Building Independent 3D Frame Bodies and Applying Global Variables in Your Solid Modeling Workflow

Let's create 3D features. So with this sketch still open,  we'll go to Basic Modeling Tools,  or rather we'll go to Features, Extrude Boss Base. And just like before, we can click and drag this arrow.

Let's just make sure it's going down. That's the right direction for this particular feature. And then right here,  let's make sure that this dropdown menu reads blind.

And then for the actual dimension of this extrusion,  let's use one of our global variables,  equal sign, board thickness. And if you want to see it update,  go ahead and click outside. Great.

That is good. We'll go ahead and close this out. Wonderful.

All right, I'm gonna go ahead and update this part on the left. Here we go. Next, let's go ahead and start creating our frame.

We're gonna start with these three vertical pieces. I'm gonna orient my model so it's matching, more or less. This little eyeball will hide the sketches I no longer need.

Okay. So first things first,  let's create these extrusions by selecting a face. And I'm going to select one of the faces of my new pattern.

Let's grab this one, hit Sketch. And let's make these three rectangles. The first one is gonna snap right to the tippy top of that plank and right to the bottom of that one.

So let's do that one first. Coincident relationship here. Coincident relationship against that line.

And then just drag it so it sits on the outside. Beautiful. Let's do this one next.

This is going to butt up against this plank and be collinear with the edge of that plank. So let's do that now. Grab the corner rectangle.

Beautiful. Now it's gonna butt up against that plank and be collinear to that plank. All right.

And then we'll go ahead and just extend this all the way down. And then what does it do at the bottom here? Looks like they're collinear down here. We'll grab this edge and this edge and make them collinear.

Great. Let's do this last rectangle here. It's gonna butt up to the top edge of that plank.

And butt to the bottom edge of that plank. Let's grab corner rectangle. Okay.

By the way, as you can see,  I'm zooming in and out frequently to get a better vantage point of my shapes as I create them. I'm using the scroll wheel to do this. I wanna highlight a line on each rectangle representing the width.

Now we're holding shift to do this. I wanna select all three at the same time. We're gonna make them equal.

And then we're going to establish an actual smart dimension relationship. And in this case, it's going to be board thickness. There we go.

Now, Escape gets us out of smart dimension. With this sketch still active,  let's go ahead and make a new sketch. Let's make a feature.

We'll go to Extrude Boss Base. We want these planks to be facing down. And then with the blind selection selected under the menu,  let's use the global variable for wide board width.

Now, here's an important part. You can see there's a box here called Merge Result. It's currently checked blue,  which means it will merge the result once we close out this Boss Extrude.

Let's see what that looks like. All right. It's merged these new solids with the existing solids.

Now, sometimes that's okay,  but in the case of this course,  we're not gonna wanna do that. We want these pieces to be independent. We want them to be their own bodies.

So it'll be important as you move through this course and use the Boss Extrude command,  you'll want to get used to unchecking Merge Result. There we go. We've done that.

We're gonna close it out. All right. Now, these frame pieces are officially their own bodies.

Okay. Let's finish out the outside of this frame with this top cap, this center cap here,  and this bottom cap. Go ahead and follow along.

Corner rectangle. Snap it to that corner. Snap it to that edge.

Just drag it out so it sits where it wants to. Snap it to that corner. Snap it to that edge.

We'll leave it alone for right now. Again, I'm using the scroll wheel to move quickly. All right.

Want these all to butt up against their respective planks. Just like before, let's grab the edges,  make them equal,  and then let's give them an actual thickness. In this case, our board thickness.

Now, when we do Boss Extrude,  go to Features, Extrude Box,  and then we'll go to Cost Base. You can see it defaults to the last dimension we used,  but it's not actually giving us a global variable. And we know that because there's no equals sign there.

So this is almost like a trap that it's setting. It's saying, do you want to do this dimension again? Well, actually we don't. And even if we did, we wouldn't just type it in.

We'd use the global variable. So first things first,  let's go ahead and make sure it's facing the right direction. And instead of putting in the global variable,  which we could do,  let's go ahead and just drop that menu and do up to vertex and then select an edge of one of our existing planks.

You can see it populated that vertex there. We've now told this Boss Extrude to be just as long as it takes to snap to that vertex. Great.

