Creating the Rings

The following information is a single lesson in a larger Tinkercad project. Check out this and more projects on Tinkercad.

Return to Previous Lesson: Creating the Planet

Lesson Overview:

Now we're going to make some rings!

The rings of a planet are usually made up of large rocks and pieces of debris. They vary in thickness, spacing, and height.

Make sure your rings keep the same center, this is called concentric. When you are finished, they should look like the image below.

Instructions

1. Choose a Thin Torus from the menu on the right. This will be the first ring

2. Scale the ring on all axes using SHIFT. Increase it's size to 100mm

3. With the Torus selected, drop down the edit menu and select duplicate. It may look like nothing has happened, but a copy of the torus has been made right on top of the original.

4. Increase the size of the new torus so that it's inner diameter is slightly bigger than the outer diameter of the original torus. Hold SHIFT+ALT before clicking a handle(circled in red). Holding SHIFT will scale the torus in all directions equally. Holding ALT will keep the center of torus locked, and will grow out from its center.

5. Drop down the Edit menu and choose duplicate again. This time, duplicate will also duplicate the scale from the previous step. In order for this to work, you will need to have completed #4 without deselecting the torus. Keep duplicating until you have 4 rings like the image shows.

6. Select all of the rings. Scale their height down to 2 or 3 mm.

7. Change the color of the rings by going to the Inspector window. You can make your own color by clicking on > custom.

In the next lesson you will learn to align the rings!

Next Lesson: Aligning the Rings to the Planet