3D Printable Track (Inkscape and Tinkercad Tutorial)

So I'm not about to pretend I know the first thing about most of this racing stuff but 3D printing is something I know pretty well so, when a friend asked for a little help making a track printable, I was all over it!

All credit where it belongs, she's pretty hot on this stuff too so was halfway there already - just needed help crossing the finish line 😉 (I'm so sorry, that was an awful joke!)

Anywho, I wanted to write up some steps for her to follow in future and figured I may as well make an Instructable out of it as there may well be others who want to do something similar too!

So, if you ever want to take a race track or similar and turn it into something you can 3D print, here's how to do it!

This is also a good beginner's project for learning a few Inkscape and Tinkercad skills, even if you're not too interested in the model itself!!

• Software for editing SVGs - I'll be demoing Inkscape as it's free and easy to use!
• Software to turn an SVG into an STL - I'll be demoing Tinkercad as, again, it's free and easy to use!

Of course you'll also need a 3D printer and filament to print in if you do want to print the stl you're creating!! This isn't going to cover the process of printing though, this is really a design tutorial!

First things first we need an svg of the track - svgs are great as they're very easy to work with and you don't have any issues with the edges burring etc when enlarging the image.

Fortunately Wikipedia is a great source for these so that's a good place to start your search - where your track is available, we can simply click on the image then just download that as shown in the pics above where I download the svg for the Jeddah Street Circuit.

If you get unlucky and yours doesn't have a Wikipedia page or the Wikipedia page doesn't use an svg, try searching google images and hopefully you'll find one there.

If the absolute worst comes to the worst, you can find a high resolution image of another type and convert it to an svg using an online tool like convertio though you'll need to edit the image to remove any details you don't want included in your print before you convert to svg in this case!

Most track svgs include a bunch of extra info such as the start/finish line and a bunch of labels etc.

We'll need to get rid of those to make this nice and printable and to do that, we'll be using something called Inkscape

Feel free to use other software if you have something you prefer but I'll be demoing Inkscape as it's free to download and use (you can grab it here - just select your operating system and install)

To edit your svg:

• Open your svg file in Inkscape - I'll be demoing using the Jeddah Street Circuit as shown in pic 1
• Select the image and click ungroup - you'll find this in the panel on the right-hand side of your Inkscape window and is highlighted in pic 2
• This will separate all the individual shapes that make up the image
• Now we can delete all the bits we don't need
• You can do this by clicking and hitting delete on each element one at a time
• Alternatively, you can hit ctrl+a to select all elements then hold down shift and click on the track itself to deselect just that then hit delete to delete everything that remains selected in one go which is a little quicker
• You should now have just the circuit itself remaining as shown in pic 3

If you're happy with the track as is you can skip ahead to the saving step now as the next 3 steps are all about thickening the track!

For this step I'll show you how to thicken a track and I'm going to switch to the Ordos International Circuit as it's nice and open - we'll be coming back to the Jeddah Street Circuit in the next step though!

To thicken the track we'll be staying in Inkscape:

• Select the track by clicking on it as shown in pic 1
• Open the 'Fill and Stroke' panel - this can be opened by clicking the paintbrush icon in the panel on the right-hand side of your Inkscape window as shown in pic 2
• You'll then need to switch to the 'Stroke-Style' tab within that panel as shown in pic 3
• To thicken the track you can now just adjust the width value as you wish - I set mine to 10mm as shown in pic 4

If this has worked nicely for your track then you can skip the next step.

If you had trouble with parts of your track overlapping itself when you increased the thickness don't worry - we'll fix that now!

Right. If you're here then I'm assuming that you have a track that's a bit more awkward - maybe something that looks a bit more like the Jeddah Street Circuit I'm using here, where it started to overlap itself after being thickened as shown in pic 1?

I'm afraid we have to do a little more work with these ones!

To fix a thickened track that is overlapping itself:

• Select your track
• From the Path menu in the menu bar at the top of your window, select linked offset (as shown in pic 2)
• With the track still selected, choose any other colour from the colour picker at the bottom of the window - this is only to help us distinguish between shapes so it doesn't matter which you pick - I'm using red! It should now look like pic 3
• Still keeping the now coloured section selected, from the top menu bar, open the Object menu and select 'Raise to Top' - as shown in pic 4
• you can now adjust the inner shape by clicking and dragging the small diamond to the top right of the shape (it is very small so you may need to zoom in a little - it's visible in pic 3 and 4)
• The coloured shape will be cut away from the outer one in the next step so make any adjustments you like now

• Once you're happy with the area to be cut out, keep the coloured section selected and you'll need to go back to that Path menu and click 'Object to Path' as shown in pic 1
• Next hit ctrl-a or click and drag to select everything (everything being both the track and the shape to be cut out)
• Now, yet again, we're going to the Path menu but we'll choose 'Stroke to Path' this time as shown in pic 2
• Finally, one last trip to the Path menu but this time we're choosing 'Difference' to cut away the coloured shape form the track as shown in pic 3
• You should now have a thickened version of your track that does not overlap itself!

If you've just followed the 'Correcting Overlap' steps above you can simply go to the file menu and save as the default svg type then move on to the next step as we've already converted the shape to a path! Feel free to jump ahead 🙂

If you didn't have any overlapping, or haven't thickened the track at all, we have one final step.

Unfortunately, regardless of how thick the line is, as far as your CAD software is concerned, it's just the outline of a 2D shape so it just fills in the gaps. This means that when you import your svg into your CAD software in the next step, it's just a solid blob as shown in pic 1.

All we need to do to prevent this is select our track and then make yet another trip to the Path menu where we'll click 'Stroke to Path' as shown in pic 2.

You can now just head to the file menu and save your svg and we shouldn't have any issues in the next step!

Converting our svg to an stl so we can print it is actually super simple but if you're curious about other methods and getting a bit more in depth into all this, I've actually written an article about this process here!

For this project though, we'll use Tinkercad - it's free, browser-based and easy and means that if you do want to make any extra changes or build on the track afterwards (maybe you'd like to add a stand or something?) you can easily do so.

• Once you're set up with an account and have started a new project in Tinkercad you can simply import your svg
• The import button can be found in the top right of your window and is shown in pic 1
• You'll now be presented with a window where you can select your svg file and then hit import
• You can also modify the size of the shape here though this can also be done after importing so don't worry about getting it perfect!
• Once imported your svg should appear as a 3D shape as shown in pic 3
• it will have a thickness of 10mm by default but you can change the dimension across any axes by selecting your shape then clicking and dragging the white boxes
• To scale the whole shape uniformly, hold shift as you click and drag one of the boxes!
• Now, you can make any modifications you wish at this point (I've created a stand for mine!) or you can just simply export it as an stl as is - you'll find the export button next to the import one we used earlier and it's also shown in pic 4
• Simply select stl in the pop up that comes up and you're done!

So as I said, this really is just a design tutorial so this is the point where you take your stl and do whatever it is you were making it for!

I've kind of assumed you'll be printing it out but whatever your goal was here, I hope you found this helpful !

Feel free to drop any questions and feedback in the comments for me - I'm always looking to add to or improve these things where possible!!