FreeCAD 0.20 For Beginners | 2 | Create a simple model and export to STL in Part Design

hi and welcome back to part two of the beginner's course for free cad we're looking at free cad from a beginner's perspective but with emphasis on the fundamentals and workflows in the last video we looked at how to set up freecad some basic preferences and how to use the navigation device with a simple sketch to navigate freecad to get the best out of your experience in this video we're modeling something from the ground up and exporting that out to file as stl format so let's have a look at the techniques that we're going to use in this course if you like what you're seeing please subscribe to the site i also have a co-fire or coffee site that you can donate to if you so desire and that's at ko hyphen fi dot com forward slash min g also run a patreon where you can subscribe and get extra content and that's at www.patreon.com for slash mango jelly solutions any money that's kindly donated will be used to expand the channel so this is having the workflow we're going to be using we're going to be using something called a part design workflow and this will be used in cooperation with another workbench called the sketcher and we're going to be going back and forth from the sketcher to the part design creating sketches for pads and pockets and using the part design to actually create those pads and pockets after that we're going to be using dress-ups in the part design to add fillets we're next going to be using the finished product and outputting it as a file as a model to be used somewhere else say in another 3d package and this is the object we'll be creating now from experience i know i can create this object in a number of different ways any new object we come across we need to examine and decide which techniques we're going to use this involves breaking down the object into its individual parts so for instance if we look from the top we can see we have four holes a rectangle with curved sides and a rectangle that is extruded out from the center and also has curves on the edges it's a good idea to have a look at this in individual profiles so we can see from the left that we just have a t so in my mind i can model this from the top down without the need to go from the side to add any geometry from the side i also know that i can take the approach from the left profile this side and loft profile through this and then curve off the edges we're going to go from a single plane so from the top plane and then we'll introduce multiple planes as we go so we're in freecad we've got it open and we create a new document either from this icon or we can come up to the top left you'll see that we have two tabs down the bottom which we can close the start page we don't need that this tab is same name as our current document let's first save this document so come up to file save and i'm just going to call it example1 so we've got our document saved and we can use this drop down to start our process in the part design now in the part design workbench we have two tabs along the left hand side we have the model tab that shows a tree view so each time we add a body or an object to our screen it will appear here or if we do an action and then we have the task now in the part design this guides you through the part design process so it's asking us to create a body if we click on that what will happen is that we'll get the next stage to create a sketch if we jump over to the model and click on that you can see a body has been created with another object inside and this is invisible you can see it's grayed out it's not disabled it's just invisible let's now create a sketch and click on create sketch it's going to ask us what plane we want to place this on so we're going to start modeling in 2d and then convert it to 3d with 3d actions let's take a look at our model we're going to be modeling everything from one plane the top plane now this is known as the xy it's like you're looking down on your workpiece onto the object so i can see i need a rectangle with curved edges and holes in each of the corners for this project we're going to be creating those curved edges as something known as fillet these are known as dress up actions and they should be done last of all just to finish off the object so i need to select a plane now i want the xy plane and you can see this xy plane lane here i'm going to select it from this side we can select it from the screen if we want but it's best to select it from here you can see them highlight as we go over them now if we look at the xy plane and look at our navigation cube we can see how it's orientated and they're orientated the same so top is xy front is xz etc let's hit ok and what will happen will be thrown into the sketchup and you'll see that we're looking down from the top and we're looking onto our workpiece and we've got the green and the red axis x and y so now we can put some geometry on the screen we look up our toolbars these may not be arranged in this manner if you want to move these about you can click on the divider here and drag these into position so we can drag them wherever we want if we go too far then these will be shrunk and you'll get the chevron which we can drop down and get to the other parts in there if you click on these to undock this window then we can actually dock this wherever we want sometimes it can be a bit awkward to get this back and to get it back best idea is to come over to the left hand side hold it there for a couple of seconds until you see the window appear and then drop it into place now to add any of this geometry running along here such as a rectangle or you may see it defaulted as a centered rectangle we just select the item from the screen and then you'll see the mouse pointer change to a crosshairs and underneath that you'll see a red rectangle so that's the last tool you selected it's worth going over to the left hand side and having a look at some of the options here before we start let's bring this out a bit you can see we've got the solver message this will change constantly