Creating a Custom Play Window with Square, Circle, and Triangle Cutouts Using Sketch Tools in CAD

In this video we're going to create a play window that's going to live in this space right here. It's going to feature three windows of different shapes and in doing so we're going to use the polygon tool within our sketch tools for the first time. Let's go ahead and get started.

All right, so the first thing I want to do is create a plane that bisects this beam and this We'll go to reference geometry, plane, select this surface, select the opposite surface,  creating a mid-plane and then close it out with the green check mark. On that mid-plane let's create a sketch and let's find the exact center of the space where our play window will live. We'll grab a center line and let's grab this corner right here just tucked right next to this beam.

Bring it all the way down, zoom in. We want this to land just above this floor plank and just inside this beam. We'll set it right here at that corner.

Once we have that line established we can find the midpoint and we'll create a line going horizontal and a line going vertical and escape gets us out of the centerline command. I'm going to bring this all the way up so it snaps to that edge and bring it so it snaps to this edge and then I'm going to go ahead and create a center line going from the center to again the top of that floor beam. Beautiful.

This is the line where our three shapes are going to live so let's draw those now. The first is going to be a square so we'll grab center rectangle and just pick any point on this line that is not the midpoint and then just drag it out. To make a square we make the length and the width equal to each other and let's set a dimension.

We'll set this at 15 inches. We also want this to have a border frame so let's use offset entities to create that. There we go and we'll set this frame to one inch in thickness and make sure that it's offsetting on the outside of the square not the inside.

All right now all that's left to set is the height of that square above the bottom of our sketch so let's go ahead and grab our smart dimension. Grab this point here above that plank and the bottom of our offset entity and we'll set that to three inches. Next let's create that circle.

We'll grab the circle tool and again don't select the midpoint but just select another point on this line and drag it out. Just like before use offset entities to offset the outside at one inch and then we'll need to give this a dimension as well. In this case we're going to dimension the inside circle.

We're going to make it equal to the height of the inside square. All that's left to set is the location of that circle but let's leave it alone for right now. Yes it's blue we'll come back to that.

Let's set the last shape which is going to be a triangle. Now we could use our line tool and draw a triangle and use references and dimensions to make it an equilateral triangle but instead let's grab a new tool. In this case it's the polygon sketch tool.

The first thing we do once we select it is select where we want the center of that polygon to live. The second click is going to set the size and angle of that polygon. Now as you can see this is not a triangle.

That's okay. What we can do is set the polygon for right now and before we do anything move over to the left hand side and right here under parameters we can set how many sides it's going to have. In this case because it's a triangle it will have three.

Once we've got that established let's go ahead and close out that for right now and we can start. We'll hit escape to get out of the tool. We can go ahead and start setting some references.

For instance I would like this point and this point to create a line that is collinear to our center line thereby setting that triangle right side up. I would also like to set the height of that triangle. We'll go from the point at the very top to the bottom line.

We'll set that at 15 inches just like the other two shapes and just like the other two shapes we're going to offset the outside edges by one inch and we'll settle this and just kind of move it down a little bit. Now's the time to space out our shapes just a little bit and the goal because this of course will have been well designed will to have these shapes equidistant from each other. Let's create those conditions now.

We'll get a central line grab the bottom of this circle and just drag it up continue it down drag it horizontal to the top of that square. This is the line that we need. Let's do that again here grab the top of that top circle drag it out and then just bring it to the bottom of that rectangle.

Now we want this line and this line to be equal to each other close out the green check mark. We can still adjust how clustered they are to each other but let's make sure that the space above the triangle matches the space below the square. We have that set to three inches we can make an equal line but I'm just going to go ahead and set that with a smart dimension.

There we go. All right now our sketch is fully defined we have all three windows. Let's extrude this with a regular boss extrude base and because we built on we built this sketch on a mid plane we know we're probably going to extrude mid plane so let's set that extrusion amount to five inches and uncheck merge result then close that feature.

