Building Plank Walkways with Sketch Patterns and Boss Extrude for a Complete Second Floor Frame

Hello, in this lesson we're going to revisit sketch pattern to build the actual planks of the second floor itself, and then we're going to set the outside frame and the inside frame with Boss Extrude. So you can see the two parts brought up, my previous part and the part we were working on together as a course. First thing we want to do is build these planks to create this walkway.

Now in the last video we created this plane called second floor. We want to create a sketch on this plane. We can do that by clicking here in the graphics area, second floor,  or in the feature manager over here to the left, click second floor and then click the sketch button.

We're now facing the second floor directly, although the orientation doesn't really match how I want to be looking at this sketch as I'm building it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and use the scroll wheel to kind of bring it to where I want it to be. Yeah, this is the orientation I'm more familiar with.

And then once I get it close to direct, I'm going to click the spacebar and hit this front face of the view cube, and now I can face it directly. Now if you can,  try to get your sketch looking just like mine, oriented the same way. It's going to make it easy when you start to pattern your planks.

You want to make sure they're patterning in the right direction. Now that we're in a sketch, let's go ahead and make these planks. Well, the plank pattern is going to start with just one rectangle.

Let's go ahead and grab corner rectangle,  and we have a pattern here that we can be coincident to. This is a pattern we can reference. So let's use it.

Let's go down here to the bottom right hand corner. You can see our first plank here. That's the top edge.

It's the bottom edge. Let's start our rectangle at the bottom edge and finish it on the top edge. Make sure not to grab this edge.

That's part of the gap. We want the top edge of this plank here. We can still move it left to right, so let's place it where it needs to be.

We'll move this over so it aligns with the inside rectangle, and move this over. I'm going to take a look at my own sketch to make sure that we do this accurately. All right.

In a previous video, we created a center line that aligned with this beam here,  and it moves down in this direction. You can see that center line here. This is part of why I wanted the sketch to be oriented just so.

Let's highlight this center line and highlight the side of this rectangle and make them collinear. Great. We have our first plank set.

Let's create the pattern to create all the planks moving along this walkway, and there's going to be 21 of these planks here. All right. So first things first, let's go to Sketch Pattern, Linear Sketch Pattern,  and just like before, we want to select our entities to pattern first.

We'll go down here to Entities to Pattern, click the box until it becomes that pink salmon color. We can click all four lines or just click inside the rectangle. Just make sure they have all four lines selected, and just like before, it wants to pattern left to right, or in other words,  along the X-axis.

Let's bring the number of instances to one, collapse this box,  and work in direction two. Let's go ahead and increase this instance count. We can see a couple things.

It's patterning in the wrong direction. It's also too clustered, right? We want to pattern up our playground in this direction. If you're already patterning in that direction,  great.

If not, you can go over here to this reverse arrow button, click it towards patterning that right direction. Now let's fix the clustering. Let's go ahead and just make this four for right now.

That's the spacing of our instances. Okay. Now we want to go ahead and pattern this to 21, but just for fun, let's pattern to 20 and close it out.

All right. Now, so far it's looking okay, but we may discover, nope, we actually need 21 instances. Well,  we can fix that.

What we can do is go down here to this button where it says 20. We can double click it and change the number of instances to the correct number, 21. All right.

That's looking okay. Now close it out with the screen check mark. We can still move the pattern up and down.

So how do we get it exactly spaced perfectly? I'm going to look over here. There's a collinear relationship between this top plank and this sketch right here, and it's going to occur right about this line,  just underneath that line. So let's bring our pattern underneath that line.

All right. Find the plank. There it is.

There's the edge of the plank, not this edge gap,  this one right here. Select that, hold down shift, select this line too, and create a collinear relationship. If you want to double check that you got it right, go ahead and bring up the measure tool and select an edge at the top of one plank and the bottom of another,  and make sure that the distance is 0.125. If it's not 0.125, you can go ahead and undo to free the pattern, and then just use smart dimension to establish what that's going to be.

In this case, let's grab our global variable, gap, and there we go. They're collinear anyway. So let's go ahead and green check mark that.

Now we need to create this pattern for the wider planks. In this case, we have 14 instances. Let's just go ahead and do that now.

Go to sketch,  corner rectangle. Just like before, make sure we're grabbing the lines on the plank and not the gap. There's the top edge of a plank.

There's the bottom edge of a plank. Let's make this line and this line collinear. Let's drag this out so we can work with it a little bit.

What happened there, it was trying to establish a false coincident relationship. I went ahead and said, hey, we don't want coincident. I just want to drag this out.

All right. So let's establish a collinear relationship between these two lines,  the inner rectangle side and the side of that plank. Great.

Double check your work. Make sure it's looking congruent to this. Let's create a new pattern with 14 instances.

Linear sketch pattern,  entities to pattern. We'll click this rectangle. Just like before, make sure we have no instances except for the one on X-axis.

Close out direction one. Direction two. Go ahead and start adding instances.

It's patterning the wrong direction, so we'll change the direction. We'll give the planks some breathing room. Let's bring this to 14.

And it looks like we're missing some lines. Oh, entities to pattern. Okay.

So instead of grabbing the inside, I just grabbed that top line. So I'm going to click inside this rectangle. Great.

I got all four parts of that rectangle. Make sure you have all four lines of that rectangle selected. Close it out when you're satisfied.

And then drag this down until it hits the top of the inside rectangle. And it establishes a coincident relationship, as you can see, based on that icon and right here in the existing relationships menu box. Close that out.