Since its humble beginning 3 years ago, 3DTin has grown into a mass repository of Creative Commons 3D models. It’s a tool that more and more people are using for different purposes. Among our users are many young students who make models in 3DTin and print them on 3D printer. We are glad to play a small role in introducing them to the technological revolution that 3D printing can be.

Our success is not without the help from our star users. Our special thanks go to them. You may know their work from our Facebook page or Twitter feed. Here are some recent examples of how they have pushed 3DTin into building something truly awesome!

Ipercar by icevipergt http://www.3dtin.com/ware

Ipercar by icevipergt

BioShock by Akin http://www.3dtin.com/yznw

BioShock by Akin

A Wrist watch by Vijay http://www.3dtin.com/o8te

Wrist Watch by Vijay

There is more on the horizon. We are working hard on technologies that will make CAD more accessible via the cloud and browser. Stay tuned for updates.

Meanwhile enjoy building!

Here’s the message
https://www.khronos.org/webgl/public-mailing-list/archives/1304/msg00064.html

Update1: The problem seems only limited to Google Chrome on Mac OSX

Update2: A temporary fix is to launch Chrome from command line with this command:

 open -a "Google Chrome.app" --args --disable-gl-multisampling

Update3: The bug was fixed in Google Chrome version 26.0.1410.65 for Mac OSX. 

We are very much here and we are not going anywhere!

I haven’t written in a while because we haven’t added any new features to 3DTin in past few months. And frankly I don’t know what to write when there is nothing to write about.

Over 3 years we have built a simple 3D modelling workflow in 3DTin. A lot of users who find traditional 3D modelling tools too daunting, use 3DTin to quickly put together their ideas. We have built a well thought interface for this crowd. At one point we reached a feature-complete state for 3DTin. It became clear that adding more functionality to the existing tool without careful thought is going to spoil it for our existing user-base. So we have decided to spend more time in planning phase.

We are diligently maintaining 3DTin though. We also actively respond to any customer queries that come our way. We actively promote the awesome 3D models that our community creates day in day out. Please subscribe to our Facebook, Twitter or Google+ pages to see the awesome models our users create.

Most importantly, we are working on CAD more advanced than you see in 3DTin today. We are constantly learning what it takes to build a professional CAD tool and how to do it in browser and leverage cloud for it. We will have some important announcements to make in coming few months. I’m very excited about it. So do stay tuned.

Until then, Happy modelling!

(And our best wishes to the TinkerCAD team in their next venture.)

This feature was requested by some of the most active 3DTin users. They wanted to keep posted if the 3D artists they admire created new content or recommended other’s content with ratings/comments. This is a very reliable way to discover new and interesting content every time you visit 3DTin.

So how can you follow other users?

Just click on their name and open their account profile, you can’t miss the big green “Follow” button.

Click it and now you are following the user. Next time you open the community window, you will see a unified activity feed of all the users that you are following.

I’m following @icevipergt and @Akin, so I see their recent activity in my community window in the above screenshot.

Isn’t that cool? What do you think? Let us know what more you would like to see.

The measurement cues include display of dimensions of currently selected geometry. You no longer have to calculate the extents in your mind from the readings in the position bar. We do it automatically for you and show it in proper context.

Another visual aid that we’ve added comes into play when you move a geometry. A geometry can at any time move only in a single plane (the one that you are currently looking into). Sometimes it’s not obvious though. Therefore we have added motion lines which show the displacement of the geometry from its original position as you are moving it. This clarifies exactly which plane the geometry is moving in and by how much.

And what do you think about the new grid?

If we don’t know what is our purpose in this world, we can at least be certain that by creating something unique and new we are bringing something to the world that didn’t exist before. This was one thought behind why I started building 3DTin instead of all the other kinds of software one can build in today’s world. I wanted to create a software that will help others to create something out of it.

If there is one gift we can give to our children to empower themselves, it will be to inculcate creativity in them.

The DIY movement that is gaining strength around the world in past few years is popularizing the ethos of Do-It-Yourself. There is creativity in all of us, only it’s hidden in varying degrees from person to person. The DIY movement is helping people discover the hidden creative selves inside them.

So when I learnt about diy.org yesterday I was pleasantly surprised to learn what they are doing to encourage creativity in kids. For starters they have designed one gorgeous website.

The idea is to gamify DIY activities for kids, thus prodding them into making something on their own.

DIY.org enlists a wide variety of skills ranging from Astronomy, Chemistry to Sculpting and Rapid prototyping. Each skill category has handful of challenges. Kids can pick a skill of their choice and a challenge that they would like to tackle. They can work on their idea under that challenge and post a photo or video of the final result to their profile. Kids can rate each other’s works which earns them points.

