Design a Planter for 3D Printing in Less Than 5 Minutes

Hi there!

In this brief tutorial I'll show you how you can quickly design a planter using Tinkercad.

It really takes less than 5 minutes.

In the end, you'll be able to design planters like these:

First, create a new TinkerCAD design.

You'll want to switch to Orthographic view, it'll be easierto to design this way.

Now it's time to design the basic shape of the planter.

For the one I'm doing, I use two Diamond shapes. You can use as many shapes you want but I'll suggest you keep it simple at least for the first planter you design.

You can move, rotate and scale the shapes as you please using the gizmo with the arrows.

If you want to scale up a shape and wish to scale it proportionally on all directions, hold SHIFT.

Use the Align tool to get all shapes centered (if you wish them to be)

Now it's time to hollow out the inside of the planter.

Copy & Paste the section of the planter that's gonna hold the plant and soil.

Change the new shape to "Hole" and scale it down a bit so its slightly smaller than the original shape.

Than align the hole to the rest of the planter.

When everything's aligned, choose the Group tool.

The key here is that any shape can either be a Solid or a Hole. When you group Solids together they add up and combine. Same happens when you group Holes together. But, when you group a Solid with a Hole, any part of the Hole overlapping the Solid is removed and taken out of the final shape.

If you don't like how the shape looks afetr Grouping, you can Ungroup it and try again.

This is a very cool and practical feature in Tinkercad that allows you to create complex shapes by 'carving' them out of basic shapes..

Your planter is done, now it's time to export it for 3D Printing.

Go to the export button and export it as STL and 3D print it!

Now you know how easy it's to design a planter.

Now it's your turn to experiment with more shapes in creative ways.

Thanks for reading!