 Hi, my name is Max Offsa. I work here at the 3D Design Studio in Newman Library on Virginia Tech's campus. We offer free 3D printing to patrons of the library and any community members as well. You also can find 3D printing at our various branch libraries, both here in Blacksburg and across the state. The type of 3D printing we typically do here in the library is FDM printing or Fuse Deposition Modeling that usually takes into account an extruding process where we take our 3D model and lay it down layer after layer until we have a full piece printed. You could use sinistration to melt powdered-based plastics with a laser layer by layer until you get a full model. There's also SLA printing where it uses resin as well as UV light lasers to do a similar process. FDM printing and SLA printing is what we have available here in the library. So how do we use 3D printing? Some of the ways you might use it are for your personal projects. You might use it for your academic projects in your class. You may use it for ways to enhance your workspace or your environment at home. You might even use it to make business items, things you might sell or create for others to help them in their endeavors. You can also use it as a teaching tool. You can teach design processes. You could teach by making learning objects that might be hard to come by and represent what you are trying to instruct. You could also use it in art projects. Maybe a sculpture that is something that you might not be able to make by hand, but you can make digitally. You could use it to construct pieces inside of a bigger exhibit that might need special stays or architectural pieces that aren't necessarily available conventionally, but you could make them in 3D print them elsewhere. Let's talk about some 3D printing terminology. So the first thing you need to do any 3D printing is a model. What we need mean by a model is a digital object that we can represent in our digital space and give to our printer. This model can be made many ways. It could be made by yourself in a computer aided drafting program, CAD program, or any number of other types of object rendering programs. The second thing we need is a slicer. Now our slicer is not exactly a model rendering program, as much as it is a thing to take our model and slice it into thin layers that our machine can then take to print. So each of those layers that come out of our slicer are going to be the XY coordinates that our machine needs to be able to lay down filament. Once it lays down that filament, it's going to lay it on top of each other until we get back to our model. So at this point you've got most of the digital side of what we need for our terminology. Model into slicer, slicer to machine. Now where that model is going to be deposited is on the build plate of our printer. The build plate is the physical area on our printer where our model will be built. Its size is what determines how big your model can be. If you have a small build plate, you can only make small models. If you have a big build plate, you can make very big models. It's really just the surface that your models adhere to when they get printed. Next we'll talk about our extruder, which is where our model actually gets deposited from. You can think of your extruder kind of like a hot glue gun. It's really taking our solid matter and heating it up to about 200 degrees Celsius, maybe even up to 230 or 40 Celsius, and getting it molten hot. At that point it's extruded onto our build plate. What we're heating up is our filament. Now the filament is the actual plastic that's fed into the extruder. That's going to be the material that your model is made out of. Most filaments that we use look kind of like a weed eater wire. It's a thin plastic, fairly flexible. Now that stays solid all the way down to the very tip of the extruder. It goes molten liquid right at that point. After it gets laid down, it cools down pretty quickly, almost cool enough to touch so that it can become a solid model. Now what it's going to be laying down with our filament is a layer. Every layer is going to be prescribed as a certain height. That height, which is defined in our slicer, is really the fidelity of your model or really the resolution of your model. So if you set a really small layer height, you're going to have lots and lots and lots of layers to make up your model. If you set a very tall layer height, you're going to have fewer layers and thus a little more of a rough model. You'll be able to feel the layers if you run your fingers across it. Now last we'll talk about really the only other three terms that you need that are essential to talking about 3D printing. So after you've taken your filament, fed it into your extruder, put it onto your build plate, you're actually going to be designing or laying down a model at this point. So the way our printer likes to lay down models is by shell first, which would be the perimeter of the outside of your model. And then infill, which will be whatever is inside your model. Most 3D printed models are not 100% solid. If you pick up a model, you'll feel it's kind of light, lighter than you expected. That's because most 3D models aren't actually solid. They have an infill pattern of some kind. And it can be really any repeating shape or pattern. A lot of times we use squares. Sometimes we use like a honeycomb pattern. You can even use MC Escher's cat faces as a repeating pattern, as long as it can be replicated across the whole face. Other than that, you want to know how to get your model to stick to your build plate. And sometimes models don't want to stick by themselves. So the last term we'll talk about are rafts and brims. A raft is kind of what it sounds like. It's a little piece of plastic for your model to stick to that'll stick to your build plate. A brim is similar, but really it's just going to make a lot of extra outlines of your very first layer of your print. And that's going to help from the model from peeling or warping up off of the build plate. So with all those terms, you have kind of a basic working knowledge of how to talk about 3D printing