• Notice the blue plane at the centre of the image (marked 1). This plane is known as the work plane. We will do all our designing on this work plane; it also is imagined as a 3D printer bed.
• Notice the panel with geometric shapes on the right (marked 2). This panel contains the basic building blocks for everything we will design. There are many more shapes as we click on.
• Notice the menu items on the top bar (marked 3). We will use these menu items to perform important operations like Group, Ungroup, Align & Mirror.
• Notice the menu items on the top bar (marked 4). We will use these  for Copying, Duplicating, Deleting, Undo & Redo.
• Finally, right-click and drag your mouse to change the 3D perspective.

Learning the interface

• Notice the blue plane at the centre of the image (marked 1). This plane is known as the work plane. We will do all our designing on this work plane; it also is imagined as a 3D printer bed.

• Notice the panel with geometric shapes on the right (marked 2). This panel contains the basic building blocks for everything we will design. There are many more shapes as we click on.

• Notice the menu items on the top bar (marked 3). We will use these menu items to perform important operations like Group, Ungroup, Align & Mirror.

• Notice the menu items on the top bar (marked 4). We will use these  for Copying, Duplicating, Deleting, Undo & Redo.

• Finally, right-click and drag your mouse to change the 3D perspective.

.

Navigating the Tinkercad

Tinkercad is a 3d software, where we can view our design in 360 degrees. This navigation option gives us a free hand to design into any view we desire..

This is same as our Ludo dice(i), as it also has six sides, which are called as (Front view, Back view, Right view, Left view, Top view, Bottom view) and with the help of our mouse we can set and rotate our design into any desired view we want. This will give us the angle to look at our design and make the required changes accordingly.

In the second image (ii) there are four options as;

Home view: Click onto this icon to bring back the design in normal view as we get in the beginning.

Fit to view shape: By clicking on this icon we can directly view only selected shape to fit the screen.

Zoom in: As we can use scroll up button or this icon (+), we get a closer view of our designs.

Zoom out: We can use scroll down the button or this icon (-), the design seems to be smaller & farther away.

Understanding orthographic & perspective view

There are two different views, one is the orthographic view and another is a perspective view. we can find the button to toggle between these views at the bottom of the navigation buttons.

For better understanding Let’s place a box near the front of the work plane and a cylinder towards the back of the work plane. This way we can compare these two views. Now keep a perspective view on and Objects that are further away are smaller and the edges of shapes recede to a vanishing point far in the distance.

So now switch to an orthographic view, did you notice the difference? The sides of the box are all the same length. The box and the cylinder are the same sizes, even though the cylinder is further away. So, I usually prefer to stay in perspective mode. while I’m working in Tinkercad, but there are few exceptions. So, one of those is working in any flat view like front or side. A lot of times, when I use a view like this, it’s to judge distance or proportion of objects and perspective view just isn’t that helpful but in an orthographic view, there you can see much better.

.

Setting up the Grid

We will find Grid setting in the lower right-hand corner of your workspace. Click on Edit Grid, we can change a few settings for our grid. The first is the units, either millimetres or inches. Millimetres are the most common choice for 3D printing files. So, usually, you’ll be working with small measurements and it’s easier to deal with millimetres than fractions of an inch. Even if the metric system is unfamiliar to you, I’d encourage you to try the metric system in Tinkercad and we’ll be using millimetres for this course.

We can change the width and the height of the Work plane as select custom in presets option. We will be changing is according to 3D Printer we are working on as for ARYA UNO+ we will be setting up width-180mm & length-180mm and for ARYA PRO width-220mm & length-220mm.

.