Tinkercad is free 3D design software.
CAD stands for Computer Aided Drafting. It used to take a lot of training to do CAD and CAD software used to cost too much for the average person to afford. But now anybody has access to free CAD software and it is much easier to use.
Learning one CAD package really well will help you adjust to other CAD programs as they are all very similar. "Industrial" CAD software is more powerful than the free ones but it is easy to transition.
Go to Tinkercad and Sign up so that your designs are saved:
Basic Concepts:
Axis: (informal definition) a line in 3D space that defines one of 3 different directions (length, width, and height). The common convention for the 3 axis is X,Y, and Z.
Coordinate space is when look at all 3 axis from a 3d perspective and consider how objects might exist in that space.
The point in which X, Y and Z connect is called the Origin. The value of X,Y, and Z at the Origin is zero.
Lets say I had a box that was 10cm long, 5cm wide and 2cm high.
I could say that starting at the origin, the box goes along X by 10 units, Y by 5 units and its Z value is 2. (X =length, Y = width, Z = height).
Note that this is a simplistic way of looking at it, and in later years this will be more formal, but for the purpose of understanding Tinkercad, this is enough.
A good way of remembering which way the positive sides are for each axis is to take your right hand and form a "gun" with your thumb and pointy finger. These are the X and Y axis. Now lift you middle finger so it points perpendicular to the pointy finger. This is Z. All fingers are pointing in the positive direction for each axis. This is known as the Right Hand Rule for Unit Vectors.
Workplane:
The workplane is the blue grid space that shows up underneath anything you drag on the screen.
It can be seen as the "working base" and it can be moved and reoriented so that it is along the X,Y or Z axis. You can also align it with specific objects already on the screen.
Moving the workplane is important because it controls which way is "up" or the z direction of objects that you may place on it. So if you want your roof pointing to the sky, your workplane better be horizontal. If you want the tip of your airplane to be pointy with a cone shape, your workplane better be flat along the forward edge of the plane!
w = shortcut to adjust workplane
Grouping
Grouping is a tool to merge two solid objects together.
Hold down the shift-key then click on all the objects you want to group together (multiple select).
Then click on the Group button on the upper left to merge them together.
Note the Pyramid and Cube and different colors before grouping. I have shift-clicked both objects to select them before clicking on Group.
Now that the objects are grouped, they share the same color and look like one object:
Snap:
Snap controls how far something can move so that you can align them.
For instance, a snap of 1.0, make sure that you move something 1.0 units at a time so that you can make a shape that is 10.0 units long instead of 9.99. It makes it A LOT easier to use the mouse.
The snap grid control is at the bottom right. This is the unit range that it will move your pieces to. So you can make something 9.0 long, but not 9.1, 9.2, 8.9. It must move it to a number that is a multiple of 1.0.
Snap grid is located at the bottom right of the screen:
To change the Snap grid click on the dropdown and you will see the options.
You can turn it completely off if you want but this will make it hard to be precise.
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Scale and Edit Geometric Shapes
When you select an object, it will display several points that can be used for editing.
White Dots: 5 white dots are used to control the scaling of the X and Y axis dimensions of the box (length and width) or the Z axis dimension (height). Click on a white box will also give you the dimensions of the edges that can be adjusted.
Black Dots: There are 4 black dots and a Black arrow pointing up.
The black dots can control the size of that specific edge of the shape.
The black arrow pointing up controls the height of the object (z-axis).
There are 3 rotational arrows that appear (you have to rotate the shape to see them all so one is not shown here). Clicking on these will rotate the box along a specific axis.
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Tinkercad Keyboard Shortcuts: You may find this list useful in the future:
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