and what steps it's going through. And what you're going to see in your prints. Now that we have some working terminology to talk about 3D printing, let's talk about how we design our 3D prints. So we talked about brims and rafts. So really that deals with a thing called platform adhesion. And what that is, is how we keep our model from warping or peeling off of our build plate while it's printing. As you might imagine, there's a lot of forces that build up with the printer moving over top of our model and pulling it from left to right. Backwards and forwards as the tool moves. This can cause the model actually to pull away from the build plate and it'll fail. You'll get a whole mess of 3D printing material all over the place. And so when we want to design our 3D print with platform adhesion in mind, sometimes we just want to try to make sure there's a very large flat area for our print to be able to use as a place to stick to the build plate. So if you have maybe a spherical item, you might want to think about making a flat side to it if possible. Or maybe cutting it in half so you have the entire middle circumference and area to use as an area for platform adhesion. And then glue those two pieces together later and then do some post work to finish it off. Another structural design sometimes we have to take into account is how our infills are actually going to make our model stronger or weaker. You might need a piece that has to be close to solid to really hold up to maybe forces that would act on it if you're using it for a mechanical project or something that's going to hold weight. So you would think about making things not too thin to have zero infill or not too thick to be more or less solid. In 3D printing typically we found that you don't really get too much more strength out of your infill patterns once you hit about 50% or 60% infill. At that point the material is probably going to yield or break even if it had been solid. You actually gain some ductility and flexibility from your print by not having it be solid but still have kind of the impact strength you would typically get. So our infill patterns, while it might be something that you want to have a certain structure to, squares, rectilinear squares or honeycombs or something like that, for the most part it doesn't matter too much what that pattern is but it does matter how much of it you put in there. So typically in the studio we run a 20% infill meaning only about 20% of our model is actually solid. But if you need something for more strength you might ask to have that be a larger number, 50% or 60% like I was saying. Something we have to design for as well are overhangs. So in the digital realm we don't have to worry about things like gravity messing with our models but in real life we definitely do. And so an overhang is any space that would be hanging just out into the air over top of our build plate with nothing underneath it. When our model gets to that height and our extruder is trying to path out to that overhang in real life gravity is going to pull all that filament down and it's just going to fall so you'll have a very large drooping area. Now we can add in with our slicing engine support material which is kind of like a scaffold that would build up to our model and have a little platform for that overhang to build on but ideally you don't want to do that. You get a very rough edge and sometimes those scaffolds are fragile and they're easy to fall off of our build plate. So when you do design try to design with the idea that everything can be built on an angle. An angle is kind of something that would stair step and self-support. Another self-supporting structure for overhangs is domes. So a dome outward would self-support from the inside but a dome cut into an object would actually stair step itself all the way to the top and you wouldn't actually have to have an infill pattern. So if you can cut rounded holes through your objects they'll actually self-support and you won't have to worry about having a support structure inside. And that leads kind of to the last thing we really designed for which is bridging. And bridging is whenever you have to take material from one support structure to another like a bridge. So if you had say a C-shaped object and the two ends of the C were on the build plate you'd have that middle bridged area. Now a C is normally a dome but we're thinking more of a three-paneled piece like you see here. So that object would build up till the two pillars are built and then whenever it needed to start going over back and forth that bridged area you would have a little droop in the middle. And that's kind of like an overhang but it's different because it's going to meet other parts of your 3D print. Some machines with proper settings can make a bridge work. Most machines want to only bridge maybe an inch or a little less of distance before they'll start getting a really bad droop. So you can think about it in your model if maybe you want to have those pieces be oriented a different way on your build plate when you try to print them so that the bridges don't have to happen. They can just move upward and build with the model layer by layer. But if you do have to have bridges think about maybe adding some support material in the center so that the bridge is not quite as long and you get less drooping and less defects on your print. Hi everybody we're going to go over a quick tutorial for Tinker Cat. So what you'll need at your disposal is a computer with internet connection and a browser. And that's about it. So when you start you're going to log into Tinker Cat and you do that by clicking sign in here in the top right corner of the screen. If you already have an account with Autodesk you'll just use that sign in otherwise you'll create a new account. It's free just requires an email address. So in our first block here we'll just type in our email address. And then in the second block here password. If you know how to type your password. And then you're in. From here we'll go to create new design. Your page will probably blank and not have anything on