The Customizer on Thingiverse makes customizing our designs really easy. Also, because Thingiverse has big computers and all the right software, it can provide you with reliable and fast rendering. So it’s definitely worth checking out. On the other hand, at certain times and on certain days, it can seem like watching paint dry.
The first thing you’ll need to do is create an account. It’s free!
Go to www.thingiverse.com and click on SIGN IN / JOIN at the top right of the page. Now, click on CREATE AN ACCOUNT near the middle of the page. Provide the requested information and click on the CONTINUE button. You’ll receive an email message from Thingiverse asking your to verify your email address. Click on the VERIFY YOUR EMAIL button in the email message. You’ll be taken back to the sign-in page where you can enter your username and password and log into your account. You can go through the tutorial or just click on this link to take you to our customizable keyguard page.
Once you’re on the keyguard page, look for the option to Open in Customizer:
Click on the button and you’ll be taken to the Customizer. Wait until the page completely loads. You won’t see an object displayed until you change one of the options…
If the page looks squashed like this:
It means there’s a bug in the Thingiverse code. You can work around this bug by right clicking on the “Create Thing” button in the upper right and choosing to open the page in a new tab.
If you don’t see an image of the object you’re customizing, just refresh the page in your browser.
The customization options are all displayed on the left. They work exactly the same way they’re described this website. In this next picture, we’ve changed the tablet to iPad 5th generation, exposed the Home button and changed the number of columns in the grid to 6:
Let’s pretend that this is all the customization you needed to do and it’s time to render the design and save it for printing. Just click on the Create Thing, blue button in the upper right corner of the page. You’ll be asked to name the thing you’ve created.
You might want to give it a name that represents the customization options you’ve chosen. You will want to uncheck the option to “Publish New Thing” and check the option to “email me when it’s done”:
Now click the blue “Create Thing” button.
You’ll be taken back to the Customizer where you can do more customizations. You can wait for the email to arrive or you can click on “Queue” in the upper right of the Customizer window:
If you do so you should see your queue with something like this in it:
When the rendering is complete you’ll receive an email message to that effect with a link to your new keyguard and the entry in your queue will look like this:
To go to your new keyguard, you can click on the “View Thing” button or, on any Thingiverse page – including this one – you can click on the “You” menu at the top right of the page and choose “My Things”:
You’ll be taken to a page with all the “things” you’ve made – in this case your customized keyguard.
Click on the image of the keyguard and you’ll be taken to a page specific to that “thing” . Click on the “Thing Files” tab below the image of your custom keyguard:
This is the STL file that you will slice and send to your printer. Click on the entry and your web browser will download and save the file.
If you need that STL file again in the future, it will be waiting for you in your list of “My Things” on Thingiverse.