Building a Roof Sub-Assembly with Mirroring, Patterning, and In-Context Part Editing Techniques

In this video, we're going to create the sub-assembly that makes up all of our roof pieces. All right, let's start by opening up our master file. All right, now that we have this available,  let's start a new part file,  close out the sketch if you're in one,  and go to Insert, Part, Master File Playground,  close it out with a green check mark.

It should be fixed in space, perfect. Let's go ahead and gather those roof pieces. Delete Keep Body.

We'll start with this outside one here. Let's call this Save As. We'll call it Roof 001.

Perfect, save your work. Now, save under a new name, Roof 002. Edit the feature and grab the next body.

Save, save under a new name, Roof 003. Edit the feature, grab the next body. Perfect, once you've done that, go ahead and close it out and close out your master file.

Let's open up a new assembly. All right, it's already prompting us to put in some parts. Let's grab Roof 001.

Let's make sure it snaps into place. We'll know that it snapped correctly if we can't click it and drag it anywhere. It means it's fixed on its origin.

Let's go ahead and add Roof 002, Insert Components. There we are, Roof 002. All right, that one snapped appropriately as well,  and let's add Roof 003.

Okay, perfect. We have all the pieces we need to make our roof. So let's save this sub-assembly.

We'll call this one number five,  and we'll give it a name of Roof, SA005 underscore Roof. Perfect. Now, first things first,  I think we can mirror some items over.

So let's create the plane about which we're going to mirror. We'll do Reference Geometry, Plane,  and let's use that mid-plane again. I wanna create a mid-plane that cuts right through this shorter outside beam.

Let's grab this inside surface and this surface here. That should perfectly bisect our roof, and it does. Close that out.

With that plane still highlighted, go to Mirror Components and select this outside surface or this outside beam to mirror. There we go. Let's create a new plane that bisects our roof in this direction.

We'll do that again. Go to Plane. We can grab, let's grab from the original part itself.

That plane and that plane. Perfect. With it still highlighted, go to Mirror Components and grab this piece here.

All right. Beautiful. Save your work.

Now we need to finish the pattern that makes up the open plank pattern of this roof. So let's go to Linear Component Pattern,  select the component you wish to pattern first. In this case, it's this plank.

Set the direction of that pattern. We're gonna pattern one direction,  then mirror on the other side. For this, let's go to,  let's pattern up to Reference.

We're gonna show you a little trick here. In this case, the reference is going to be this inside surface,  and the selected reference is going to be not this surface here of our plank,  but rather this opposite surface. That one right there.

Go to Number of Instances. That's what we want. We want our last surface or our last plank instance to live inside of this outside piece.

Let's set our number of instances to four. See how that looks? Yeah, a little small. Let's go and set it to five.

You can see that as we're adding instances,  it's maintaining an even gap between each of our pieces,  including the gap between the very last plank and the outside border piece. That's because it's actually maintaining a gap between the second to last instance and the last instance,  which we've set in perfect alignment to the outside border piece. That's kind of the little trick that we're utilizing right now.

We can decide how many instances we want and expect that gap to always be even. Let's go ahead with six. Now, before we close it out,  let's go to Instances to Override and go to Skip Instances.

And just like we did when we were setting our staircase back in our master file,  click all the pink dots we want to get rid of. There we go. Close it out.

All right, save your work. Beautiful. Now, about this plane here,  let's go ahead and mirror these new pattern instances.

Mirror Components, grab those four. Perfect, save your work. One last thing we're gonna do before we call this roof done is we're going to add some curved edges to make these less sharp right here on these four corners.

We only need to change this part once and it'll show up in this copy of that part. Now, we could right-click and open the part like that and go right into its part file. Let's take a look at that.

Here we go. But I don't know which of these four corners,  which two are the ones that I actually want to edit. Well, the good news is we can actually edit the part while still looking at our sub-assembly.

So let's close out this part and let's right-click on that same piece and go to Edit Part. But this little piece, this yellow and blue,  kind of two pieces fitting together,  that's what we're looking for right there. All right, now we're technically in this part file,  but we can still see it within our sub-assembly context.

Now that we're in this part file,  any features that we add are going to live in the part file of this plank,  not in the sub-assembly. We'll go to Fillet,  grab this particular corner and this particular corner. Let's set that radius to one inch.

Close it out. And once you're happy with that,  click this button here. All right, now we're back in the sub-assembly.

All right, you can see that it updated the edges of this outside plank, which is good. The problem is that plank is facing the wrong direction. For right now, let's save our work.

All right. Next thing, let's modify this mirror so that this is facing the right direction. So let's find the mirror that made that.

Looks like it's mirror component one. Right-click, Edit Feature. All right.

Highlight the mirror piece itself. And then click this arrow that goes to Next. This is how we're going to set the conditions of that particular mirror.

All right, all these buttons here show different ways that that mirror can be expressed. And you can see the mirror changing each time we push a new button. We want to select one of these options that sets it up so these fillets are on the outside.

So this is what we had before. Fillets were on the wrong side. If we select the button just to the right of that,  now fillets are on the outside,  and it's looking the way that it needs to look.

Once we're satisfied with that,  we close it out with this green check mark. All right. Let's see here.

It looks like we're having an issue. With our pattern. Let's see if we can't fix that.

Oh, as we can see. Yep, there we go. It's still referencing the wrong surface.

So let's change the reference surface. We'll delete that. Select this new surface,  since our pattern has now been adjusted.

Close it out. All right, and that was able to fix it. If that was a lot, I encourage you to review the video.

We're going to be reviewing some of those special techniques in future videos as well. So have no fear. Thank you.

In the next video,  we're going to finally get our general assembly started and start loading it with some of our sub assemblies. Let's save our work.