3-D Printed Board Game Piece

Since my game was about a child trying to get out of the house and catch the bus on time, I decided to do a child for my piece. And, since I’m new to Tinkercad, I decided to do a cartoonish child. I did my best to construct the child out of the shapes. I had the idea to make the child look like he was running, but I was worried about the complexity of the form, and my ability to create it as a new user, and whether it would be stable. To avoid just placing the character on a circle base, I tried making the feet big enough to support the stability of the piece.

Next, I wanted to make sure the piece wasn’t too big or too small. I know I needed the base to be about half an inch, so I looked up what that was in millimeters and saw 12.7, so I figured 10 mm would be good. As I did the tutorials, and I began creating a human out of shapes, I decided to start bigger and hopefully I’ll be able to shrink the entire piece when done. The final size of my original large piece was 40 mm by 60 mm by 87 mm tall. Also, due to a technical issue, I had to start over when I had to switch computers. I had left the hands as the last aspect of the character the first time, and they were the challenge when I created the piece the second time. I thought about making them as just spheres, but I decided to challenge myself to make them a little like a Lego character’s hands. That said, I debated about shrinking the piece because I think it might make the thumbs and hands too small/fragile. But, for the sake of my board game, and my own curiosity about how it will turn out (learning by failing, maybe!) I shrank the piece to 11 mm by 16 mm by 23 mm tall.

In Adobe’s apps, I’m used to holding down the space bar while I click and drag with the mouse to move the art field or background around so that I can center what I’m working on within the visual work area. Matt referenced this as panning, so I was hoping that I had missed something, but when I went back to Tinkercad, holding down the space bar did not allow me to pan. This was a little frustrating, but I eventually got used to clicking on the home icon whenever I was too far in a corner of the work area and wanted to refresh the view to a more visually workable point.

As I built my piece from the baseline plane, I often had trouble with the three-dimensional aspect of the work. I would vertically raise a piece, visually, while placing or moving it, but because of the 3-D nature, this would just move the piece to the back of the baseline grid, not raise it vertically.  Time and again, I would have to stop, undue my move, and remember to click on the vertical black arrow at the top of the piece to properly raise a piece higher up. I also remembered from the tutorials, that if I had a piece selected, the “cruise” feature would place the new shape on top of that selected piece. This was helpful, except when my pieces were curved on top, like my character’s feet. This resulted in shapes coming in at angles if I didn’t place the shape perfectly, and then that affected the following piece on top of it. For example, while I intended to have the legs angled in toward the center, I did not want the shorts on top of the legs to be at an angle.

I left my piece in the colors I would prefer it to be produced in (ideally), but I am also willing to group the entire piece so that it can be printed in one color for speed and cost consideration. Overall, I really enjoyed learning a new program for creating artifacts!