Can someone please help with some items designed on Tinkercad?

Hi folks, I'm trying to find a way of increasing the resolution on the models I designed using Tinkercad. I'm mainly interested in addressing curves (pipes and spheres) which are looking a bit too 'blocky' for my liking. Are there any settings in Tinkercad that can help or are there any other applications that I might use to refine the models developed in Tinkercad? Any help would be much appreciated? Many thanks

Hey Nocoolname.

Tinkercad optimizes its models by lowering the tessellation of small curved surfaces. The tessellation, or smoothness increases when pipes and spheres are scaled up.

There is no setting to control this, and I find it somewhat limiting also in certain places. However, depending on the material you intend to print in, much of this "blockyness" goes away. If you want to do something about this, you could let the Autocad Tinkercad team know how this is limiting you and ask them to increase the resolution in curved surfaces. Let me know if you do this, I'll chime in and maybe together we become louder.

I don't know of any tool that could increase the resolution afterwards, but then again I'm a noobie in 3D modelling who does all his designs in Tinkercad. Aah it's so easy and quick.

What you could try is modifying the custom shape generator codes to increase resolution. What it boils down to is finding the parameter or other equation statements that define segmentation. For example, in the custom cylinder code you can find this:

var ndivs = Tess.circleDivisions(Math.max(r1,r2));

which can be changed to something like

var ndivs = 2*Tess.circleDivisions(Math.max(r1,r2));

Don't go too crazy with the resolution improvements though. Tinkercad will choke on too much resolution improvement.. That can manifest itself in slow response times and more grouping errors. Larger resulting file model downloads can become a problem as can transfers to Shapeways. Exports can freeze up, time out, or mysteriously send multiple copies to your Shapeways account. And as pointed out before printer resolutions limit the improvements you would realize so there's no need for excess smoothness.

If you already have designs using the standard un-editable elements you would need to dis-assemble your designs and swap in corresponding editable shape generator elements for the critical elements. You can mix and match the older and custom elements. This is a bottom up type of change. If you want to smooth models after they come out of Tinkercad that would need to be done in a different editor. I have no good experience in that realm.

I don't know all the ins and outs of the custom shapes. I don't know if they end up being global elements or if they become unique within a saved model. If they don't have a basic instruction document there are some posts in their blog about the feature. You can also generate your own custom element codes if you know what you're doing and share them with the Tinkercad community.

Thanks both! I'm a newbie to all of this and naively thought that the printing program would figure that the shapes were meant to be round and would print as such LOL! I also appreciate that the type of material used should help a bit. I'll see about cancelling my current order and trying out the custom shape thing and if that doesn't work I'll try and order a few pieces to begin with to try it out. Cheers for now folks!

If that doesn't works you could also download Blender (freeware) and use the Multiresolution tool, it works pretty well by subdividing models.

However we don't know how it works with models from tinkercad, if the faces you see are all or mostly quads (rectangular) it should work perfectly without leaving strange looking artefacts.



You can also use blender to make your model look more blocky :

When you have a base mesh with a lot of vertices you can decrease the amount by using the tool Decimate.

Another bonus :

When you have a low polygon model (a model with a blocky look) you can easily make a wire frame from that !

Go into edit mode, hit space, type in "wire frame", adjust the thickness of the wires, go into object mode and use the multiresolution tool to make the wires look round.

There are a lot of great tutorials on youtube about all the functions blender offers and it's fairly easy to get the hang of.

Hi folks!

Thank you so much for the help and advice. I tried the custom shapes option in Tinkercad and that 'seems' to have worked well on the settings you suggest. Although it's meant recreating my models that's no big deal. I've recreated one of the bigger parts and it certainly looked so much better on the viewer. I've sent it off for a test print to see how it looks and I've had an email from Shapeways saying it's currently in production so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I've started work on the other parts and I'm 70% there. Unfortunately Tinkercad is down for maintenance so I might give the Blender option a go on some of the previous files. I tried Blender recently and must say was pretty daunted after only using Tinkercad but will give it another shot. Once again, many thanks to you all!

Working "in the cloud" can definitely have its own set of problems!

Indeed! If I can find a CAD program to purchase that runs off my local machine and that's as easy and intuitive as Tinkercad then I'll be a lot happier.

Blender - it's free! (Although in reference to the earlier post, I would use SubSurf Modifier instead of MultiRes - it's a bit easier to use imo.)


Maybe not Blender, then. But there are plenty of resources on-line to help learn it, and it can be very powerful.