FreeCAD for Beginners #3 Offset Sketches and Datum Planes

[Music] in this video we're going to look at offset sketches and using datum planes i'm going to explain why you'd want to use one or the other and it's very important that you understand how to do offset sketches because we don't want to use faces to create our sketches on at the moment the topological naming issue is one where if you use faces to set up sketches when you change the model the number or the reference to the face changes and you basically you will lose your reference and so the model will break so we're going to use offset sketches and we offset them from the plane so you won't have that problem so i'm going to show you how to do that so here we go one thing i want to mention first i am using the latest stable release it's 0.19.1 is what they call it and it is this 24276 from the get um and the release date is the 11th of march so this is the latest download i'm using and i know it's the latest download because i just downloaded it because i had to rebuild my laptop because the thing was dying on me so i rebuild it and reinstall all my software so i'm actually going through the setup at the moment so some things look a little different on my screen it might be because i reinstalled all the software one other thing i wanted to mention i am using if you look down here i am using the blender um set up for my mouse when you install freecad you get the cad setup for your mouse all that does is it it changes how the mouse works so your left button your right button and your wheel will work differently depending on which one of these you choose i choose blender because i use blender in fact this video is being edited in blender all my animations in my video are all done in blender and as you've probably seen by some of my videos we have some um some rendering in blender and some animation of assemblies in blender that i've done so i like to use blender that way my mouse is the same way for free cad as it is for blender for the most part so just wanted to point that out somebody did mention it to me that you will automatically go into the cad version if you just use the defaults so if if for some reason your mouse is not doing miners it's because i'm in the blender version and you might be in the cad version okay with that being said we're going to work on the same model that we had for part two and so we're just going to open that up and use that model now if you don't have that if you didn't if you didn't do part two already what you can do is you can just use any uh box any uh just model anything that's a you know box shape and that'll be fine now one thing to point out i have seen some discussion around workbenches i always start out in the part design workbench so i change my defaults if you go to preferences here and you look at the general so you're on the general tab here general down here it says startup auto load module after startup and you can choose which workbench it should really say auto load workbench so you can choose the workbench that you want to load up so i'm loading up the part design one by default the system loads up start but i like it to load up part design so that's what why mine is in part design when i start out because when i start freak out it starts in part design so again just be aware that sometimes when you start your file you might start into that start interface you need to change up here to the part design and then you'll be in the same workbench also note that you can move these tools around so for instance if your tools are not in the same place as mine you can see i can move my tools around here and have them in a different order so they may not be in exactly the same spot as mine but you will have these same tools okay so those are things to to think about so with that all that being said hopefully that answers a lot of questions uh if you have any other questions please leave a comment below and i'll do my best to answer it and if you have any issues let me know what those are i'll do my best to help you if i can okay so this model should be familiar to you basically uh looks a little bit like a fishy thing but that's what we created before and we created that from a sketch remember and again for people who are beginners to this sometimes it's uh a mystery as to where everything is gone and if i show you this pad i click on it highlight it if i hit the space bar it will disappear then you can see the sketch here this is the sketch that created that pad if i hit spacebar on that now there's my sketch and if i wanted to change that sketch i just double click it and there's the sketch that we originally started with now i'm not going to change it i just just wanted to show you how to access that so i'm going to close that i'm going to go back to my sketch here hit the that turns it off go back to my pad hit the spacebar and that turns it on now what i want to do is i'm going to create a piece that runs along this side and to do that we're going to create a sketch and i want it to be i want to run along this side here so it's going to be in that xz plane so that plane there i can select it there or i can select it over here and i can say okay now my drawing is in that xz plane so all i'm going to do is i'm going to create a box i'm going to create that box this size now remember we can't see this because the model is in the way i can use this guy here which is the switch between section view and full view i'm going to press that now i can see my sketch in full view all right sorry sorry now i can see my sketch in a sectional view but my sketches is fully visible that's what i meant to say all right so let's just um we're going to do some very simple constraints here just to lock this down so that we're using a constrained sketch