Advice on modeling masks in Tinkercad?

Ask
1

Trying to make some kanohi in Tinkercad, any tips?

I could use some help, @Rothanak !

2 Likes
2

dont

so, though Tinkercad is free and can be run on a browser, its really difficult to actually work with for quality modeling. I can however, give what tips I have picked up over time for various modeling uses:

Use a mouse: pretty simple, but especially for tinkercad, the experience will be drastically easier if you have a mouse instead of a touchpad. dosent have to be a fancy mouse or a 3d one specifically for cad, it just has to be a mouse.

Leave a 0.5mm gap between parts that are meant to go together cleanly: I dont know what the spacing is supposed to be for modeling Lego pieces and masks, but with the advice I’ve gotten and the experience I have in modeling for the Nerf Modding hobby, I can tell you that.

Shrink models and provide scale factor when sharing them: again, I dont know how this applies to the Lego hobby, but it seriously reduces the amount of time you need to wait for files to move/download/upload/ect. Just be sure to share the amount things need to be enlarged by so people can actually make your parts without needing to do tons of trial and error.

It must be stated that number two and three should be taken with a grain of salt since Im talking from the point of veiw of a modeler who works in FRC CAD and modeling for the Nerf Modding hobby, but I understand that most people cant or dont want to get access to the fancier programs.
Either way, good luck on your adventures into CAD, it can be really frustrating at times (cough cough dependencies), but its pretty fun to see things go from your head to paper, and then on to digital designs that can be printed off

5 Likes
3

based on my experience with tinkercad and mask modeling, my only advice is this,
don’t

jokes aside, tinkercad is hardly ideal for mask making imo, and you’d be better off trying to learn blender or something

4 Likes
4

Hmm,

  1. One thing that helped me is studying other kanohi models and chopping them up to make my own new ones at first (the prototype masks) one issue with tinkercad though is that it sometimes corrupts those files.

To avoid this corruption issue, sometimes I wait to combine parts until part designer (for stud.io), where I add the axles and other stuff. Models are less likely to corrupt upon import there. For printing, the axles in part designer are slightly too big, so take .02 studs off of the each dimension. Also models exported from there need to be shrunk to 40% size to be printed.

  1. Another good thing to do is to use the shape generator parts in tinkercad, which often are higher poly that the standard shapes and save a lot of time in making more complex shapes. Favorite the ones you like so they are quicker to access. My favorites to use are the corner fillet, the bean, the pipe, and the trapezoidal prism. They are very common shapes in Bionicle.

In terms of the standard shapes, my most commonly used ones are the cylinder and the sphere. Make sure to max out the number of sides. If you are using the cylinder with the half dome, use 36 sides on the cylinder so that they join together smoothly.

  1. Also learn some of thee hot keys to speed up your modeling and it’s accuracy. One that I use a lot is “d” which drops your shape to the ground plane. There is also the align tool, which is the bar graph looking thing in the toolbar that helps with accuracy.

  2. Import a mata head and a metru head obj from stud.io part designer to model around. For hollowing out my masks I usually copy the main form, or parts of the main form and scale them down by a few units to get a nicer looking inside and uniform thickness. You may have to separate out the different components of the model and shrink them as separate holes to cut out.

  3. I also use blender to smooth out the cuts I make in tinkercad that are too rough sometimes. I don’t model in there though. This is one of the downsides of tinkercad, it is quite difficult to bevel or fillet edges. This is done much more easily in other cad programs, but there is a lot more learning to get there. I have used other programs such as rhino, moi3d, and fusion 360 before, but I stick to tinkercad most of the time because I am much more familiar with the toolset so I can prototype my masks quickly. I would say if you want to make organic looking masks, blender will suit you better. But if you want geometric masks, use some type of CAD. CAD is more clean and accurate.

  4. Another program I use for more angular shapes when I don’t want to cut them out in tinkercad is sketchup. You have to export as a .dae file and convert it online before importing an obj to tinkercad to combine that shape in though.

  5. Finally, this tip is more about visualizing before you even model. You should practice drawing things in 3d and looking at masks to see how their shapes come together. This will make modeling easier since you are able to visualize what shapes you will need to put together to get your model.

6 Likes
5

Yeah, I’m just gonna echo what people say here. You don’t want to model stuff in Tinkercad; Tinkercad is best used for teaching people brand new to CAD how to visualize 3D objects in 2D. It does have its uses, but you won’t be able to make even the simplest of Kanohi. Maybe you could make some of the really simple ones from the Sayger comics like the mask of rebounding, but even then it’d be really pushing tinkercad’s limits.

Now the issue is that I don’t know anything else to recommend you; I mainly work with industrial CAD softwares; you know, Inentor, Solidworks, that sort of thing. I did try to make a Kanohi in Inventor once though, before I knew what Inventor was supposed to be used for, and it was a real challenge.

I can tell you that if you work to learn a CAD software, any CAD software, you’ll have a really rewarding path ahead of you. 3D modeling is incredibly fun and profitable once you get good at it.

Good luck, bro!

2 Likes
6

I don’t think that’s true, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to make any of the mask that I’ve made so far.

3 Likes
7

Thanks man! that is really nice of you!

2 Likes
8

Question. Do you purposefully make them larger than they normally are or do you measure in inches or something. Cause when I upload them they come out to be like 10 times bigger than they’re supposed to be

1 Like
9

That’s just the export from part designer which makes them 250% larger than they should be. I do it this way so that I can add to my studio pack every time I make a new mask. The correct scale for printing is 40%. It’s just difficult to scale down once you’re in part designer and I don’t want to go open another program for scaling when people with 3d printer slicer programs can scale down with the click of a button.

2 Likes
10

I wasn’t getting after you and asking you to fix it. Was just asking why it’s happening.

1 Like
11

I didn’t think you were asking me to fix it, just explaining.

1 Like
12

heh, how was that experience for ya? Inventor is great at what its meant to do, but is incredibly painful for anything else

1 Like
13

Really? Well then you have my respect bro; i like many of your masks. It’s not easy working within Tinkercad.

It took me two months to model. What contributed to the time was that it was the first thing I ever modeled in Inventor (well, I modeled a cube and then the letter “L” before that, but those dr count.) But yeah, I chose to recreate the Mask of Rebounding from the comics; you can see it as my pfp.

2 Likes
14

Yeah, I model almost all of my masks in tinkercad. I don’t find it to be difficult, but that’s probably because I’ve modeled 200+ masks in there at this point. And thanks!

1 Like