Building the Roof Structure for a Backyard Playground Using Sketches, Patterns, and Extrusions

In this video, we're going to create the roof of our outdoor playground. All right, so first things first, let's go to the very top surface. Let's do this beam here,  and let's start a sketch.

I'm going to go ahead and click this eyeball to hide all the unnecessary information. Let's grab a corner rectangle and just kind of estimate more or less what that roof is going to look like. I want this to overhang on these beams equally on all sides.

So to do that,  let's go ahead and convert some of these edges so we can use them in our sketch. We're grabbing the outside edges of this beam, this beam, this beam, and since there isn't a fourth beam here,  let's just grab this edge here and convert that. Go back normal to our sketch.

Let's highlight everything and turn it into a construction instead of geometry. All right, now let's set the overhangs from our converted entities to the outside of our rectangle. Here's one converted entity.

We'll set that to three inches. Then this one we'll set to three inches. We'll just set this one to three inches, and this last converted entity to this edge we will also set to three inches.

We can always go back and change that later if you so desire, but for right now this feels good. All right, we've just created a pretty decent reference sketch for our roof, so let's close this out, save our work, and we can title this sketch Roof Reference Sketch. Great.

Let's now create the pieces that make that up. Start a sketch on that surface, grab the corner rectangle,  snap that corner, snap this edge, set this as the wide board width. All right, and let's go ahead and run an extrusion, and we'll set this as our standard board thickness.

Uncheck merge result, make sure it's moving upwards, close it out. I have a previous equation I need to delete. All right, let's start a sketch on this surface, snap to that corner,  and just draw it out arbitrarily like that.

Let's make this edge and this line equal to each other. Let's create a new rectangle that starts on this corner and drags out. Make this line and this line equal to each other.

Highlight this bottom rectangle,  make it construction geometry, and then click and drag this until it is coincident to that edge,  and that gives us the exact length of what that board is supposed to be. All right, now that we've done that, let's go ahead and create a boss extrude feature. In this case, we'll feature up to surface, this surface here, uncheck merge result,  close out the check, close out the feature, close out the feature, save your work.

All right, now I'm going to use move copy bodies, but a rotate of move copy bodies to copy this plank and this plank, flip them 180 degrees to finish off this side of the border. So first things first, let's create a width plane. We'll go to plane, grab this surface here and this surface here, close it out.

You can make this plane appear a little bit bigger so it's easier to see simply by clicking it, simply by clicking it and dragging it out. Let's make a sketch on that plane. And then now I want to convert an entity that represents the width of that overall border.

All right, and let's open a construction line and find the midpoint of that line. Great. So as you can see, this vertical line now represents the exact middle of what will be our roof.

Let's close out this sketch. All right, let's go to move copy bodies and make sure that we are in translate rotate. As always, pick the bodies first.

And for this, instead of doing a translate, let's collapse this. We'll do a rotate move copy bodies and we need to rotate around something. In this case, that something is this line that we just created.

So let's highlight that rotate box, select this line and you can see that it's starting to create a copy that is rotating around that line. Now we know this needs to be 180 degrees because it needs to rotate all the way to the other side. We can type that in ourselves.

Once we've done that, make sure the copy is selected, close out the sketch. All right,  beautiful. Now let's create some slats to go across our roof.

I'm gonna go ahead and hide all of our types here and start a sketch on one of these new surfaces here. Let's find the exact middle of these planks. Here's the midpoint of that plank and we'll connect it to the, oh, it's wanting to grab a lot of references.

So make sure you pick carefully and grab the midpoint of that plank. Beautiful. Let's start a center line and just snap right here and then highlight that vertex and highlight this line and create a midpoint relationship.

There we go. Now we have the exact midpoint of that roof yet again. That's going to be the center of our center plank that lives in our roof.

We grab a center rectangle, start it on that vertex there, drag it out and butt it up against this outside piece here. Let's make these planks our narrow board widths and let's pattern one direction and see if we can get a good spacing going with the slats of our roof pieces. We'll go to Linear Sketch Pattern, go to Entities to Pattern and you can select the shape to grab all four lines at the same time.

It's defaulting to patterning left and right. That's not what we want to do. We'll bring this to one and close out direction one, open direction two and bring this to say three and maybe create some space between these pieces.

I like the spacing but we need one more slat. So I'm going to bring this to four and then close out the pattern. Now as you can see it's still not fully defined.

Let's go ahead and define it now by creating equal spacing between each of these planks. We do that by grabbing a center line, first snapping to a plank and then this first instance here. Then grabbing a center line, snapping to that other side of that rectangle to this rectangle here.

Highlight both and make them equal. All right, now it's fully defined that sketch. Now that we've done that let's go ahead and just do a Boss Extrude.

In this case, let's extrude up to this surface here. We'll uncheck Merge Result, close it out with a green check mark. Now that we've completed all the necessary roof pieces, let's color green the ones that are unique.

We'll go over to our Appearances, Edit Appearance, make sure to add one long piece, one side piece and at least one of the slats. I'm going to grab the one in the exact center. Save your work.

Before we close out this video, let's go ahead and clean up our feature tree just a little bit so that it's easy to navigate. First thing I want to do is grab some of those reference sketches that we made in the past and give them names. This one here was used to make the stairs.

Let's call this our Stair Reference Sketch. All right, let's see what else we got. We got the Handrail already named.

That works. Roof Reference already named. Great.

Let's see here. Should we name that? No, probably not necessary. Let's do something that names these beams.

Let's highlight the beam first to find the Boss Extrusion that made it. We've now found it. I'm going to name this Main Beam Extrusion.

All right. What else should we name? Let's see. Maybe our first plank.

We'll call this Wall Plank 1. Maybe some of these roof pieces. All right. Long Roof Plank.

We're doing this just to make it a little bit easier to navigate in case we ever have to make changes moving forward. I think that's probably okay for now. Now, what I want to do is, since we've completed more or less the main frame of our outdoor playground,  let's group these features into their own folder so they can be nice and organized.

Because at this point, we're going to start creating the accessories to go into the playground. So, I'm going to highlight everything in the feature tree that I want to put into a folder first. In this case, it's going to start with this second floor plane and extend all the way,  hold shift, to this very last Boss Extrude.

Right-click, add to new folder. Let's name this folder Main Playground. Main Playground should be fine.

All right. There you go. Save your work.

We'll hide this eyeball. Double-check the green pieces that are colored. We have 125 solid bodies currently made.

If everything looks okay, go ahead and save your work again. That will finish up this video. In the next video, we're going to begin by creating the fire pole and exploring some more of the accessories that we're going to add to our playground.