it. So you just click this blue box which will be basically the only thing available to you. And then we'll hit the ground running. Alright so before we get into Tinker Cat we need to address some of the things that are on our screen here. Tinker Cat is a visual based CAD software. So it's kind of a middle step between a typical CAD software. CAD being computer aided drafting or computer aided design depending on who you're talking to. Most bigger programs want you to do a few more steps before you get to the step that Tinker Cat has you at. But what the nice thing about Tinker Cat is you can relate it kind of one to one with how you might build with Legos or building blocks. A lot of people are fans of the video game Minecraft and that's a pretty good one to one analogy with how you might make in Tinker Cat. So the headspace we want to be in right now is building with Legos building with blocks. Say I gave you 10 Lego blocks and told you to make a dinosaur. You would make a very very non detailed maybe outline of a dinosaur right? If I gave you 100 blocks that would get a little more detailed but it would get bigger. And so where Tinker Cat kind of comes in is you have the super power to make infinite blocks. So at that point you could set there in stack blocks and stack blocks until you had the most detailed version of a dinosaur you could make just by stacking blocks. It would be a huge object but since we're in the digital space it doesn't really matter because we have infinite void to deal with in our digital space. Now if you try to import that to a 3D printer you might run into some problems. However we want to be thinking about how to build with blocks the way we would go about stacking and grouping and combining in that way. And so on our screen here I'm going to show kind of iterations of design. So if we're going to make a dinosaur we might start with our 2D dinosaur over here and we'll zoom in on him. So he's very flat and single kind of pixelated guy. Our 2D dinosaur here is a little more extruded. He's got a little more depth to him. He's a bit bigger. Our 3rd iteration's got some more detail. He's got teeth, he's got eyes, he's got little hands, he's got spikes on his back. And then our 4th iteration with a lot more work. He's very smooth, he's rounded, he's got cool features. He kind of looks like a god's little monster at that point. So the more time you spend with these softwares the closer you can get to a more detailed object. Alright so let's go over our basic tools in Tinkercad. We'll go back to our space that's blank. You should have this screen that says work plane in the bottom here and it's kind of like a blue square. So your work plane is the space in which you will drag all shapes from our toolbar over here of basic shapes. Before we start dragging shapes in let's go over our viewport and what we're looking at. So on our left side of the screen here we have the view cube and it is labeled on each side what dimension you're looking at. The top, the front, the bottom, left, right and you can just click on it to reorient the space kind of like I'm doing here. The next button here is the home button. It will take you back to this base screen that we started at. It won't erase anything but it will zoom out or zoom in your viewport so that you fill the screen with just your work plane. The second button is for when you actually have an object. It is the fit view. You can type command F which is just F on your keyboard. Anything you have selected on your work plane and then you type this button it will zoom in on that object. So if I drag a box in and I have it selected you can see the anchor points around it and then I click the fit view. It will fill the screen with our object here. We'll go back to the home and zoom back out. The plus and minus buttons are the typical zoom in, zoom out and depending on the computer you're on that might be the mouse wheel roll in and out. Or if you're on a laptop with a trackpad the typical pinch and pull functions do the same thing. This last button is not one I usually recommend. It switches you between a flat view, an orthogonal view and a perspective view. So as you can see here I switch to the orthogonal view and everything looks very flat and it's geometrically sometimes easier to look at your object this way. But for spatial reasoning purposes perspective is much better. It actually gives you this kind of vanishing point. It makes it look more like you're looking into a 3D window instead of a technical drawing. Alright so now that we have our navigation tools aware of what they're going to do. If we get lost, if we zoom way out and our object's really tiny and we zoom way in and our object's huge we know how to get back to safety now. Alright so let's make our first object and typically our first object is bringing in a cube just like we did earlier. So you click on it, hold your left mouse click while you're clicked on it and drag it to anywhere you want on the plane. And this at this point is a 3D object. This is a 20mm by 20mm cube. This is a 3D printable object. That's why Tiggercat is a great first step because you didn't have to go through all the steps of making every side and panel of this object. You were just immediately able to pull in a 3D object. Like we were talking earlier if you wanted to make a dinosaur from this you could just keep dragging and positioning just by click dragging these blocks until you got a dinosaur shape or whatever shape you're going for for whatever project. And so as you can see on the screen here what I'm doing I'm overlapping pieces and it doesn't really matter because there's no real physicality to these pieces. These are digital blocks. They can be pressed inside of each other and you can even add them to each other to make a new shape or you can subtract them away from each other to make other new shapes. And so those are really the other two kind of superpowers that Tiggercat gives you for block building is infinite blocks and then the ability to add a strip tract any shape from another shape to make a wholly new shapes. The only kind of bad