FreeCAD Boolean Operations in Part Design.

[Music] in this video we are going to look at some boolean operations and we're going to do them in part design we're going to use part design first if we have time i'll show you some of the part workbench boolean operations but they're very similar to the ones in part design so i'm going to focus on part design because that's where i do most of my work and we're starting out basically i've just opened a new file and create a sketch now what we want to do is we want to show you how to do some boolean operations with two bodies i'm going to show you a couple of things that i found a little bit quirky before we get started this is my version of free cad so i'm working with 0.19 and it is revision number two three five four six it's the latest one i've downloaded i'm gonna check to see what the latest one is right now um but this is the one i've been using for a little while now okay so to start with we're going to create a couple of bodies so i need to create a couple of interesting bodies so i'm going to start with something like this and maybe like this and let's have this guy come off here here i just want to create something that you can see which way round it actually works i'm going to zoom in a little bit and we'll do a little bit of trimming up here so we're going to trim this guy and we're going to trim this guy we will trim this one and this one this one oh apparently something didn't like trim in there so i can't we might have to just delete those lines yes it's all one line so we need to delete that guy and then we're good so you can't trim a complete line that has to be a break you know you have to break the line to do a trim so that's why it complained at me so this is going to be my shape and i'm not really going to constrain it now i'll be honest with you if you're going to do booleans you should constrain your sketches because strange things can happen to models if they're not constrained but for the purposes of this demo i'm not going to constrain that i think if you want to see how to constrain things my previous video was on constraints and you'll see it's pretty easy to constrain that shape but we're not going to do it for the purposes of this video so we're going to close that sketch and we're in part design of course i started out in part design before i start the sketch and i'm going to create a pad can hit this button to bring my drawing to the middle so all that does is that centers um everything that you're you have on screen so it fits into the screen and then i'm going to rotate that a little bit so you can see that it is actually already a pad and i'm going to make that pad just so we can play with it i'm going to make it 50 and i'm going to make it symmetric around the axis there okay so we have that shape what we're going to do now is create a second body so let me just okay that guy go back here now this body i'm going to name i'm going to actually give it a name here because when you're doing these boolean operations it's always good to know which one is which and they start out as body and body one body two and body three and he gets confusing very quickly so i'm gonna call this my base item and that's so i can only purely so i can distinguish it from the next item that i create now i want to show you something that's kind of interesting certainly in this version i'm going to select this part i double click on it just to make that part current and i'm going to select a new body so now it puts a body underneath this part and i'm going to rename it now i'm going to call this uh cut item so that's to be i'm going to use in a cut so we're going to do we're going to do a cut we're going to do a fuse and we're going to do a boolean common so now under this cut item i'm going to create a new sketch i'm going to do it in i'm also going to do this in the xy plane and look what happened my my original part has disappeared from my sketch if i hit center there's absolutely nothing there and that's really annoying so i don't know if that's unique to this particular version but what i'm going to do is i'm going to close this and i'm going to take this cut item i'm going to put it outside of this part so now it's at the same level as the part in the tree and when i go back into the sketch and edit it i have that piece there the reason that piece has got to be there so if i'm going to create a piece to cut out of here i need to know where where it's going to be so i'm going to do a simple cut i'm going to i'm going to simply cut a slot i think into this guy and one of the things you want to do is you want to set this [Music] sectional view that way you can see what you're drawing so i'm just going to create a very simple slot and i created there and i think i might create another one that goes this way just for grants and giggles i just want to do something that's you know interesting at least so we're gonna trim this guy up we're gonna get rid of that part and that part can't get rid of that again same thing it's the full line so i have to delete that i'm gonna get rid of that i'm gonna get rid of that i'm gonna get rid of that piece in the middle and exit that select that line delete it select that line and delete it okay so now i have like a weirdo shape there that i can cut out of this guy so and of course in this particular instance i could do that as a pocket if i just did that sketch in the first body and just did a pocket i can certainly do that so you have to when you're thinking about doing