Creating a Fully Defined Ground Plane Sketch with Global Variables and Patterned Plank Layout

In this lesson, we're going to create a ground plane sketch on the top plane. We're going to set dimensions, set references,  create a sketch pattern for the first time,  and apply some of those global variables that we created in the previous video. As you can see here on the screen,  we've got two part files open.

The one on the right is our course part file,  which we will be working on together. And the one on the left is a master model that I created in anticipation for this course. You can see over here the feature tree,  all the features used to create this.

If I grab this blue line and drag it all the way up,  I can suppress all of these features that will come later in the course. In other words, hide them or inactivate them rather. We'll bring it up to just this very first sketch here.

This is what we will be creating today. A top plane reference sketch that we will use as a basic design guide as we move through the course. All right, so let's go ahead and do that now.

Click top plane over here in the feature manager and then select sketch. We are facing the top plane directly. The first thing we wanna create is this outside rectangle here.

So let's grab center rectangle and our first click can be right on the origin and we'll drag it out like that and then hit escape to close that command. Let's give it this 90 degree width,  or I'm sorry, this 90 inch width here. We'll go into smart dimension,  which I mouse gestured into.

You can also click it up here in the sketch. Smart dimension, click this top line and set 90 as that outer width. Green check mark, we'll close that out.

Next, let's create this inner outside rectangle here. We'll grab center rectangle one more time,  click the origin and then just set it arbitrarily for right now. And the green check mark closes this out.

Now we want this border to be even on all sides and as you can see, currently it's not. So to fix that,  let's zoom into one of the corners. I recommend the top left.

Bring up center line over here, underline. Grab this first vertex on the inside rectangle corner and snap it to complete it on the top edge of the outside rectangle. Escape will close out the command.

Then grab another center line. I just did that with a mouse gesture. Grab this vertex here, the same one and bring it to the side line of the outside rectangle and then close it out.

Now that these two lines have been created,  hold down shift and highlight them both by clicking them. Over here on the left, it's gonna ask us with these two lines,  what kind of relationship do you wanna make? Collinear, perpendicular, parallel, what is it gonna be? In this case, we want them to be equal because we want our borders to be equal on all sides. Once we've done that, we click the green check mark,  zoom out with the scroll wheel and we can see a nice even border on all sides.

Okay, great. Now this border is thin or at least it should be as we can see from this sketch over here to the left. So I'm gonna go into smart dimension with a mouse gesture and we're going to set what that dimension is.

So I'll grab this outside edge and then the inside rectangle edge and let's go ahead and make that our global variable by pressing equals and go to global variable board thickness. Green check mark closes that out and do that again over here. All right, now we've got a rectangle that's almost fully defined.

Oops, control Z by the way,  undoes anything that you want to undo. The next thing we wanna create is this pattern right here and this pattern represents how we're going to lay down the planks of the second floor of our playground. All right, so I'm gonna zoom in here.

Now the pattern itself is made up of two aspects. The first is a large rectangle which represents the plank itself and the second rectangle, this really thin one represents the gaps between the planks and since we're building this playground for outdoor use,  gaps need to allow for water and moisture to run through so we'll have to include those as well. So let's go back to our file and let's zoom into that bottom right-hand corner over here.

Let's grab center line and then click the vertex of this inside rectangle corner right here and then just drag it out a certain distance and then make a box. We'll go vertical, back horizontal and then escape closes this out. This is our first plank so let's set the dimension, the thickness or the width rather of that plank.

First we go to smart dimension,  grab this line, click outside of it and hit the equal sign because we're going to be accessing our global variables and go to narrow board width. The green check mark closes that out and then escape gets us out of smart dimension. Let's make the gap now.

We'll build another rectangle with center lines. The center lines are these dashed lines as you can see. Smart dimension, grab this line,  click equals yet again,  go to global variables and make this one gap.

Green check mark closes this out and then go to the green check mark here to close this out again. This is what we call the first instance of our pattern. Patterns are made up of instances where an instance is basically a new repetition moment of that pattern and this is the first repetition moment.

So this is what we wanna pattern. In order to do that, we go up to linear sketch pattern in the sketch tab right here at the top and with any pattern that you create,  the first thing you wanna do is select your entities. So let's go down here to entities to pattern.

This box may be collapsed by the way, just click this arrow. Click inside this box here until it's red or pink and then grab all the entities that you just created,  these center lines. Make sure you get each one,  the side ones and these three here.

Now, there's a couple of problems with this pattern. We can see it's starting to create something with this ghosted set of yellow lines. First problem is it's going the wrong direction,  it's going left to right.

We want it to go up and down. Well, the linear pattern references the X-axis which moves left to right. So let's make sure that the X-axis isn't activated.

We'll go down here to this box here,  yours might have a two in it just like mine. Click this arrow to the left, this bottom arrow,  bring it to one. We can't bring it to zero because that creates an error because we already have an automatic one here.

