Sharpen your sketching skills with an exploration of two new tools: Convert Entities and Offset Entities. This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to effectively utilize these tools in the creation of sketch entities and offset lines on selected surfaces.
Key Insights
- The 'Convert Entities' tool, found under the Sketch tab in the Command Manager, allows you to select lines to appear as sketch entities in the sketch you're working on. It also enables the conversion of entities from sketches that were not absorbed into features.
- The 'Offset Entities' tool lets you select a line or surface, and it will create a yellow line offset by a certain distance from the entity you selected. This tool also provides options to reverse which side the line extrudes itself and to appear bi-directionally on both sides of the line you are referencing.
- Practical application of these tools can be seen in steps like creating footers for a playground's walls, where you convert faces of beams into sketch entities, hide all bodies in your part file to avoid creating unwanted references, and create rectangles that reference center points created using the 'Offset Entities' tool.
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Hello, in this video we're going to explore two new sketch tools, Convert Entities and Offset Entities. For the start of the video, feel free to simply watch. There won't be a need to follow along until later in the video.
I'm going to start a sketch on this outside surface. I'm now facing the side of the playground directly in a perfect side elevation. If I wanted to, I could grab the line tool and start gathering some references, some coincident references, some collinear references.
And build a sketch that way. You can see it's starting to populate. I'm going to go ahead and highlight all of these, hit delete.
Or I can go to Convert Entities under the Sketch tab in the Command Manager, and I can select lines that I want to appear as sketch entities in the sketch that I'm working on. Here they are. Also, if I were to show a previous sketch, in this case the height sketch, I can convert entities from sketches that were not absorbed into features, like so.
Next to Convert Entities is a button called Offset Entities. If we click Offset Entities, we can click a line or a surface, for instance, and it will ghost a yellow line that is offset by a certain distance from the entity that we just clicked. In this case, that distance is two inches.
We can reverse on which side that line extrudes itself. We can also choose bi-directional for it to appear on both sides of that line that we are trying to reference. Let's take a look at what that looks like.
And then just like Convert Entities, it will appear as sketch entities on the sketch we're working on. It'll also have its dimensions set there for us for us to be able to update if we so desire. Let's go ahead and close this out.
I'm going to close out the sketch. Great. Let's practice using that now.
Go ahead and go underneath your model and select a plane at the bottom of one of your beams. We'll use that as a sketch surface. Great.
Let's go ahead and click Convert Entities and select all the faces of the beams. Here we go. And once you've done that, click the green check mark.
All right. It has grabbed all the lines that make up those squares. Great.
Go ahead and close out the sketch. Now, if you go over here to the Feature Tree, under this Solid Bodies tab, open that tab up, highlight the very top solid body, and scroll down to the very bottom solid body, hold shift and highlight that as well, thereby selecting every single body. Right-click and select Hide.
We have now hidden every single body in our part file. Now, let's go back to this sketch. All right.
The reason we're doing this is because with all those bodies, there are a lot of moments where we could inadvertently and mistakenly create references that we don't want to create. We could grab coincident references or midpoint references that are going to make it really difficult to get exactly the shapes that we want to get. So, instead, let's go ahead and orient our model so that we're facing it in this direction with the two rectangles here at the top.
Sorry, the two squares right here at the top. Highlight the entire thing. Click this box that says For Construction.
This turns all of the solid lines into construction lines. Great. And now, we can grab a center line and easily capture the midpoint and then the midpoint of this line of every single one of these rectangles without accidentally grabbing a coincident relationship with, say, a plank or part of the flooring or part of the borders.
We can just work with these squares that we have here. Great. And let's make this vertical.
Okay. Now, let's create some rectangles that reference these center points. So, let's grab center rectangle.
Click. Place a center rectangle here. Place a center rectangle here.
Place a center rectangle here. A center rectangle here. And grab that center line one more time.
Let's place a center rectangle here. Highlight the short edge of each of these rectangles. Make them equal.
Let's give them a dimension. In this case, it will be the narrow board width. All right.
Now, click and drag them so they terminate between their respective squares. Click and drag. Click and drag.
Click and drag. What we're doing is we're making footer pieces that connect to each of these beams. Click and drag.
Great. Your final sketch should look something like this. Go ahead and go to Features, Extrude Boss Base.
Go to Blind. Make sure it's pointing up. There we go.
Into our playground. And we're gonna set the extrusion value as the board thickness. Merge result is unchecked.
Great. Let's go ahead and close that out. All right.
Now that we've done that, let's go back to our solid bodies. Click the drop down arrow. Grab that first body.
Go all the way down. Hold shift. Grab the very last hidden body.
Right click. Select Show. Go to the very top and collapse that menu.
All right. And we've just created footers to the walls of our playground. Go ahead and save your work.
Control S. And that concludes this video. In the next video, we're going to create width planes for the very first time.
