as you. Then a friend recommended Microsoft 3D Builder. It seems to be easier to use for me. Fewer buzzers and bells.

Then there are plenty of tutorials on Youtube. I started with this one.

I’m never going to turn out fantastic models, but I can make all the brackets and simple widgets I need.

12

Coming from an engineering background (civil, so not as much CAD as an ME, but enough to be dangerous) I find Blender baffling. Fusion360, and most of the freeCAD software, I think , is reasonably easy to get to the level where you can build significant number of models for 3D printing.

13

Blender is by far the most baffling software I’ve ever used, and I have a high pain tolerance for software. I found myself unable to do even the simplest tasks even after playing with it for an hour+.

Fusion 360 is great, though. I would recommend the OP start with TinkerCad, SketchUp, etc. The first step is to become comfortable with building complex shapes out of simpler ones. All CAD-oriented modeling programs work this way–take a few basic shapes, either 2D or 3D, and then perform operations on them like extrusion, intersections, etc.

After getting comfortable with that, programs like Fusion 360 add constraint-based modeling. You don’t have to recreate your entire model if, for instance, you want to change the wall thickness of something–if you set up the constraints right, it’s just a matter of changing a parameter. Extremely convenient, especially for 3D printing where the dimensions are sometimes a bit dicey. Just last night I printed a thing that needed to be 10.5 mm wide… but it turned out that didn’t leave quite enough of a gap, so I’ll bump it to 11 mm. All it takes is to change a single number; I don’t have to remodel a single thing.

14

Blender has this reputation, but I feel it’s gotten so much better in the last couple years, both in terms of the UI and the amount of material available to learn from.

15

There’s a ruler tool, but it’s the one tool I’ve never quite figured out how it works. You can also get the dimensions of the bounding box of any object fairly easily, and you can combine that with the workplane tool to get the extent of an object in any direction, but that doesn’t tell you, for instance, how deep a hole is.

It can also sometimes cause problems if the object and hole are both 5.0 mm, especially if they’re at an angle. You can end up with the object being a fraction of a micron larger than the hole, due to rounding issues. It’ll probably still print correctly, since no printer can print those microthin membranes, and even if they did, they’d break away… but it makes it really hard to design the next steps, because it won’t look right.

16

Regarding holes, I was just happy I was able to do something like this.

17

Obviously the $$$$ engineering software is pretty polished, but someone mentioned FreeCAD when I asked about open source software and it seemed to work, even though the same person gave vague warnings about the boundary representation kernel possibly not being 100% or whatever.

I have used Blender to set up some simple 3-D scenes that needed to be raytraced and the tutorials/help was clear enough.

18

I use FreeCAD and there are some nice tutorials about it out there. Parametric modeling is the cat’s meow. It is a bit more heavy duty than things like TinkerCAD, but you’ll know when you need a tool like this.

Some of you have mentioned Fusion360, which seems to be the gold standard for hobbyist software (stuff like Solidworks are unreachable by hobbyists). Are you happy with its licensing restrictions?
The reason I went down the FreeCAD road was because of how F360 suddenly applied limits to the formerly wide-open hobbyist license–I didn’t want to get totally married to the tool and have them change their hobbyist licensing again, cutting out some feature I used and breaking my models.