thing about Tiggercat is if you get too used to this you might have a harder time with typical CAD softwares where you don't have base 3D shapes. You actually have to draw your base shape and extrude it into a 3D shape. But that's not what we're going over today. So we'll finish making our very rough like 20 block dinosaur here and you can see I've got like a little nose, a little mouth. These kind of rough but you can select all these blocks. Click drag selects everything on your screen. So I've selected 16 shapes here. It's always good to look up here in the shapes corner to see what number of shapes you have and kind of how many you wanted to get. It looks like I brought in about 15 blocks. So I guess it was 16 apparently. And so I want to show you one of the these tools up here. It's called the group tool or control G and this will combine any shapes you have on the screen. So when I hit this it's going to make this into one big block and you see all the lines disappeared from the individual blocks. Now this is one shape that when I scooted around it moves in unison because it's now a new singular shape made up of all the blocks we pulled in. So I'm going to fit this back into view. So it's very rough looking. He's got a little eye here. You know, so he's got some features. So let's go over some of our other tools. Workplane is again the place where you're going to bring in your objects. Now you can change where your work plane is and it's very useful to do so. So the work plane button is up here in the top right where you can type W and it's going to give you this little block panel. And if we zoom in and look at it, it actually has a little cone and the cone is pointing what direction is up on our planes or on our plane. So I can make my work plane the top of my dinosaur. I could make it the chin here. I could make it the nose anywhere. I type W and then click and you can see as this plane changes shape as it goes over different surfaces up is now a new direction. And so what doing a new work plane really does for you is when you drag in a new shape, it's at an elevation that you find useful. So I'm going to bring in this roof triangle piece and you can see I brought it on top of my dinosaur here. And so if I typically did that without changing my work plane, it would have come in underneath the dinosaur. So you can see he's in the wrong position. So if you want to put things on top of each other and you don't want to try to manually move them through space because in the digital space, it gets kind of rough finding elevation such you would just type work plane, click on the surface. You want to place your object and then start bringing objects in from there. So this was going to serve as an arm. And so now it's kind of a blocky arm. It's not quite scaled correctly. So what we're going to do is we're going to scale it. You can click on any of these white blocks, which are called anchors. And those anchors are for skewing the object in whatever direction you end up clicking and pulling on it. So as long as you click on it, hold your click and then pull it in a direction. It will scale it however you want. It will also scale linearly, meaning it will keep all of its height and width and shape the way you want it by holding Shift while you drag it and it will instead of skew it in one dimension, scale it all linearly together. Alright, so let's make this a little skinnier, a little longer. And now we can see these little arrows on the side that I'm highlighting. So there's three axes to our object here. We got an X, a Y, and a Z. So I'm going to rotate this around our Z axis. And so all you have to do is click on our arrows there and drag it. And you can see there's a little degree radial marker. You drag it to whatever degree you want it to. I want it to look, let's see, about 60 degrees off. So I'm giving it a little slant. So now it's kind of a little arm coming off our dinosaur man. Really you can make anything here. Typically the Tinkercad tutorial, if you want to look at those, they have excellent tutorials as well. They go in more depth in other parts of the tools. They have you build a house out of the roof tool and the block tool. I just like making a dinosaur better. So now that we've rotated, we've scaled, we've brought in multiple objects. Let's do Subtract. So earlier we joined all these red blocks together. That is a group command. You can also group a different type of shape here. And what I'm highlighting here on the mouse is solid, which is what all these objects are right now. You can inversely change these to whole, which you can kind of think of as like negative matter. So anything that is combined with a whole piece will subtract away everywhere the whole was. So in this case, we're going to give this guy a mouth. So we're going to scale this whole block so that it's kind of skinny and long. We're going to put it where we would put a mouth. So I'm going to put this over his mouth. And I'm going to overextend it a little bit because it doesn't matter if the hole is outside of our area of interest. Because once we join it, it's just going to disappear. Subtracting matter from where there isn't matter, it's not going to do anything. So you can see it kind of looks like a dinosaur with a sandwich in its mouth right now. So we're going to group these two, the hole plus the dinosaur shape. And there we go. It cut a little slot where his mouth was. He looks kind of like an alien dinosaur. I always do this different every time, so it always looks a little different every time. So I'm going to change my work plan again as we've already done. We're going to give him a few teeth. What do you think teeth would be? Cones or roofs, use whichever one you like the best. Maybe he has rounded teeth. You could have little sphere teeth. I'm going to do a cone. Yeah, that's a big tooth. So we're going to hold shift, hold on an anchor, scale it down a little bit. And because we're in 3D space, it is a little difficult to see where he is. So we have to play with our views. That's why we learned them first. All right, so there's a tooth. That looks