So let's just make sure this puts one. Then we'll collapse this menu bar here for direction one. Let's work in direction two, the y-axis which moves up and down.

And let's increase the instances that appear in the y-axis. All right, so we're starting to see a pattern form with these yellow ghosted lines. Yours may be going down or may be going up.

Make sure your pattern moves in the direction of your playground. And you can set the direction of the pattern by clicking this reverse arrow until it starts moving in the right direction. Okay, the pattern is moving in the right direction but the instances are way too clustered together.

So let's space them out a bit. If we go down here to this dimension box,  let's go ahead and type in something that gives us some breathing room, say four inches. We're establishing four inches between each instance by doing that.

All right, click out of the box to see a manifest. All right, now it's starting to build a pattern for us. And we can click this instance box and add instances or we can simply type in a number and watch it populate.

Now I'm gonna go back to my original sketch to find out what the magic number is here. In this case, it's 35. So go ahead and type 35 into this box.

All right, so far so good. Now we've created the pattern but we can still move it up and down. So there's a couple of things we wanna do first.

First, if we go back and zoom into that very first plank and gap,  we want every gap to be next to every plank. We'll grab the bottom edge of this new plank and click it to this gap and create a relationship. Now we have a perfect pattern, plank, gap,  plank, gap, plank, gap, and so on and so forth.

But these lines are still blue. They can still move up and down. We want this pattern for planks to go all the way to the very top of this inner rectangle.

So to do that,  the first thing we'll do is we'll see this orange line here. This is the top edge of the last plank of our pattern. We don't want the gap edge.

We want the top edge of the plank. So that's the second line from the top. Highlight that, hold down shift and highlight this top edge of our inner rectangle.

All right, with those two highlighted,  go to our references here on the left and select colinear. It's basically telling the program,  I want these two lines to live on the same theoretical line. All right, the green check mark closes that out.

We have basically a fully defined sketch at this point. We're making great progress. Make sure that your sketch looks like this, okay? Next, let's go ahead and set these beams.

All right, now I'm gonna first create a center line that represents the outer edge of these beams. And I want that center line to line up with this top edge of this gap right here. All right, so let's go ahead and just create a center line connecting the inside rectangle side edge to that same inside rectangle side edge.

Now, you can see my line isn't horizontal. I did that on purpose. That's because I don't want it to create a relationship where I don't want one, you know? I just want it to connect to that line for right now.

I'm gonna make it horizontal by selecting the line,  going up here to make horizontal,  or I can go over here to the left and click horizontal. All right, now let's find out how many planks before we set this line. So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,  10,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21.

Okay, great. So let's go to the 21st instance. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,  10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21.

All right, right about that plank. Take this line, highlight it, hold down shift. This top edge of this plank, highlight it, make colinear.

All right. The reason we're doing this is because we want our pattern plank size to change after the 21st instance. It goes from thin or rather from narrow to wide.

So go back up to the sketch. I'll open it up, move this over to the left. There we go.

Now we have the general location of where we want our two main beams to set. So let's go ahead and create those beams now. We'll go to rectangle, corner rectangle,  go to this new vertex we created,  click it and just drag outside.

There we go. Now on that same line, click it again and just drag out randomly. Hit escape to close out that command.

These beams need to be the same width and height as each other. So let's grab a line representing the width and height of both of those squares by holding shift and we'll make them all equal to each other. Close it out with a green check mark.

Let's set the thickness of these beams. I'm gonna go into smart dimension, grab a line,  hit equals and we'll grab the global variable of beam thickness. All right, perfect.

Escape will close this out. Now we can still move this one back and forth. Let's take a look at the sketch to the left.

We can see that this actually aligns with the center of this inside rectangle. All right, so let's create that relationship right now. I'm gonna grab a center line,  highlight this top line of the inner rectangle and you can see that yellow dot that opened up,  that's the midpoint.

Click it, bring it down to this line here and you'll find the midpoint of that line. Escape closes this out. If we highlight that vertex,  we can see midpoint is a relationship that was created.

Yeah, we just did that. Green check mark closes that out. I want this beam over here on the right to be fully center aligned to that line here.

So to do that, I'm gonna create a new center line,  grab the midpoint, not just any part of that line,  but the midpoint of that line and connect it to that line right there. Escape closes this out. And we can still kind of move this like this.

If we make it vertical, we'll know we have it right. We'll highlight that line and click make vertical. All right, that beam is now fully defined and that closes it out for this sketch.

So let's go ahead and save and close the sketch by hitting the blue button. Let's name this sketch,  in which case we'll name it Ground Plane. Save our work, Control-Save.

And that does it for this video. In the next video,  we're going to create a second reference sketch,  which we'll call the Heights Sketch. We'll set the stair heights, the floor heights.

We'll also create a new plane for the first time.