Professional Documents
Culture Documents
by sarahcath
While visiting an o ce, I noticed that it was decorated with paper snow akes. Each snow ake was unique because they
were all made by hand. I realized that I could recreate the feel of paper snow akes in Tinkercad by utilizing the Star shape
and placing holes in the Star.
There are other great tutorials about creating snow akes, placing shapes on the workplane or using CodeBlocks. This
tutorial focuses only on using the Star shape and using holes of other shapes to create the design.
Supplies:
Autodesk Tinkercad: You will need a basic understanding on how to log on and design items using Tinkercad. If you have
never created a design in Tinkercad, you should take some of the lessons available in Tinkercad. You should know how to
place a shape on the workplane. Turn shapes into holes. Along with duplicating, rotating, changing size and color, and
grouping shapes.
1. Access Tinkercad
2. Click Log In
3. If prompted- select the correct account type
4. If prompted - enter your username and password.
1. Select Create
2. Click 3D Design.
3. Rename Design – Instead of taking the default name Tinkercad assigns a design, it is good practice to
give your design a name. A design with a descriptive name is more likely to get recognized than a design
with a default name. Why? Because sometimes I do not know what I am looking at until I see the name.
4. Click the design's name at the top left of the screen and type in " Snow ake".
1. Select the Blue Star from the Shapes menu and place it on the Workplane.
2. Adjust the Points and Radius in the Star’s Properties window.
3. Points: The default is 5 – with a max of 30. Using an even number of points will make it easier to add holes
to the design. For these instructions set the Points to “8”. Note: The rotation degree the outer points are at
are 0, 45, 90, and 135. The rotation inter points are at 22.5, 67.5, 112.5, and 157.5.
4. Radius: The default radius is 20 which creates a 40mm (or 1.57 inch) Star. For these instructions set the
Tips:
1. Unlock the Star shape by clicking on the star, then clicking the lock in the Star’s property window.
2. Select the Star shape and of all the heart hole shapes. The easiest way is by dragging the mouse over all
the shapes. Alternatively, you can hold down the Shift key while clicking each of the shapes.
3. Group the shapes by clicking the Group icon, or pressing CTRL+G. We have a snow ake! We need a way
to hang the snow ake.
4. Place a Torus shape on the workplane, and change the dimensions in its properties window to:
5. Radius: 3.4
Note: You can change the color snow ake and torus to White.
To 3D print a le, I must convert the .STL le to the GCode le that my printer needs. To make this conversion I use
UltiMaker Cura. Most of the time, I use the default. But, for the Snow ake I set the Resolution to Fine – 0.1mm and turned
o the Adhesion because the print is at on the print bed.
The back of the snow ake is just a pretty as the front of the snow ake. The printed version took about 3 hours to print.
The blue area of the Star must be connected to other areas of the Star, or the Snow ake will print in pieces, or you will
have holes where you did not want a hole. See the Snow ake with the Text. When printed, the centers of the D's, O's, B's,
and R's will fall out of the snow ake, and it will have large holes.
To prevent this from happening, make sure snow ake is connected (one hole does not touch another hole). For this text
example, do not place the holes all the way through the snow ake. Raise the text at least 1mm o the workplane.
I made seven (7) snow akes each using di erent shapes. They are available to copy at Snow akes. I encourage you to
deconstruct these snow akes to see how they were made and create your own snow akes.
If you would like to just print the snow akes, the .STL les are available on Thingiverse.