when we place geometry onto the screen we've also got the edit controls in here if we expand this out you can see there's a number of checked options i've got the auto constraints checked and the avoid redundant order constraints also checked that means that if i hover over any of these lines you'll see an additional icon appear by the right hand side of the rectangle or whatever item you selected from the toolbar this additional item is a constraint so if we look and match it to our toolbar you can see we've got the point online constraint or point and object constraint and if i hover over this center point you can see we've got coincident constraint this one here this means when i place this rectangle i can constrain it to anywhere on here for instance let's place my pointer over this line click and then place the pointer over this line you'll see a number of red items appear around the object and we have constraints at these points so you can see we've got the point and line constraint and the point of line constraint here if i did the same here and moved over to the center point you see we've got a quincean constraint and i come out and i can drop it wherever i want and that'll be constrained to that center there hit escape get the mouse pointer back or hit the right mouse button and we've got our point back we can now manipulate these into position you can see the constraints are stopping the object from moving from certain points so this point line constraints keeping it on this vertical axis and the same for the horizontal if we don't want those we can click on the constraint and hit delete on the keyboard and this will move us off of that constraint you can see we've got this constraint here another way of actually selecting that is come down and find the constraint along the left hand side in the constraints box and we can click the constraints and you can see the constraints here's the coincident constraint we've handed it's there and they're highlighted in green so let's select one constraint and come up and find that in here so you can see the constraint there and just hit delete and therefore we can move this off that line these other constraints can be moved as well so we can click on this one and say delete it and now this isn't kept horizontal this can have some angle so let's remove this geometry and i'm going to remove it with a box selection let's shrink this down and i'm going to click into spare space hold the mouse pointer down and draw a box around what we have everything is highlighted in green if i want to say just delete everything except for this line here i just click it again that turns white and now we can hit delete let's get rid of this one as well hit delete again so let's create our rectangle in here now i'm going to drop this down and use a different rectangle the centered rectangle so you can see we've got the rectangle icon by the side of our mouse pointer and i'm going to hover over this center point here and create a question constraint click now i haven't got my mouse pointer held down i'm just going to bring this out and click again you see we've got the number of constraints and we've also got something called a symmetry constraint going across this point so these two are symmetric constraints that's found here i'm going to right click so i get the mouse pointer back and we can see how that symmetry constraint if i click on this point and drag it we can see how everything's kept in symmetry it's just a symmetry across this center point that sets some height and width so i'm going to select one of these lines this one here and set a width also known as length which is a length and i'm going to say about 100 millimeters there i'm also going to set the height this one here set the height you notice we got a change behind it everything's gone green let's see what's just happened so i'm just going to cancel out here you see it's gone back to white and we're going to scroll up to the top notice our solver message has changed under constrained 1 degrees of freedom that means this can be actually moved in one degree of freedom so one direction i know this is two directions it's counters one because it's just along the vertical we can find that degree of freedom by clicking on the one dof here and you'll see in green the points that are not locked down so these points aren't locked down minute we add a height so at the moment i've got the wrong selection because if we look hit okay you see we've got this line selected and these two points selected so let's take those into selection so we must click instance spare space and then click on this line again and add the height everything's gone a bright green behind and we'll get to that in a minute let's type in 50 millimeters and hit enter what we have is a fully constrained sketch you can see it's saying fully constrained this is important in cad because it means this can't move so it's not going to move by accident and it won't destroy any geometry that's placed on top of it so it's fully constrained down so let's hit close and see what we have we've gone back to the part design because we create the sketch from the part design and we've got this sketch here let's go to the model you can see the sketch has been selected and it's inside the body so this is known as the active body if we look at this body and right click you can see we've got toggle active body when this is bold that means it's active any sketches i add will get added to the active body one other thing to look at is the access cross so i've got to view toggle axis cross you can see our axis cross is in the center here now this is relevant because it's where we're going to transform this body from so we can actually transform this body and the handler will be placed in here so this is the center point of the body and this is controlled by the sketch so if i double click the sketch you can see if i add some angle to this we've got our axis cross sitting here and this is the point of origin where we started this from so this is the sketch if we moved geometry over then our body