TinkerCad - Usable, but not great

Tinker Cad Free Version

TinkerCAD is perhaps the most popular free 3d modelling software around.
Its web based, & thats perhaps the main advantage.
Its not free as in open source style, its just 'free' enough for you to get into it.
There is a free trial, & a pro version.

This free version makes all your work publicly visible. This isnt too bad, just dont name the file something useful if you dont want people actively looking at it. Thankfully all rights stay with the creator so thats good.

Its all hunky dory when you are dropping some of the ready made shapes around & manipulating or exporting them into .stl files for you to 3d print, but you try to get creative with it & TinkerCad will tolerate you for a while but ultimately shit itself.

Its very slow once the design goes past the basics. No its not my hardware, my Radeon HD 6630 happily manipulated & rendered 3ds Max files.
Tinkercad literally re-renders the whole scene in front of you, every single basic shape, & thats where it often has a minor crash.

Here is what these crashes & model corruptions look like:

In terms of modelling functions, frankly, there arent any.

The only thing you can do to the ready made objects besides the simple resizing/rotating/moving is to use them like dye's to cut other objects. They refer to these as holes.

In 3d speak its basically cutting the mesh of the parent object by the intersecting area of the child object that youve positioned as overlap. Thats the entire philosophy of modelling in the free version.
I cant comment on the paid version, if it improves I dont know.

I was making a very simple design, purely geometric, but it had some curves in it.
Now if you have a rectangle, & god forbid you want to curve it a little so its a bit like a banana, then youre pretty much screwed. I got around with by using predefined shapes & then cutting them out.
There is no smoothing filter, or any mesh modifier. No way to join adjascent faces, or cut them.

Its basically 3d for people who have never touched a 3d program before.

For this target audience who are focused on using the 3d printer & making simple stuff rather than precision models, tinkercad is more than adequate, especially being a free product.

Using it is like writing with pencil, except your'e not writing with the lead, you're just scratching lead  randomly & then using the eraser to actually write in what you want!

After a few of these 'holes' are cut, the whole thing starts getting corrupted & the model looks like all the parts you ever used suddenly got dumped there.
Its extremely frustrating as it starts breaking things & changing shapes that you didn't modify.

The examples make it look all awesome, sexy & powerful. Its not.
If geometric right angles shapes is what you want, yup all good, try to add some elegance, tough luck.
The built-in cylindrical & spherical objects are fine, but its creating your own curved objects thats the problem.

Now as you can imagine, the internal complexities of the model which are just nothing but multiple model cross sections being activated or hidden etc impose such constraints that the model becomes un-editable with slow performance.

You try to make any change, or even rotate the view & it will error & crash.

Also, for some stupid reason, any change automatically leads to a save, which is silly, as that takes too long, & even a simple undo will take forever.

And the undo function doesnt even work sometimes when the model starts to get more detailed.

You can actually see it quickly recreate every single object youve dropped or cut in the model before it re-renders the view for you, & thats after every little change. Its nasty.

My design is almost complete, but I cant add the last few details, as it keeps on crashing!

An error shows up asking you to contact support, & thats just as annoying because it happens after every single click.

Thankfully, their support emailed me back promptly, so thats a good start.

Lets hope they get the issue investigated & resolved soon, which will be a good judge of their capability.
My speculation is that this wont be fixed too soon given the nature of how its related to their root design philosophy, usually you cant change those things that quickly.

Yesterday I got an email from them saying they have noted the issue but dont have a fix for it yet. Good on them for replying back, but as expected, no surprises there with not having a fix.

I will work on this & finish my model, & then, stay away from it for creations that require extensive manipulation of their basic steps.

TinkerCad is handy for cleaning up stl models which have holes etc

Youll often be in a situation where something you made looks fine to the eye but the 3d printing software will mourn about it not being a complete solid model etc.

Since tinkercad was designed for 3d printing as the target audience, it lets you import stl files & will automatically clean them us & 'solidify' them, within reason.

You can then export those stl files back out & your printer program will mostly accept them!

This is brilliant, & is perhaps worth sticking around with tinkercad for such simple manipulation.

Have a read of my UP! printer software tips here for details