FreeCAD Beginner #42 Sketcher Copy & Link - You won't believe what you can do with Sketches

[Music] now in this video we're going to look at sketches and we're going to look at how to copy a sketch and use a copy of that sketch and why you might want to do that and we're going to look at linking in a sketch and how you can use a link sketch and why you might want to do that too as always I'm going to show you my version of freecad so I'm at version 0.20.1 and it is get 29410 so I have tried the latest Dev release I haven't seen any uh solution for the topological name in issue I'm going to keep an eye on it once I see that it's working I'll let you know but until then we're going to keep using the current release I am using just so you know I'm using Windows 11. that's the version of Windows I'm using and I am intending to use this on Linux too I have a couple of Linux boxes but I haven't unpacked them yet since my move and just an update on my move I moved to Florida as many of you might know I moved to Florida in August and my name is Ian and we had hurricane Ian just his yesterday um it actually hit down in Fort Myers and those guys were devastated fortunately I lived further up north and by the time the hurricane reached us it was actually a tropical storm we had high winds we had lots and lots of rain some power outages for some people in the area I was fortunate didn't lose my power and um to be honest with you for us it wasn't anywhere near as devastating as it was for some of the people down south and my heart goes out to them I hope they can recover from that quickly okay moving on it seems like my highlighter has got stuck so let me see if I can fix that and I'll be right back okay looked like I had to restart free cam for some reason it was grabbing my highlighter I wouldn't let it continue so let's get on we are gonna create a new file and remember the last video I did was the start macro if you have that you can use that to create these first parts so I've created a file I'm going to create a part gonna create a body and then I'm gonna create a sketch I'm just going to use the X Y plane for the sketch and all I want to do is a sketch here is not important but I'm going to just create something so that we can see how it's oriented and I will just create something quickly so that you can see my sketch and I will Dimension it quickly too and to mention that radius I'm going to Dimension from yeah to here with height and I'm not worried about what these dimensions are I'm just um I just want to have Dimensions there so you can see when I make changes so fully constrained that shape and I'll close that now let's imagine that I want to use that for um a pad in this body and then I want to go on and modify this shape within this body I can do that I can add another sketch and continue on and what if I want a second body that starts out with this shape but has a different modification to it so I want a copy of this sketch in another body well here's how I would do that I'll go to the part I'll create a second body then I'll go to this first sketch and just highlight it I'll right click and I'll say copy and then I don't need the X Y plane because there's already an X Y plane in this body so I'm going to turn that off so I'm just taking the sketch I'll say okay and then I'm going to right click on my body and say paste and now I have a sketch copy of this sketch I'm going to move that I'm going to click on it and just move it into that body now that sketches inside that body and I'm going to turn off this pad and then I'm gonna take this sketch and create another pad this time I'm gonna make it a bit thicker and say okay now if I turn on actually what I'm going to do I'm going to color this one I'm going to right click it and I'm going to say random color so now this one is a color I'm going to turn that one on that one is not a color and I'm actually going to transform it just so you can see it so I'm gonna I'm literally just gonna move the body just so you can see it transform it over here say okay and now you can see I have two bodies made from the same sketch one is thicker than the other now if I go into this sketch which is for this part here I'll go into the sketch and just to make it clear I'm going to turn off the pads so that you can actually see the sketch so I just all I did is highlight the pad and hit spacebar then I'm just going to put a hole through this piece so I'll just draw a hole in there it's in there say okay and then we'll give that a dimension from here this way we'll give it a dimension that Center Point here going this way now I'm a fully constrained sketch for the second one and say okay or close to that I'll turn my pad back on now you can see that that sketch has a hole in it the original sketch is unchanged and I can modify either one of these sketches and it won't affect the other one so I have a copy of this original sketch which I've now modified so I start out with that original shape that I wanted put that into this part and then modify the sketch so I can make a completely different body so that's how we do a copy of a sketch the copy of the sketch is a useful tool if you need a certain shape to be your starting shape and you're going to build on top of that that's perfect so let me get rid of both of those bodies for now I'm just going to delete them both and we'll create a new body and then in this body what we're going to do is we're going to create a new sketch um I'll keep it on next by playing just because I can and I'm going to create it with centered rectangle and I'm going to put a hole in that centered ring rectangle and then we'll just we'll make this one and this