Tinkercad got a new lease of life

Tinkercad is nice little tool for 3D modeling, specially designed for 3D printing. It's very easy to use compare to other free/open source tools like Blender, Sketchup, Audocad 123D etc. About a month back there was an announcement that Tinkercad will be discontinued as core team wants to pursue other goals. However interestingly on 18/05/2013 they announced that Audocad has agreed to lease a new life to this nice little tool.

I have mainly used two tools Sketchup and Tinkercad, sketchup is mainly used for Architectural design. The model coming out of sketchup is not ready for 3D printing, requires some special plug-ins to export the sketchup model to STL format. As such it may not be fair to compare Sketchup with Tinkercad, as both tool's are designed for different purpose but both are widely used by 3D printing hobbyist users.

What I like about Tinkercad (compare to Sketchup)?

1. Import SVG, I like it as it makes it very to easy to convert a 2D drawing to 3D model. I have used it to make Map Jigsaw puzzle and Cookie Cutter.
2. Some of my favourite features are Object rotation, push/pull, cutting, moving object from one place to other, joining two objects, making an object transparent etc.. are way to easy in Tinkercad compare to Sketchup
3. Best thing in Tinkercad is,  object coming out is always a solid object unlike in Sketchup where sometimes you need to repair the STL.

I wish we have following features in Tinkercad, I am not an expert so if you think this is already possible in Tinkercad, feel free to post your comments.

• Number of basic shapes available are bit limited, I wish we have Arc or round shape objects. As making round corners of the cube is not that easy
• Drawing canvas size is bit limited and also zoom is limited
• I miss the guide and measure tools of sketchup in Tinkercad, the scale tool in Tinkercad provides very limited functionality. I find it very difficult to measure the internal details of the object in Tinkercad. For example in this Map jigsaw, how do we measure the width and height of a particular state?
• Adjust the size of the tool-bar icons and movement of tool bar side to top or bottom

My creations with Tinkercad

Micky mouse cookie cutter - http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:48846

Gingerbread woman - http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:70638

Samsung galacy Ace2 case - http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:56976
India map jigsaw puzzle - http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:70663

UK map jigsaw puzzle - http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:70697

Note: Sketchup is not completely free but they provide free and licensed version both, the free version is quite good enough for any beginner. I find the plug-in architecture of Sketchup quite powerful, as it has allowed to build large list of free plug-in libraries by community.