boolean operations you have to understand why you might want to do a boolean operation as opposed to just doing a pocket for me if i have the opportunity to do a pocket i'm always going to pick the pocket it's much easier but there are some times when you'll want to do a boolean particularly if you have let's say that slot has a taper on it then cutting that out of this piece would be much harder uh to do or you couldn't do it as a pocket very easily anyway you can probably use the taper um in the part but it would be easier just to create this and do a boolean i'll show you another design in the cut that is actually pretty cool in it and it will um it will show you another good reason for using a boolean cut okay so we're going to close that and now we're going to pad this sketch i'm going to do it as a pad i'm going to do it symmetrical and i'm just going to keep going until it sticks out of this piece so my pad is growing right now and remember that was 50 that piece so as i get to 61 you can see it's sticking out both sides that's basically what i want i'm going to say okay so now if i want to cut this part with this part what i do is i go back to my base item make that current so you double click to make them current if you look at that one's bold now if i double click this one this is now the current one so i want it to be the base item that's current and now i select the boolean operation and you see the base item has disappeared it does that on purpose because it wants to allow you to select the cut item or the fuse item or the boolean item because right now in in part design when you select that body you can then select what kind of operation you want to do with it now the ad body is a little bit difficult to see but when you click that if you watch this button you'll see it sort of depresses you see that the ad body went down so it's kind of a depress on that button personally i'd prefer if they change that to select or something like that like they do with other features but you click that you click any part of that body that you want to cut with and it will do the boolean now it's actually done the boolean because boolean is on fuse and fuse says take this part join it to this part so that worked now i'm going to show you how to do a cut so you just do cut and there sure enough we have cut that part out of the original part and then if i if i wanted to do it as a common you do that now the common looks just like that other one um or the this this cut body looks like nothing changed but it did change because it's only leaving the parts that are common with the original so where this stuck out of the original body the base body this is now shorter so in this case a common wouldn't really make sense but the cut makes sense so there i have my cut and you can see i've cut all the way through because my part was sticking out on both sides so i'm going to leave that as the cut just to demonstrate a cut now if i want to add something to this body or i want to do something else with this body i can always use this base item and create a new body and do another boolean operation you will also notice that the base item is the only body you can see right now the other body's gone in here if you look here there's my cut item body so i can still go all the way down the tree so inside the boolean to the body to the pad that was originally this shape this cut out shape to its sketch and i can edit the sketch and in edit in the sketch and this time i'm going to just turn this guy off so you can see the sketch so i'm gonna just spacebar on the base item and so that allows me to see the sketch a little clearer and then what i'm gonna do is i'm going to modify the sketch so let's say in this case i want to add a radius here and i'm going to make that radius a little bit bigger than that just so you can see it so i'll give it a dimension and we'll call that a 5 radius just so you can see a little better now i'm going to put some constraints in here because it's doing some some weird stuff so i wanted this to be straight up and down there like that so that's basically the sketch that i wanted close that sketch turn on my base item again and now you can see that radius actually changed so you still have all the parametric abilities with the booleans you can still change the sketches and it will change uh your model in the boolean so everything still works still parametric and these boolean operations just basically a way to use a tool the tool in this case being this this uh cut item to to make changes to an existing item now i'm going to show you one that uh is not easy to do with a pocket so i'm gonna i'm gonna just do one more body on this and just show you how that works so so i am going to create a new part or a new file and then a new part and then a new body and a sketch and what i wanted to show you is if i do a sketch here and i create a part that is let me just do it with this guy i create a part that goes like this just go to there say close pad and then i create i'll just say okay at 10 mil and then i'll create another body and i'm purely putting outside of that part so that i can still see this body if that is a bug and it gets fixed i wouldn't do that but so i'm going to create an uh another piece that we're going to add to this one so we're going to say okay and i'll just zip that over this way and i want to do a drawing here it's going to be like that and i want to pad that piece i'm going to do it reversed so there's my pad i'm gonna say okay to that i'm gonna go