Digital technologies/3D printing/3D modeling- Beginner/Other Tools in TinkerCAD

Other useful tools can be found above the Tinkercad shapes menus.

Workplane (W) tool allows you to change the work plane to an alternate workplane. Drag it onto the edge of another shape, to set a new work plane. An orange work plane will appear. If you drag a shape onto the plane, it will already appear perpendicular to that plane. You can copy/cut shapes from one plane and paste them to other planes. To get rid of the new orange plane, drag a new plane back to the original blue one.

Ruler (R) allows for you to easily change the dimensions of a shape. Just place it anywhere on the workplane and dimensions from the ruler origin to the part origin as well as the part's major dimensions will appear. Just click on any of the dimensions and you can change their value. Highlighted in blue are the major dimensions, in green are the offsets between the shape's origin and that of the ruler. The ruler tool also has a mode where changing the dimensions of the shapes will happen symmetrically from the shape's midplanes. Simply click on the circled three lines (bottom left of the ruler origin) to toggle between modes. Toggling will change the reference of the ruler to the centre of the shape.

Next to the group button, there is another set of useful tools, Align (L) and Flip (M).

	Align (L) will only be available when selecting more than one shape at the same time (you may box select or hold shift down while selecting shapes to select multiple). Of course, this makes sense, as the tool allows you to align two or more shapes relative to another. The alignment can be in either dimension, and is not limited to center alignment (shapes' sides can be aligned as well).
	Flip (M) is available when one or more shapes are selected. This tool will allow you to mirror a part along its midplanes (X-Y, Y-Z or X-Z). If you select multiple shapes at the same time, the flip tool will see the selection as one shape and use the midplane of the selection as the midplane to perform the flip operation.