From the course: Designing a Replacement Part using 3D printing

Introducing Tinkercad - Tinkercad Tutorial

From the course: Designing a Replacement Part using 3D printing

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Introducing Tinkercad

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Tinkercad is a free, cloud-based CAD program. It's a great program for beginners to get started learning about creating designs, in three dimensions, and it has a really short learning curve, so it's easy to start creating designs fast. You'll need to make sure you sign up for a free account, so that you can log in to use the site. I'm going to login and get started. When you sign in for the first time, you'll be prompted by these play these next series, and these are some great step-by-step lessons that are actually included in Tinkercad itself, and they're interactive and a great way to get started using the basics tools. So before you start out with this course you might want to check a couple out just to get the lay of the land. We're going to start by creating a new design, and before we get started we're just going to take a look at what our program has to offer. Go through the work space and the tool bars. So first let's take a look about how we can navigate around the space. On the upper left hand corner here we have some buttons that will change our point of view, or we can zoom in and out. And we can do the same functions with our mouse, in Tinker Ked you use the left-hand mouse button to select tools and select objects. We use the right-hand mouse button to orbit around in space, just click and drag. If you want to pan, you hold down your center mouse wheel, and move side to side. And to zoom you can use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out. At the top we have a toolbar under Design and Edit you have the standard things you'd expect to find, make a new design, save, download, cut, copy, paste. We have a few tools over here that we'll learn to use later in this course. And then on the right-hand side we have this panel that has most of the shapes we're going to use and also, some tools, as well. On the bottom, see this edit grid function, I'm going to click on that and we're going to make sure that our document is all set up right. We want to use millimeters as our units, and I like to set up the grid so that it matches the build plate of my 3D printer. I'm going to use the MakerBot Replicator two here, but if your printer isn't on the list, you can enter the dimensions of your printer here. Update grid, now we're all step up, so let's move on to the next step.

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