one equal it's a square we'll give it one dimension and then we're going to Dimension this circle and we'll give those dimensions okay that one that one and then we'll go on that one so that one Dimension it this way so again we've got a fully constrained sketch and we'll close that and we'll pad that and there is my fully constrained sketch now what I want to do is create a second body and I want to use that sketch in my second body so I'm going to create a body so here's my second body and then I'm going to take this sketch and I'm going to link it this is going to be a link made from this sketch into this body so I'm going to make that link now you can see that this sketch is a link of this sketch one thing that is a little confusing is I can't now pad this sketch if I try to pad it so this is my Active Body and I try to pad this sketch you see I get an error and the reason is this sketch is not inside this body so you would think I could just pick it up and like we did with the copy drop it on the body and it would be in but it's not if you look it it moved it actually went above the body so we don't want that to happen so I'm just going to control Z so how do I get that sketch to work inside this body well the way we do it is we create um a sub-object shape binder so just take this shape binder highlight that sketch click on that shape binder and now I have that binder inside my body and so this body has this binder in it and I can take that binder and I can create I'm going to create a bit taller pad and what I'm going to do is I'm going to color that pad again so just give it a random color then I'm going to take that body so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this first body and I'm just going to transform it out the way so you can see I have two bodies and now what I can do is I can go into this sketch which was the original sketch and I'm going to change the diameter of that hole I'm going to make it 20 sure probably going to break outside if I do that but let's see and I'll close that and now you can see that both sketches change so they're linked so if I make any changes to the first sketch it's going to make changes to the second sketch if I go into this sketch which is the linked version and edit that one and let's say we make this 10. so it's going to be a smaller hole close that you'll see both changed it's because the link is bi-directional so this sketch and this sketch are basically driving each other so if you want to link a sketch and why would you want to link a sketch but you might want to link a sketch if you have something that you've sketched and then you want to keep that exactly the same in both parts should you modify it later so if I have this link sketch I can go into this body I can still make changes so I can go into this body and I can say let's draw us another sketch on the X Y plane and I'll just draw another centered shape close that that I'll make it bigger foreign this body with additional sketches but now if I change this original sketch in the original body or the link sketch it's going to change both of the original sketches so so the important part is when they're linked together you maintain that connectivity you maintain that link to each other so that any changes to the original sketch will change both and I'll show you that one more time we'll go into this one and I'm just going to turn the pad off so you can see the sketch over there a little bit I'm going to draw just a rectangle here and I'm going to go in with this guy and I'm gonna cut that at that and that that and I'm not going to constrain it right now I'm just demonstrating the changes so if I close that you can see I'll turn the other pad back on you can see now that both sketches the original sketches have changed but this body still has that additional pad on it so again very useful if you want to create something from a standard part and then add changes to it that's when I would use a link if you want to create something from a standard part that you're going to modify that original piece then I would create a copy so both work both work well the thing to understand is if you do a link you need to use a binder a shape blender to make it functional other than that very easy very cool good stuff in free CAD lots of power there that you can use and things that you can use it for if you have any questions feel free just leave me a comment below if you like this video and you like the things I'm doing please go ahead and subscribe subscribing is free I know it's 75 of the people who watch my videos don't actually subscribe or they're not subscribed to the channel if you would subscribe to the channel that will help me to continue to to create more videos and then also if you like this video give it a thumbs up so other people can see it if it's if you don't get many thumbs up you know many likes for the video YouTube decides not to show it to people so people don't even know they're not even aware that it exists so if you give us a thumbs up that would be great if you want to join our patreon you certainly can do that if you want to become a channel member you can do that by hitting the join button below again thank you very much for your support I appreciate you guys hanging in there with me we're back on track now create videos every week and I look forward to seeing you in the next one

Channel: Adventures in creation

Views: 19,001

Keywords: FreeCAD, CNC, CAD, CAM, CNC routing, Design, DIY, woodworking, 3D printing, maker, creativity, art, crafts, Blender, Inkscape, Prusa Slicer, OBS

Id: szGowpZgZP8

Length: 15min 50sec (950 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 01 2022