will be starting here so the first sketch determines where the point of rotation is going to be let's close this and get back to our modeling now we've got the sketch it's fully constrained and it's known as a closed sketch so we can pad a closed sketch in the part design so padding means extrusion so we're going to screw this up using a pad command now if we look along the toolbar we can see a number of different colored icons so we've got red ones here or red and blue and then we've got the yellow ones here yellows are additive red are subtractive so if we add a material like a pad their additive if we remove the material away from this like a pocket this attractive let's pad this sketch i can see it's been selected because it's highlighted in green but it's worth just selecting it from the left hand side here and using the pad option or coming up to the part design and create an additive feature and pad on the left hand side in the task you can see we've got another window that's appeared the pad parameters and this tells us how this pad is going to be applied to the object so i want to apply a five millimeter pad to this if i click off you can see that shrunk down to five millimeters now we've got a number of other options which we're not going to go into we're just going to keep this simple let's hit okay now we've got the base for our objects we're going to create another sketch on top of this to add the holes now we could come into the pad and add the holes here but i'm going to go and click on this face now i clicked once and add a sketch to that face to add the holes if you double click you'll notice that the body has been selected double click selects the whole object just click off and click that face and come up to the sketch icon create a sketch and that will add the sketch to that face you can see the sketch laying across that face we're still from the top plane looking down we can see that sketch has been aligned with the face let's add some geometry now for the geometry we want to add our holes going across here so we're going to use the circle and we're going to pocket these holes so we're going to create these circles as voids in this piece of material i'm just going to click pull out the circle click again and we're just going to place the number of circles in the approximate vicinity of the corners that's add some constraints to these so i want five millimeter holes now i can come in and click this hole or this circle and add a diameter constraint so constrain diameter like so and we could set that to let's say 10 millimeters so 10 millimeter holes so that's 10 millimeters but i wouldn't then go and set all these to 10 millimeters because this may change and i want all these to stay in relation to this one there's two ways of doing this we can set the first one and then click to select so i'm just clicking on all of these edges and coming up and using the quality constraint and that sets those all equal to this one i'm just going to come up to edit and undo another way of doing this let's click on this constraint here and just hit the delete so delete that constraint is to select them all and then use the radius again select all of them and come up and set the radius and we'll set that one to 10 millimeters you can see the quality has been placed all the way across there so these are all equal now but they're still not constrained down they're not in the right place so we need to do that i'm going to click on top so we're looking directly down on here and i want to reference the box underneath this pad underneath to do that we need to pull in the geometry now because if we go to the model we can see that we've got a number of items that's added here so we've got the pad that's been added and the sketch underneath we can see they're in the same body so anything in the same body we have access to let's click on this little icon here the external geometry tool this allows us to pick up points so we hover over the point here or here you can see the vertex is being highlighted and also the edges if i click on that vertex here i've pulled in that point i can pull in more we're just going to pull in one for the time being and press the right mouse button to get the points back and we'll come back over to task and see what we have if i scroll down to the bottom let's bring this out a bit you can see we've got elements and we've got a purple cross if i drop down the mode to external we can see that point five five point is a standard geometry that's been pulled in this one here we can use that in our constraints so i'm gonna click the center point of this circle and this point and use horizontal distance of 10 mil and also do this again so i'm going to pull this constraint out and push it to the side and this one and this one and use a vertical constraint again of 10 millimeters you can see this one's gone green so it's fully locked down it's this one is fully constrained but the others aren't so we've got constrained geometry but unconstrained geometry around the outside let's start constraining these geometries now so i want to select this point and this point and keep them in line so this keeps in line with this one we could go through and select this point and pull in geometry from our external source our steno pad and do the same but it ends up getting messy so we want at least a datum constraints these are called data and constraints because they've got data added to them the least data and constraints a lot more easy to control and that makes our sketch a lot more neater so to put these in line with each other we're going to use the horizontal and vertical constraints now you probably saw those in previous pad we had lines that went here and here they're not only just for lines they can be used for points as well so these are at distance so i can take this point and this point and add a vertical constraint in there and if i move that they all move together and we can do the same with this point and this point we're horizontal these move now and this one now i want to do the same with this point and this point