Through the Interface

Importing Minecraft data into AutoCAD

A mere 2 among 100 million registered users, my boys are crazy about Minecraft. I’ve been looking into how I might be able to help them use Autodesk tools (well, AutoCAD) to generate Minecraft content. In this post we’ll take a look at importing Minecraft data into AutoCAD, but ultimately the creation/export story is clearly more interesting (something we’ll look at in the next post, I expect). To investigate dealing with Minecraft data – bearing in mind I didn’t actually know anything much about its file formats – I took a look at the Minecraft export you can perform... Read more →

Community Shape Scripts in Tinkercad

The Tinkercad team have been busy enabling an interesting new capability in their product called Community Shape Scripts. As I’ve mentioned before, for some time it’s been possible to make Shape Scripts public for other Tinkercad users to inspect and learn from, but now it’s even easier to share – and to discover – interesting Shape Scripts. You still need to select the “Share Code'” option inside the script’s properties – if you want to share the implementation details with the community – then once you have the Shape Script just as you want it to be shared, simply... Read more →

More knots in Tinkercad using JavaScript

After working out how generally to use Brandon Cole’s Shape Script code to display mathematical shapes in Tinkercad, I carried on looking for some interesting functions to “plot”. I ended up finding definitions for two Cinquefoil knots, specifically the (2,5) and the (5,2) variations (I also tried the (5,1), but that ended up looking just like the (5,2)). This “page that once was” helped a great deal with the underlying formulae, as of course did the online derivative calculator (Brandon tells me he personally used Wolfram Alpha to calculate his derivatives, a site I’ve blogged about in the past).... Read more →

Drawing a figure of eight knot inside Tinkercad using JavaScript

Following on from my initial playing around with Tinkercad and its Shape Script implementation, I started to look more closely into what’s possible with the Gen6 kernel. I came across this recent blog post, which highlights the ability to make Shape Script implementation details public. The Shape Scripts shown in the post looked nice and complex, so I tracked down the model by selecting “Discover” inside Tinkercad and searching for “Brandon Cole”, the originator of these very interesting Shape Scripts. He published this design about 3 weeks ago, which I went ahead and copied (yes, shamelessly, but at least... Read more →

Creating a grid of columns inside Tinkercad using JavaScript

A little over a month ago, Autodesk acquired Tinkercad. Tinkercad is a 3D CAD tool that uses WebGL to display graphics directly in your browser. While this tool is primarily targeted at consumers – it’s proving very popular among the 3D printing community – I thought I’d check it out to understand its customization capabilities. If you want to get to know the capabilities of the Tinkercad system, I suggest taking a look at these step-by-step lessons. I personally just dove right in – the system is very straightforward to learn – but I’m sure there are basics that... Read more →