Create the Arched Doorway

The following information is a single lesson in a larger project hosted on Tinkercad.

Return to Previous Lesson: Creating the Walls of the House

Lesson Overview:

In this lesson you will learn how to combine multiple shapes to create an arched doorway shape.

For a house to be functional there must be a way in. It’s time to create a doorway.

To do this, we will group two objects together in the final shape for that door, we will make that shape a Hole, position it, and then group the shapes. These are the same steps we completed in the previous steps to hollow out the house, but this time we will create the door.

Instructions

1. Start by pasting the final shape from the previous lesson.
2. Place a red Box shape and a Round Roof shape on the Workplane.
   These shapes will be combined to make the door shape. The shapes at their current sizes are much too large for the house, but at this size they are easy to work with. We will work on positioning the models at their current size then scale down the final door shape so it will fit the house.
3. Select the round roof shape and use the black arrow on the top of the model to lift it off the workplane 20mm, so the bottom of the round roof is at the same level as the top of the red box.
   
   
4. Continue to the next step.

The shapes should now be positioned vertically, but they haven't been centered horizontally. Once they have been properly aligned they will look like an arched doorway.

Instructions

1. Select the red Box shape and the blue Round Roof shape.
2. Select the Align tool from the menu bar.
3. Using the alignment dots that are laying flat on the Workplane, click the middle black circle on each side.
   The black dots should turn grey to indicate that the shapes are aligned. This can be seen in the image above.
4. Once the shapes are aligned on top of each other, click the Group button on the toolbar to combine the shapes into a single door shape.
5. Use the Inspector window to set the door shape to a hole.
6. Continue to the next step.

To complete the door we need to scale the door shape to be small enough to fit on one of the walls of the house.

Instructions

1. Select the door shape.
2. Hold the SHIFT key on the keyboard and click and drag on one of the white corner dots to scale the object.
   Note: Holding the SHIFT key down will cause the scaling to be proportional, meaning it will scale the shape from all directions.
3. Scale the door down until it is small enough to fit into the wall.
4. Select the wall shape and the door shape and align them so the door is in the middle of one of the short walls.
   The image above shows where the door should be roughly positioned.
5. Once positioned, and with both shapes selected, Group the objects together to cut the door opening in the wall.
6. Select the final wall shape that has the door shape cut out and copy it using the copy button on the menu bar.
7. Continue to the next lesson.

In the next lesson you will learn how to put a roof on the house.

Next Lesson: Add a Roof to the House