Just like before, uncheck Merge Result,  close out the sketch. All right. So far, so good.

Now we've got a couple of frame pieces underneath that we're gonna have to make too. So let's do that now. The first will be these vertical frame pieces,  which are gonna sit snug against the outside frame.

One, two, three. Let's grab one of these bottom edges. Click on it.

Click Sketch. Let's go ahead and I'll orient my model the same way so we can see what we're doing here. And let's create these three blue rectangles.

All right. So the first one is gonna live right here. It's gonna snap to that inside corner.

We'll just snap it along that edge. The second one, snap to that inside corner and drop all the way down. So let's go back up to this inside corner.

Snap it to that corner. Drop it all the way down. Snap it to that edge.

This last one, snap to corner. Snap to corner. Here we go.

Click and click. It's establishing coincident relationships each time we do this, as you probably have guessed by now. Let's grab these three lines.

We're gonna make them equal because these are all gonna be the same thickness. And then we can do board thickness for our global variable. Or we can grab one of the boards that currently exist,  hold Shift and grab this new board and make them equal.

Let's do that. It gets us the same result,  but here we learn a new way of using our model to design itself. Now, for these boards,  let's make them the same width as our narrow boards.

Boss Extrude, in this case, do blind. Hit the equal sign, narrow board width. Click outside.

There we go. Uncheck merge result. Check the green check mark.

Great. Now for the last frame pieces. These three blue frame pieces,  or the four rather, shown here.

We'll start a sketch underneath one of these planks and let's create those four rectangles. Corner rectangle. One here, snap.

Snap. Nestle it right here, right? Next to this plank right here. Snap.

And then, it's not recognizing the snap,  so I'm gonna actually highlight this and highlight this board edge and make them collinear. It does the same thing. Grab this rectangle.

Let's go ahead and just establish collinear relationships here. Oop, there we go. Highlight both.

Collinear relationship. We can see how these boards are starting to line up. I'm gonna click N to go back to normal so I can start snapping again.

Just a little faster that way. Snap that corner. Snap here.

Let's grab a side edge of all these boards and make them equal. I'm holding Shift and selecting all the side edges. I click equal.

It's still arbitrary what this thickness is going to be,  so let's just make sure we highlight not the entire edge, but just the edge of one of the boards. Highlight that edge as well. Make them equal.

And then, just like before,  let's actually extrude up to vertex and we'll pick the same vertex as our other nested frame pieces. There we go. Uncheck merge result.

Check the green check mark. These are all their own bodies and that's what we want. The last thing we'll do before we close out is we're going to start coloring some of these boards.

Now, for the master model methodology,  we don't want to bring every single body we create into a general assembly. We want to just bring only unique pieces into assemblies and then pattern them in assemblies. So, go over here to the right,  to this beach ball tab right here.

This is the appearances, scenes, and decals tab. The very first dropdown menu, you'll see plastics. Go to low gloss and then scroll down until you find this green low gloss plastic.

Let's match the boards we have here. Let's start with the outside frame pieces. Click it and drag it onto an outside frame piece.

We could color just the surface,  color all the pieces made by that feature,  color just the body, or color the entire part. Let's always just color the body for now. All right? Now, since we've already established this first appearance,  we don't have to make new ones.

We can just go to the appearances tab if we navigate with this right arrow, click that,  right click green low gloss plastic and click edit appearance. What parts do we want to edit? Make sure that the bodies, selected bodies,  is what we're editing. And then let's go ahead and grab all the outside frame pieces,  because they're each unique.

They have their own unique dimensions. Let's grab this first plank of the smaller pattern,  of the narrower pattern rather. And let's grab the second and third from the top planks of the wider pattern.

Let's go ahead and close that out. I'm gonna take a look at what's unique underneath. And it looks like it's just this long board here.

All right, perfect. So, right click, edit appearance,  grab that long board, close it out,  and make sure we didn't miss anything. All right, it looks good.

This is a great time to save your work. Control save, by the way,  I use these arrows to navigate back over to this puzzle piece,  so we can see our feature tree yet again. Save your work, and that'll finish up this video.

In the next video, we're going to begin to hide sketches,  and we'll explain why we would do this. We'll also use CutExtrude for the first time to establish the location of what will be the beams that make up the structure of our playground.