Tinkercad
My boys asked me to 3D print some models from Half Life 2 but for some odd reason (licensing, likely), there were scarcely any to be found in the usual model repositories. A few people had painstakingly remodeled, printed, and hand painted some of the main characters with intricate detail but didn’t make them available for others. We were looking specifically for a Strider and almost gave up until we came across this Combine Strider in Tinkercad with a very unique style. Unlike the super detailed meant-for-a-display-case models that others had done, this one had a very toy-like appeal. The pieces were built to be attachable with simple ball and socket joints. Each part was large enough to be easily printable. I cranked them out in a couple of days on my old Ender 3 v2 using a 0.6mm nozzle and draft quality slicing. The boys loved it!
After that we remixed the model using Tinkercad, turning it into a Combine Gunship! It came out pretty well and didn’t take much longer to print. I have more experience in Blender, which I really enjoy but Tinkercad does three things exceptionally better:
- It’s super simple. There are some basic building block shapes and with just those and a few meant-to-be-printed pre-modeled pieces, you can compose just about anything imaginable.
- Boolean operations are clean. I imagine this is a conceptual difference in how shapes are constructed.
- Alignment UX is intuitive. When you select more than one object, you are presented with three dots along every axis (one edge, center, other edge). This makes it extremely easy to get shapes on the right axis without fiddling around with awkward constraints.
I’ve barely scratched the surface with Tinkercad. I’m looking forward to playing around with it more and building more toy-like stuff for the boys!