in here if we have trouble with all these i'm trying to get this point can't really see in there let's click off to unselect that that's click constraint this one here and come up to it and there's a tick by the side of it if i uncheck that it hides it from screen let's do it with this one as well let's hide that one now i can see this point in here so i'm going to click it and click this one and keep those in mind horizontal constraint and we're going to do the same with this point and this point and keep those in mind so i shouldn't be able to move this left or right but i can still move it up and down let's have a look at our degrees of freedom so we've got two degrees of freedom so we've got up and down here and we have left and right here and if i click you can see these have been highlighted so we need to lock these down somehow to do that we're going to do the reverse here so we're going to do this one over here so that's bring in the external geometry and bring in this point hit escape or press the right mouse button to get the mouse pointer back and select these two points now watch the under constrained degrees of freedom place a height it's changed to 1 now so let's type in 10 and you notice this one's gone green so we've got one degree of freedom let's click that and you'll see these two points show unselect them by selecting space so let's select this point and this point and place some horizontal length in there and set that to 10 and you can see already it's fully constrained and everything is green so hit okay and we've got our constraints and we'll just bring those out let's come back over and i'm just going to show those ones that i made invisible so fully constrained let's come up and hit close and if i click off you can see the sketch has been added to that so you can see the white sketch if i add some rotation to here we want to create pockets with this sketch so we want to pop it through to wall to create the holes for this item you can see that if we followed the body down we've got a green arrow and this is known as the tip so this green arrow there it's the tip it's the very last action so let's select the sketch and come up to the pocket or come up to part design it's a subtractive feature so come down to the subtractive features and create a pocket you can see those pockets have gone through five millimeters now if we set this to say one millimeter we'll get a pocket that only goes part way through now if we drop the type down and go to first that takes us up to and past that first face so that's gone all the way through the bottom which is what we want that's it okay we get another action in our model tab you can see the little green arrows in there and that's the pocket at any time we can come in and change this so i can set it back to dimension and that will change that pocket there let's cancel out and now we've created the base for our model so looking back to this we can see we've got this base here we have an applied the fillets because that's a dress up feature and we do that last of all there's a reason why we do that last now i'm going to concentrate on this feature i can do that still from modeling from the top plate so we look at this we can see it's just a rectangle and that rectangle has been extruded upwards if we ignore the fillet here we can see that the rectangle is the same width as the base so back in freecad and we're going to model that feature make sure you're saving regularly as well can i either use a control s or file save and we're going to start modeling a rectangle in here now for this we're going to do the same make sure nothing's selected and select the top face and we're going to click on the sketch icon create sketch now i'm going to pull in some geometry because i wanted button up against this line here so i'm going to pull in this line and this line and you can see those are coming and we scroll down to the bottom we can see the two lines off pulled in from the base let's create a rectangle so i'm going to come up to the rectangle this time i'm just going to use a standard rectangle click on that i'm going to use the auto constraints and hover over this line point on line constraint click once and move the mouse over to the other side and again use the 0.09 constraint you see it's gone over this hole which doesn't matter for the time being because what we're going to do is make symmetry across this line here to do that press the right mouse button get the mouse pointer back and click this point and this point and these two points we want centered on this line so selected the two points first and then select the line and use the symmetry constraint it's gone orange this means it's over constrained if we go up to the top you can see we got redundant constraints let's say number seven what may happen is that you may get the report view pop up here and if you remember back to when we set the preferences you need to go in there and uncheck the show report view on errors and that's at the beginning of the video where we went through the settings let's click on that redundant constraint number seven and hit the delete key you can see that's removed that redundant constraint but it's still not fully constrained we've still got one degree of freedom which is this way i'm going to slide one of these lines doesn't matter which so this line i'm going to set a distance i'm going to set that one to five millimeters and hit okay we've now got that sketch on the surface and we're going to pad that sketch so hit close make sure the sketch is selected and use the pad again it's asking us for the length let's have a look at this length now i want something like 25 millimeters for the length so we can see that length is in there and that model is starting to take shape let's hit okay now we've got the shape of our model but we need to finish it up let's compare this with our model at the moment so we've done this part and this part with the holes we now need to add the curvature going across here to do that we're going to use something called dress up and this is the finishing