into that sketch gonna move its attachment just by a little bit all i've done is i've moved the attachment so that if i zoom in there you can't see a witness of it on the back side but it's still is still attached in there and i haven't i have yet to um fuse those together so they are separate bodies at the moment so if i turn that one off it's that body that i just created okay and so let me just turn this body back on go back here and now we're going to do a boolean what i want to do is i'm going to add this to this so let's make that one our current body i'm going to do boolean laminate something's not right ah there you go we're gonna make that current body we're gonna do a boolean gonna add body say okay and now that's all fused together as one part and then i want to create another body outside there and we'll do a sketch render in this plane that's my x z plane say okay and i'm going to just make a square close i'm gonna pad that and i'm gonna reverse that and i'm gonna pad it so that it comes all the way up to there i'll go there and look at the bottom yeah just about got a line in the bottom so now if i say okay and this time i want to take this body that's already current and i'm going to cut from it remember to hit add body i'm going to cut from it that body and i'm going to say cut and i'm going to say okay and now you can see it's actually cut out a hole in there just let me see that you can see it's cut out a hole in there that was that other shape that's something you can't do um with just pockets if you try and do that with pockets can be very very difficult anyway to get to the same solution so it gives you an idea another idea of why you might want to use booleans to do cuts so finally i want to show you how to do a common or why you might want to do a common let's get rid of that we're not going to save any of that so you won't see that on my thumbnail because i didn't take a picture of it um so what we're going to do is going to start a new file and i always add a part and then a body and then we're going to put in something on the xy plane so we're going to start out on the x y plane and we're going to draw a shape so my shape is going to be i'm going to use this guy this one's actually quite useful for um if you want to create a continuous shape a polyline as opposed to these single lines they all come in useful but i like to use the polyline quite a bit so if i want to do something that looks like this maybe see if we can do something that it's going to make sense and we're going to go ahead and here and here and that's going to be my first shape and i'm just going to modify that because apparently i did it that far on that one there you go now what i could have done i could have drawn all that myriad if i really want it all to be exactly the same and of course i can constrain all of this and make it all symmetrical and all that good stuff but for what we're doing now is i'm trying to show you the boolean so i don't want to belabor all the the constraints and all the shapes and all the other techniques i'm just trying to show you these techniques so um of course if i was doing this and i needed to do something that was accurate there are many other things i would do to do that okay so we're going to take this shape and we are going to pad this shape and i'm just going to pad it symmetrically and i'm going to pat it 100 millimeters i was working millimeters i grew up on inches um i actually was an engineer working on machines that were all in inches but i must admit working in tenths of inches you know working in in decimals of inches is great but working in fractions to me it's just more hassle than i need so so i always work in millimeters just because it's it's easier sometimes i even like if i'm doing uh something that's a quarter inch in diameter i'll make it 6.35 millimeters in diameter i don't i generally don't use uh imperial measurements very much anymore okay so that's my first shape now you know exactly what we're going to do we're going to create a new body and again i want that body outside so that i can see it when i'm see what i'm drawing in the sketch because this body will disappear if i leave it in line there so i'm going with this guy and then i'm going to do this drawing in this direction so i'm going to say ok and bring that back to the middle and i'll just give it a little tip around so you can see what's going on so so that's the shape that i drew before was that shape and now i'm going to draw on the side of that shape so i'm on the side of that shape and i'm going to draw something again with a polyline and i'm going to say start here and we'll go to here along here and then we'll come back here and we'll go out here and i'm gonna hit this guy so i can see my lines and then i'm gonna go to here to actually i'm going to go all the way up to here and i'm going to go up to that line there and then i'm going to move this one point no i'm not made a mistake there you go i'll move this point up to here and i'm going to create a couple of other things here so i'm going to take this guy that size and i'm going to take this guy and i'm going to run it to that size and just because i'm gonna get that guy and that guy and make them equal because i want them to be equal and then i'm gonna trim this line and this line and i'm going to trim [Music] this line this line and that'll be good enough for what i want and then i'm going to say close to that and now i'm going to pad that sketch and i'm going to pat it symmetrically and i'm