Let's save our work. All right it's already starting to look pretty good but this won't be how our window arrives at our doorstep it's going to probably be one piece so let's create the rest of that feature now. On that same plane that we created earlier let's start a new sketch and let's convert the outside entities of each of our shapes.

You can see that we as we mouse over items SOLIDWORKS wants to grab various things that we don't need we have to make sure that we're converting exactly the lines that we want to. We'll close that out now let's go ahead and create a central line between the top of that rectangle or triangle to the bottom of that square here and we're going to use that to create a center rectangle. We'll create the center rectangle on that line drag it down to the bottom or rather the top of this bottom plank and the top of that rectangle is going to fit right underneath this beam here.

Now all we need to do is set the distance between the outside of the rectangle and the inside of that beam. I want one of our narrow boards to live there so let's set that distance to the equals narrow board width. All right now that we have that shape let's go ahead and extrude it again it will be a mid-plane extrusion and for this one we'll just set it to two inches and we can go ahead and leave merge results checked because we're going to link it with these shapes but just like before if we're going to do that we need to be very specific about what bodies it merges with so we'll go down to feature scope auto select hold that box down select that box and select just our three shapes and no other body in our part file.

Once we've done that close it out with a green check mark. Save your work. Now the second to last feature we're going to add is going to be one of the boards that's going to hold this window feature in place.

I'm going to start by creating a sketch just underneath this new window that we've created on that bottom surface. It's highlighted in blue. Let's go ahead and hit convert entities. Another entity I want to convert is this edge right here where the beam meets the plank. Okay, and that should be okay for right now.

At the moment let's go ahead highlight all of our bodies by holding shift and grabbing the top and bottom one and hide them. The "Normal" button gets us back into a normal perspective. We'll highlight all of this and make it for construction.

We're going to have a narrow board nested on one side and a narrow board nested on another side, and then we'll have a notch cut out of them to accommodate these corners of our play window. So let's just start drawing that out right now. I'm going to go ahead and click along here, bring it down, bring it over. Don't grab the midpoint just yet, but go ahead and grab the midpoint of this line here, the shorter one. Make this line vertical.

The width of this board, or rather the thickness, is going to be our board thickness at 1.5. Oh, looks like it didn't recognize that. We'll try again: board thickness. Beautiful. And then the width is going to… let's see. We want to have that notch, so let's make this the wide board width.

We can see there that even though this is the narrow board width we're going to use one of our wide boards and cut a notch out of it. So your sketch should look something like this. All right, this is going to extrude up and hug our outside play window.

The first thing we're going to do is go back and show all those bodies again. Close that out and let's take this and extrude it just underneath this beam. All right, go ahead and we'll do "up to surface, " select that beam, uncheck merge result, close it out.

Now all that's left to do is draw out the plank that's going to sit right on top of everything. So let's start a sketch on this surface here and let's create a center line directly down the center of our play window so we can have something to build our center rectangle off of.

Don't grab the midpoint of that line but grab another point on that line and then bring it up to this corner of our barrier. Then connect this down so that this bottom line is collinear to the top of that floor plank. It should look something like that. You can see this blue line referencing this floor plank over here in the back. Once we do an assembly we're going to create another one here, so we're making space for that right now.

Now that we've created that sketch — oh, can't forget — we need to convert the entities of our shapes, because essentially our plank is going to have these shapes cut out of it. We're going to do that here in this sketch. Great. Now that we've created this sketch let's go ahead and extrude this feature. Make sure it's going the right direction and we'll set it to the plank thickness. Uncheck merge result and close it out with the green check mark.

All right, we've created a few new bodies so let's go ahead and color those now. Right click, edit appearance, select the window itself, the plank covering the window, and if you zoom in this wide board with the notch cut out of it — we want that too because that's unique. Once that's done, save your work.

And that's it for this video. In the next video we're going to begin creating the slide feature that will live right here.