feature so this is thing you should use last of all you shouldn't place geometry on top of this because this is used as a way of making the object look more subtly pleasing and also to clean up any sharp edges to save from injury we're going to bring this around and look at the edges so the first one i'm going to do is this one here we're going to do curvature that cleans up this edge to do that i'm going to select the edges so this edge that runs across here and this edge that runs across here control select those i'm holding down the control clicks i select one hold down the control key select the other and come up to part design apply a dress up feature and apply a fillet this curves these edges off now if we come down to the left hand side we can see we've got the edges and a radius and we can decrease this and see what happens on the right hand side if we go too far the flip will go into error so if i click again you can see it's disappeared and this has gone into error so if i hit ok now you can see we got failed to create fillet and we've got the report view that's popped up now we can turn that off by going to the edit preferences output window and you see i've got show report view on warnings unchecked and show report view on error let's uncheck that and okay get rid of that one and hit okay see it's come up failed to create fill it which is absolutely fine and we've got no report view showing let's bring this fill it now so 24 i'm going to go down to say 20 and hit okay we've now got that fillet there let's do the same with these edges this time i'm just going to select one and click the fillet tool from the toolbar this time you see that edge is added in there and i'm going to set this to 10 millimeters so i typed in 10 and i've clicked off that does me but i want to add more edges to do that we click add we locate our edge and click it and come around again this ad is still selected so we can just click on that edge if we accidentally add an edge say this one then we can just remove it from here hit remove and we have to select the edge so click and it disappears anytime we can just tweak the radius to see what it looks like we'll add one more make sure the ad has been selected and click and just tweak the radius and we can see that's all in there nicely let's say okay so we've got one for there and then the next filler at any time we can see what our work is like at any stage we can see these have all been hidden but we can bring them back by pressing the space bar you can see that our tip action has been greyed out but this is still our tip and we can see the fillets are no longer there and as we move up we can see how this object has been built just click on the last fillet press the space bar at any time we can double click and adjust this so let's add the last fillet so i'm going to click on this line inside and add the filler and we'll increase the filler to about five millimeters let's add another one on the other side click add click the edge and hit ok we've now completed the build examining the tree view you can see we've got a pad and inside that we have a sketch and this is the sketch that's been built by i've just pressed the space bar on there just to show where that sketch is and to show it on the screen just press the space bar on the pocket and come into the sketch and press the spacebar on that so you can see the sketch in white around those holes same for this pad the sketch we see the pad there and lastly we've got phillips pressing the spacebar as we go through and we can see what's happened we can hide the sketches by clicking on the sketch from the screen as well with highlights on the left hand side and press the space bar so the next thing is to export this out as something like an stl to allow us to 3d print it or use it somewhere else say in another 3d program to do that we need to select the last action from the left hand side here so this one here and we just go to file and export and it'll ask us the file name and also the file type now if we come down we can see we've got stl which i'm going to use click on that we need to specify the extension because we've got two extensions here we've got sdo and ist so we need to specify that so just type in stl and we can save it that's exported out we can even export out this one this filler the one without the curve edges here and we'll click on it file export and we've got bodyfillet001 dot stl and we can save that as well i'm going to create a new document so we can have a look at those stl files click on the new document we've got two open so you can see we've got the example one here and the unknown and count to file import and let's find our stl file here they are so i've highlighted both those using the shift or the control and hit open so we've imported two stl files and click on the first one and press the space bar you can see this is the one with the filler in here and we'll just press the spacebar again and click on this one and press the spacebar and this is the one without that fillet so that's it for video two we've created an object on a single plane and now we're going to move on to video three where we're going to create an object on multiple planes and also output to a technical drawing i hope you enjoyed this video and i hope to see you in the next one if you like what you're seeing please subscribe to the site i also have a co-fire or coffee site that you can donate to if you so desire and that's at ko hyphen fi.com for slash ming0 also run a patreon where you can subscribe and get extra content and that's at forward slash mango www.patreon.com solutions any money that's kindly donated will be used to expand the channel thanks a lot for watching and subscribing and i'll see you again soon

Channel: MangoJelly Solutions for FreeCAD

Views: 143,598

Keywords: CAD, three, 3D, CNC, Printing, solidworks, autoCAD, freecad 0.19, freecad 19, freecad basics, basic course, fundamentals, learn freecad, freecad beginners, freeCAD 0.20

Id: uf32NAq-Rsk

Length: 39min 50sec (2390 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 03 2022