going to pad that for 200 say why not okay and then i'm going to do one more one more sketch so we're just gonna go this way and here we're gonna create a new body and put this body outside here and then we're going to create a sketch this time we're going to sketch it in [Music] this direction here oh good and then that we're going to sketch shape use our polyline again and we'll go from here i'll go here here i'll go back over there and we'll go out this way just to give ourselves some interesting shapes basically no one's gonna go to there and then i'm going to trim that one back because i don't really need that to be all the way along there i'm going to close that i'm going to pad that and i'm going to pat it symmetrically and we'll just keep going until it pops out through the roof boop that should be on both sides now we should we should be pretty good on both sides let's smell a little bit yep we're good there we're good there we go there everything looks wonderful go back here and now we're gonna create um a common so you can probably already see what shape this will leave these commons are a little bit tricky to do to end up with the right shape and i'll be honest with you i haven't rehearsed this so i don't know what the is going to totally look like but we can always change it because we have the sketches so what we're going to do is we'll select one of these bodies to be our current one we'll do a boolean we'll add a body and then we're going to add a body you see how the bodies disappear to to make that nice and interesting so this would be a fuse it would just stick all that lot together a cut might be a problem because it doesn't know where to cut from where and here's the common so as you can see we made a common that has this little shape on it and we have all those angles and all those shapes are all in together and made sort of a little cuff and if i'd have made maybe i should have made that hood down a little bit an angle but let's just say okay let's put that in the middle there you can see you can create a shape and i'm going to let you work with the common and and come up with the shapes all i did is i drew the front the side and the top and then i command them all together and that gives us sort of the basis of a car um and this piece here is bugging me a little bit so we probably should go in and change it but i'm not going to get a little ocd about it but you can see it's it gives you the basis of a shape now we can take this boolean and we can still add bits if we want to put a hood ornament on or if we wanted to add some wheels or whatever we wanted to do we can certainly do that um using the boolean operations and adding more pieces to it um or we can uh you know use other techniques to to come up with the same sort of thing so that is the common and then um the other thing i wanted to just quickly talk about is if you go into part workbench you have a lot of these um booleans over here so you can do this is the two shape boolean this is a cut of two shapes this is a union of several shapes so you can get several pieces and stick them all together or you can see you could do that in part design as well this is the intersection or the common of two shapes and then this one here is splitting tools which is kind of interesting what it'll do is it'll allow you to take one solid and split another solid so you can end up with three parts from two pieces as opposed to just one part and then you can move those around you can explode them and and move them around i'm not going to go into all that in this video so just wanted to make you aware of the part workbench has a lot of these boolean operations in it too for the basics part design has everything you need in this one boolean operation okay if you have any questions you have any comments feel free to leave them in this video if there's anything else you'd like to see feel free to put that in the comments too because i'm more than happy to make a video about something if people want to see it because that makes it more fun for me to actually make it if i know somebody actually wants to watch it um if you've liked the video please click the thumbs up and if you want to see more please subscribe and if you hit that notification bell what it'll do is i'll tell you when i release a new video i'm pretty much releasing them on a weekly basis they do take a little while to put together so i appreciate you taking the time to watch them thanks and i'll see you in the next one you

Channel: Adventures in creation

Views: 9,312

Keywords: FreeCAD, CNC, CAD, CAM, CNC routing, Design, DIY, woodworking, 3D printing, maker, creativity, art, crafts

Id: Uz9W3-wAITI

Length: 30min 15sec (1815 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/SameDaySS]

At 5:00 in the video, I'll tell you what's really annoying, is blaming FreeCAD for unwarranted failure.

IF instead of moving the "CutItem" Body under the Part, you simply use the right-click menu when over that "CutItem" Body and "Toggle active Body," and then create a Sketch, you will see the "BaseItem" above it.

FreeCAD has it's problems and by all means blame it for the stuff that does not work, but please do not harangue it for stuff that does work, but is not understood or used.

[u/Jollyrogr]

Thank you for the helpful video. I seriously spent a couple hours trying to figure out why a pad wouldn’t properly cut from a body only to find out it was because the one edge was coincidental with the body. Extending it a fraction of a mm allowed it to cut.