Adding Realistic Ring Connections to Your Slide Model Using Curve-Driven Patterns in CAD Design

Hello, in this video we're going to create this ring feature on our slide to add a little bit more realism to the model. And as you might see in the real-world, these rings represent the moments where pieces of the slide attach together with nuts and bolts. We're going to give that realism to our own model.

Now, as you can see, this is a pattern, but it's a pattern that moves in an organic direction. This is a new type of pattern called a curve-driven pattern or curve pattern. And like every pattern, it requires at least three things.

The first is the thing being patterned. The second is a pathway or a direction along which that pattern occurs. And the third thing is, is a number of instances within that pattern that's greater than one.

Now, what makes the curve pattern unique, and I'll open up this feature so we can see that, is it also requires a face. Now, what this face is going to do is it's going to establish a perpendicular relationship with each of the instances being patterned as they move along that curve. If this face wasn't here,  we would still have these instances occurring at these points on the curve, but there's nothing to keep them facing the right direction.

This ring might be, you know, disjointed or kind of moving off in a random direction, this one too, and there's no consistency. The face establishes that perpendicular relationship so that at any given instance along that curve, every single ring is facing the right direction. That's what we want to do.

So let's go ahead and make those features now. First thing you want to do is create the thing that's being patterned, and that's this ring here. We'll go into our model, start a sketch on this surface.

Let's convert the edge of this slide and then offset it. Make sure it's offsetting to the outside by one inch. Close that out.

Go to features, make sure it's set to two inches, uncheck merge result, and then check the green check mark. All right, save your work. We have created the thing being patterned.

Now, let's create the line about which it's going to pattern. All right, now this is going to be based off of the projected curve that we made earlier. So let's go to 3D sketch, to the drop down menu here, and in our feature manager, let's highlight the projected curve feature and then click convert entities.

Perfect, we have our curve for our pattern. Close that out, save your work. Now, next we need to create that surface, and that surface needs to run directly through the center of our slide from bottom up.

Okay, lucky for us, we have a sketch that can create that surface for us. If we start a new sketch on the top plane and go into our projected curve, we have that top plane sketch that we used earlier. Let's go ahead and convert that entity, and let's also drag out the ends just a bit.

We want to make sure that surface cuts cleanly through every single point of that slide. So let's make it a little bit bigger than the slide itself. Close it out with a green check mark, and then close out that sketch.

While that's still highlighted, we'll go to surfaces, extruded surface. And again, if you don't have this tab,  simply right click, go to tabs, and toggle on the surfaces tab. We're going to go to extrude surfaces of our new sketch, and just like any other extrusion, it has that arrow.

Let's just pull it up, make sure it cuts through the entire thing, and we can even give it an exact height. Great. Once you've done that, close it out.

All right. We have everything we need to do our curve driven pattern. Let's do that now.

If we go into this feature tab here,  go to the drop down menu under linear pattern, we'll see curve driven pattern. And just like any other pattern, we first select the thing that's being patterned. It's the easiest way to go.

We'll go down to bodies, highlight the box, select that. Great. Now the direction that's where we put our curve.

So for that, let's go to the feature manager here,  click that 3D sketch we just made. And there we go. Now it's not patterning anything because we haven't given it the surface yet.

So to do that, we'll go to face normal. This box here,  this is basically us establishing the surface. That's going to be normal to every instance.

Click your surface, click this middle part. That's perfect. All right.

Now it's ghosting in what that pattern is going to look like. And we can increase the instances. That's a lot.

Let's bring it back down to four. That should be appropriate. All right.

Close it out with a green check mark. Beautiful. Now let's just find one of these rings and right click and hit isolate.

Beautiful. It is a perfectly good ring facing the right direction. We'll exit isolate.

We don't need some of these extra bodies. So let's go ahead and delete them now. Under the feature tabs, we would normally see something that says delete body.

You might also find it in surfaces. If you don't have it here, like I don't have it,  let's go ahead and search for it here. Go to delete, keep body, click it, make sure the features tab is the one that's selected and then drag it, adding it to that mix.

This is a feature that you'll use a lot. You'll want to keep that handy for yourself. Once you have that, click it.

You can either choose to delete bodies by selecting them, or you can keep the bodies you select and it deletes everything else. So let's go ahead and make sure the delete bodies is checked. It asks for the bodies to delete.

Let's delete the face. It's no longer needed. And we don't need this ring at the very end.

So let's delete that too. Great. Just so you can see what it looks like if we had keep bodies checked, I'll show you.

We'll go back in, keep bodies, and it deletes everything but those two. That's not going to work. So let's go ahead and fix that.

All right. Beautiful. Once you've done that, save your work.

All right. Now, when the child goes down this slide, they're going to need a cutaway so they can sit up comfortably and get out of the slide. So let's make that now.

Let's create a sketch on this surface here and let's go ahead and just convert that circle. And why don't we draw a line that goes directly through the center of that circle? There we go. Everything should be black.

Let's go to our trim tool and let's trim away the bottom half of that circle. So it just leaves the top half. This will be our cutting tool.

Let's go to features, extrude cut. It's a little too far. So let's make that say 18 inches.

Why don't we bring that to 24, see what that looks like. That's a little bit better. Why don't we make it 36, cut right to where the curvature changes.

That looks pretty good. All right. We'll go ahead and close that out.

All right. This is a little sharp. So let's add some fillets here to smooth that out.

We'll go to the fillet tool here and then select these edges. Let's give it something a little bit larger and hefty. Six inches is good.

Now for this, I'm going to do asymmetric, right? And here it's asking you what the fillet degree is going to be as it moves up this surface and down this surface. So for the first part, let's just make both of these boxes six. That is a perfectly symmetrical fillet, filleting six inches this way and six inches this way.

But if we start to toggle,  we can see that we can only grow one side at a time. And that's a way we can get a more organic looking fillet. Now, in your case, it may be filleting the opposite direction.

If that's the case, simply just click this directional arrow and that should fix it for you. And if you need to change which of the fillets is being changed, go ahead and highlight items to fillet and then hit the directional arrow that way. There we go.

Okay, great. Let's make it move, say, nine inches up the side of the slide and move six inches down the front of the slide. Great.

It should look something like this. Let's close it out. And speaking of fillets, let's go ahead and just soften all these edges here.

Let's go to fillet. It's still set to asymmetric. If you go down to fillet parameters, you can set that back to symmetric.

Let's pick something a little more reasonable like one inch and then just grab some of these surfaces. Actually, okay. So it's having an issue and it's probably occurring right here at this corner.

So let's go ahead and delete each of these. We can do one by one or we can click this dropdown menu and click clear selections. Let's fill up this corner here.

We'll do that first and we'll set that, say, to six inches. All right. Looks pretty good.

A little bit big. So let's make it three. All right.

Close that out. Now let's soften all the edges once and for all. We'll go back to fillet.

Make sure it's set to one for items to fillet. There we go. It now has a clean pathway with this new fillet added at these corners to connect an entirely completed fillet all around that slide.

Do it on the top and the bottom. That looks pretty good. Let's close it out with a green check mark.

All right. That's starting to look like a slide. All right.

Let's save our work. That'll do it for this video. In the next video,  we're going to create the legs that hold the slide and in doing so, we're going to explore the draft tool for the first time.