pretty good. Feel a little like Bob Ross. There's a happy little tooth right there. All right, so you can also use typical copy and paste commands. These are up here in the corner. You can make copies, duplicate is what it calls it. But yeah, control C, control V will copy a piece. Or you can click those buttons I just showed you. If you ever mess up, there is an undo tool. It's control Z or literally this undo button. So if you put something in a weird place, you subtract the thing you didn't want to. You can always click undo and go back to the original. And something we haven't really talked about yet, but this is saving your progress every time you bring something in. So it's live saving to a cloud server that Autodesk runs. So there's no saving, there's no worrying about saving. So if this crashes on you in midway, you should be fine. It should be saving everything as you go. So let's add, finish adding our teeth here. We've got two fangs. That's pretty good. We'll just have the two fangs. Heal needs front teeth. There we go. I think we need a better eye though. We guys think bring the work plane up here. Let's put our half sphere. All right, look at that eye. Nice bug eye. This is going to be interesting dude. What do you think? He's almost more alien than Dinosaur right now. Hopefully yours comes out pretty cool. We get to see it in the studio. All right. So this is the basics of making an object. At this point, you can subtract things. You can add things. You can scale things. You can move them just by clicking and dragging. You learned how to move this cube here. You can just click and drag on that to do a crazy orbit as well. If you guys didn't know how I was doing my orbit, I usually just right click anywhere and hold down and it'll do this kind of freeform orbit. But it doesn't always work that well. So things you might be noticing about the software that have been causing you problems that people don't usually identify. There's a button down here called snap grid. So what that's doing is every time you bring an object in, you might notice there's some kind of clunkiness to moving it around. The snap grid is holding your objects movements to whatever that number is. So right now it's at the one millimeter on mine. If you click this dropdown, you can change it to something to like five millimeters. So it's even clunkier, but it's only moving your objects in five millimeters X, Y, or Z. You can actually just turn it off completely so that everything you move is just by your touch. So if you feel like you're really precise and you really need that fine-tuned movement, you can turn that off entirely and it will be less clunky. So it's a little helpful hint for when you're making your own objects. You can also change this grid from millimeters to inches. You also do it to bricks. This is fully integrated with Lego. So you can actually Legoize any of your objects and then print Lego blocks or actually ship it to the Lego website and they will send you all the bricks your object is made out of. So it's an interesting feature they do. You can also make your build plate in this, your work plane bigger. So this is just at 200 millimeters by 200 millimeters. And then you hit update grid and it changes it to whatever you change it to. Some people work better at inches. Typically in the 3D Design Studio and in 3D Printing General, we use metrics, so we use millimeters. And I guess the only other thing we want to go over is how do you tell how big any of this stuff is. In digital space, this could be 20 feet tall. We have no idea. But there's a ruler tool and that'll tell us what to do. So you can just click this, click anywhere on the page and when you click an object, it'll tell you what size it is. So our dinosaur is 105 millimeters by 93 millimeters. If you ever want to scale it by those dimensions, you can literally just click on the dimension you want to change and type in a number. Maybe I want him to be 110, 120 millimeters and that'll make him a little bit taller. So if you know, kind of like maybe this needs to be a specialty piece that's precision made, it's got to hold all your SD cards and you measured your SD cards to be 10 millimeters wide. You can make it exactly 10 millimeters wide. However, I will warn that when you 3D Print, you want to make all of your objects either a little bigger or a little smaller than the thing you measured because thermoplastics typically expand after you print them. So if you make holes, you can make them a little bit bigger. If you make pegs, like things that need to fit into a hole, you can make them a little bit smaller because that plastic is going to expand a little bit and close up your holes and expand your pegs and poles and stuff like that. So if you want to pull new models in or take models out, export will export whatever you have selected. Right now, since I didn't have anything selected, it says, do you want to export everything in design? However, if you just click on individual piece and say export, it's just going to export the piece I selected. So in this case, it's just exporting this red piece. And if we hide these other two pieces, you'll see what that looks like. You can do this light bulb and make them go invisible. So this is just right now only doing this red piece, which means that's not our whole design. So make sure you select everything in your design if you didn't group it before you export. For us, you technically can bring in OBJs, though the way Tinkercad exports OBJs, it gives you a material texture file, which you won't need for 3D printing. So we always suggest exporting .stls. And then for importing, if you had a model you wanted to import, you would click import here, and then you would choose the location of the file. And as long as it's small enough to be loaded, which the file sizes are listed right here, 25 megabytes, it should load into Tinkercad. And you can edit it with all the same tools that you used to create an original model. If you have more questions or ideas or things that you need consultations with, feel free to contact the 3D Design Studio at our website.