Discover the methodologies behind building specific features on a 3D model, particularly a rope ladder, using an existing small section as the foundation. This professional guide walks you through the process of identifying patterns, taking measurements, and creating corresponding patterns for new elements on the model.
Key Insights
- The process of creating complex 3D features often involves identifying existing patterns on the model and replicating them, rather than building each feature from scratch. In the given example, a small section of a rope ladder serves as the basis for the entire feature set.
- Accurate measurement is crucial in modeling. For instance, the eyelets on the model are measured at a 0.25 distance, and this measurement is replicated in creating patterns for new eyelets. Equally important is the radius of these elements, which in this case is 0.12.
- Sketching is an essential part of the process, where elements like center lines and squares are used to define the placement of new features. Techniques including filleting and linear patterning are employed to ensure accuracy and consistency.
This lesson is a preview from our SOLIDWORKS Certification Course Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in this course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
In this video we're going to start building the features that are ultimately going to make up this rope ladder here. As you can see in this finished model, there are a lot of patterns happening. We actually don't need to build all this.
All we really need to build is a small section here in the corner. I'll show you what that looks like. There we are.
That's it. Everything else about this feature pattern is somewhere in these features here that we're building. So let's go ahead and do that now.
I'm going to move this over to the side. Over to the right is the model that we are working on. The first thing I want to do is determine what these eyelets are going to be.
And you might remember when we made the swing, this piece has already been created. We don't need to create it a second time. We simply need to use the move copy body feature.
I'm just going to grab a couple measurements by highlighting, holding shift, these outside surfaces. It is 0.25 distance. So what we're going to do is create a pattern of where these new eyelets are going to sit along this beam and on this beam.
And those instances of the pattern are going to be made up of squares that are 0.25 in height and width. And they're going to have a radius matching this radius, which currently is 0.12. Great. So that's what we'll do.
First things first, let's go ahead and start a sketch on this surface. Let's convert that entity. Let's convert the entity of this beam here and this face as well.
We're going to highlight everything and make it for construction. Then we're going to grab this top body and our solid bodies, hold shift,  grab the bottom one and hide our bodies. We just want to work in a clean space here.
There you go. Make sure we're facing it directly. All right.
We'll grab a center line and we're going to establish a coincident relationship in this corner. Now look, if you can see from the cursor, once we go roll across a line,  that coincident symbol pops up. But if you're rolling across two lines, that symbol changes to an X with a dot over it.
That represents two lines crossing and a coincident relationship right where they cross. That's what we're looking for. There we go.
Simple coincident. There's the compound coincident. We'll collect that and grab the midpoint of that line and just bring that over.
Let's continue it over here and grab the midpoint of this line and bring this down. I'm doing this so that when we set our hooks, they fall in the exact center of these beams. All right.
Let's go ahead and create those features now for them to sit for our move copy bodies. We'll create a square. We'll fillet the corners of that square at 0.12. Perfect.
Oh, we're gonna have to adjust that to 0.12. Make sure it updated. All right. Beautiful.
Set the height of this at 0.25. That's essentially the profile of that hook. Let's do that again down here. We'll grab a center square.
Turn it into a square by making the height and the width equal. Grab a sketch fillet. Go ahead and just click yes to each of these notifications.
Beautiful. Make sure it's at 0.12. It is. Close it out.
Let's go ahead and establish that height and width. Perfect. Now we just need to set where this filleted square, or rather what is looking to be a circle, is going to live.
I'm going to grab the center of that item and then the line that represents the bottom of this beam. I'm going to set that to 2 inches. Go ahead and take a look and make sure that you're following along.
You've got the same location. Now let's pattern this entity. We'll go to linear pattern.
As always, select the entities to pattern first. I'm going to click inside this closed shape to grab all these lines. Make sure that I'm patterning in the right direction.
There we go. Let's set the distance of our pattern to 12 inches. We'll set the number of instances to 5. All right.
Just as we know, patterns aren't fully defined until we finalize those last references. Let's grab the top line of this shape and the top line of this shape here. Make sure that is confirmed at 12 inches.
Great. Oh, and it's fully black so it is fully defined. Wonderful.
That's what our sketch looks like. Let's go ahead and re-reveal each of our bodies. All right.
We can see exactly where we're going to be placing each of those hooks on this beam and this beam here. That'll do it for this video. We'll continue in the next video with more features to create that ladder toy.
Thank you. That's it for this video. We'll continue the ladder with more features in the following video.
