Tinkercad For Dummies

Chapter 15

Getting Started with 3D Printing

IN THIS CHAPTER

Making sure you’ve included everything to 3D print

Cleaning up your design

Choosing the type of 3D printing

After you design your nameplate and your skyscraper, you’re ready to take the plunge and dive into the pool of 3D printing. Your Tinkercad design is about to become a real physical thing.

In this chapter, you perform all the checks and balances to make sure that your design can be 3D printed. You also decide what method of 3D printing is the best for your Tinkercad design.

Verifying That You Included Everything

Before you even consider 3D printing, you need to ensure that you have included everything. If you have solid shapes and shapes used as holes and objects that are used for other reasons, you must make sure they’re included in your design.

The easiest way to do this is to make sure that all necessary objects that you want to 3D print are grouped as one object. If you are unfamiliar with grouping, it is covered in a number of the previous chapters.

Using the nameplate design as an example, you may want to 3D print the nameplate baseplate as one object and the nameplate text as another object. Therefore, your nameplate ...