The part I like is that the challenges are not puzzles; but rather a suggestion of a tool or a generic problem description like “Grow a Bacteria Culture” or “Design an Object with CAD“. This encourages open ended thinking in kids. 3DTin features as one of the challenges under the RapidPrototyper skill set. Kids can design a 3D model in 3DTin and post a screenshot of it to their DIY account as a project.

There are already tons of projects that kids have posted. Take a look at this one “da vincis  katapult” or this “Erector helicopter“.

Go ahead and introduce your kids to DIY.

Many 3D shapes are better expressed by their projections in 2D plane. Sometimes you want to draw a two dimensional figure and extrude it along third dimension. Sometimes you imagine a side profile of a figure in the form of a curve and would like to revolve it around an axis to create 3D solid. The new feature we are unveiling today is meant to help in such cases.

Here’s how you can get your hands on it. Click the new button added to the Shapes bar to launch the 2D editor.

The 2D editor presents you with a smooth curve along with bunch of control points (circled red). By moving the control points around you can change the shape of this curve.

There are two ways in which this curve can be used to build a solid.

First is Extrusion

When you hit Build, the curve is automatically closed and extruded along third dimension and a solid of specified thickness is ready to add to your main sketch. This is how the solid of above curve looks like.

This is a very powerful technique. It opens doors to creating any arbitrarily shaped objects and putting them together into really interesting models. You can increase the number of control points up to 30, which lets you add more and more details to the curve.

The second option is Revolution

When you hit Build, the curve is revolved around the shown axis of revolution and you are presented with the final solid to add to your sketch. You can imagine this curve to be a side profile of the final solid. When added to sketch the above curve looks like this.

You can use this trick to create objects like Pots, Vase or any other shape that is circularly symmetric.

We are very excited to see what you make of this new way of building 3D shapes. Head over to 3DTin and try it now.

(The objects created with revolution can be little too heavy and sometimes with some undesired artifacts. We will fix that aspect in future. For now we wanted to deliver the new feature to you to get your early feedback.)

You can see the Visual Transform Cues in following screenshots or try them out yourself.

Protractor for Rotation transform

Directional arrows for Scaling

Directional arrows for Shear

These new visual aides will give you hint about the direction and/or magnitude of the transform that you are about to perform. You will also be able to change the planes of transforms by simply clicking the X,Y,Z buttons, instead of having to cancel the dialog and reorienting the view.

We look forward to your feedback.

Long back we had implemented a mirror tool that was used to draw cubes symmetrically. After we added support for template based geometries, we didn’t get a chance extend that functionality to new geometries. Recently we found many 3DTin users building symmetric models. It occured to us that we can make their task remarkably easier if we allow a mode that automatically mirrors all the operations that users do in the other half of the model. Thus was born the idea for this new feature. Since this feature is mainly useful for power users we are offering it as a Premium feature.

There are two different ways in which this feature can be used.

1. Symmetric Add

In the left bottom corner you have seen the mirror icon (Club). In a regular sketch you can toggle it into two modes.

When the Symmetric Add is ON, for any geometry or cubes (voxels) that you add to the model, a mirror image is automatically added for you. In the past this feature was limited to cubes, but now it is available for all kinds of geometry. The mirroring is only restricted to add operation in this mode.

2. Super Symmetry

When you create a new sketch, you will now be prompted for which kind of model you want to create – Regular or Super Symmetric.

If you choose “Super Symmetric”, 3DTin assumes that you are building a completely symmetric model and it mirrors each and every operation you perform automatically.

Here is a short clip explaining how that looks.

As you can see, not just adding of geometry, but also all the subsequent operations – moving, rotating, grouping, aligning – are exactly replicated in the mirror image.

We very much hope that this new feature will help you make more awesome models with less amount of effort.

Note that you cannot add any asymmetric features to the super-symmetric model. But that can be easily worked around. You can build all the symmetric parts of your model in one sketch, then create a fresh regular asymmetric sketch and import the symmetric sketch into it. Best of both the worlds.

You will have to be a premium user for all the symmetric effects to actually take effect. If you are not, you will see a preview of the mirror geometry being added, but it won’t be actually added when you click.

Give it a try. We look forward to your feedback.

The world of web browsers has come a long way since then. In past couple of weeks when we collected the same stats, we found that now nearly 92% of our visitors have WebGL enabled browsers. This is a huge boost. My guess is that the growing popularity of Google Chrome and its support of WebGL on machines without graphics card has contributed to this tremendous rise in WebGL users. Whatever might be the reason, the result is very promising.

In the light of these new numbers, it seems to be the right time to drop Canvas 2D backend support. We will be doing that in next few days. The users visiting 3DTin through non-webgl browser will see an error screen that will inform them about WebGL upgrade. Note that, all your models from the past are safe and sound on 3DTin servers, you only need a WebGL enabled browser to access them.

This will help reduce 3DTin javascript code that downloads into the browser. It will also simplify our data structures and make the WebGL backend more efficient.

Do let us know if you have any questions.