so make that symmetrical and then we're just going to give it a couple of quick dimensions and for the sake of this model i really don't care what those dimensions are i'm just going to demonstrate something for you but i'm going to make this a little bit bigger just so we got a little bit more space here and i'm actually going to move this whole thing up a little bit and i'm going to dimension a line from here this center point to that end point and we'll call that eight millimeters and there we have it that is a constrained sketch i just added a couple of dimensions and some symmetry and we are all constrained so i can close that and then let's look at our model and there's the sketch visible in our model and it's right in the middle there so if i were to do a pad now if i pad that it's going to pad in the middle i want the pad to be down here on this line here so i'm going to cancel that i'm going to go back here i'm going to go to my sketch that's the sketch here selected here and in this bottom window here there is an attachment for the sketch i'm going to click that and then under that is position click that and now i can see my x y and z position of the sketch if i go into z remember the way this sketch is it's in two dimensions x and y and z is going to be back and forth so if i go into z and i start to move that you can see that the sketch is actually moving so i'm going to keep moving it all the way down to this side and if i remember correctly it's about 40. meet us to the middle yep so now the sketch is right on that edge so i've moved the sketch from where it was i've offset it by 40 millimeters then what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to my pad and say pad and of course i want it to pad in reverse because i want it to go up the side of that guy and i'm gonna make that 25 lawn just for grins and giggles okay so now i have a pad where i wanted it and if you look closely here the reason we got a line here and here is because that sketch is on the same face the same plane as that face so we're exactly the same if you don't like this bottom line there is a way to get rid of that line and you simply go back to your sketch remember once you've created the pad remember the sketch is underneath there so i'm going to go back to the sketch and instead of that being 40 i'm gonna make it 39.99 and if you watch when i tab off here that disappears because i am now a very minute amount of a step there but you're still going to have this line here because that's where this the model shows so that's great if i want to do one pad and i want to put it there that's that's a brilliant solution for that because it won't break with the topological name in but now what if i wanted to put a hole in the edge of this block that didn't go all the way through so it's not going to be part of the first sketch has to be a unique sketch so i can do this i can say do another sketch put it on that same plane that we picked before draw a circle let's say we want it to go here i'm going to use this sectional view again so i can see what i'm doing and i'm going to put a dimension on that and i'm going to call that oh i put a block constraint on it by mistake so i'm going to get rid of that i deleted that and so as i was saying before about these icons if if they're hidden away you get this little line here that lets you open them up so i didn't do that and i missed it this and this and this are very similar looking and i missed that it was that one instead of this one so i actually want this one i want to give it a dimension so i'm gonna call it five and i'm gonna line this with this vertically and i'm going to give it a dimension from here to here we'll call it 13 that's fine so now if i turn that off yep it's inside there so now i have a drawing here which i could do the same thing with the sketch i could go in here change its attachment position to the front of that guy so i can bring it here and then i can pad or pocket it back this way now this starts to get a bit laborious because what if i wanted to do a different shape hole it went to different depths it has to be its own sketch again it's not going to be fun so there is a way around that so instead of creating this sketch the way i just did i'm going to delete that sketch and i'm gonna create a datum plane that sits back here so to create a plane i can create new datum plane and of course i don't want it to be there i can go back to my model and i can select this origin and remember you hit spacebar and it shows you the actual origin of the model so if i go back to where my um to where my date and plane is going to be attached i'm going to hit this guy and i'm going to attach it to the xz plane so now it's attached there and then i'm going to offset this in this direction the same as we did the sketch i'm just doing that for the plane so now i'm going to take that plane to 40 so now the plane is right on the edge there so i can say okay now i have a datum plane and i'm going to turn off this origin so all those planes go back off because we don't need to see them now turn those off so that's our datum plane right there now if i want to create a sketch i say create a sketch it still shows me these sketch planes but it's also showing me that datum plane so if i highlight that datum plane i click it you'll see it selects date and plane here and i say okay now i'm drawing right on that datum plane so i can i'm going to zoom in there a little bit and we are going to some reason my icons went all crazy in that one too so i don't know why that was the case to be honest so we are going to sketch we're going to sketch that's probably because i moved around in the other one so we are going to sketch a circle here we'll put it in the center i'll give it that dimension this time i'll pick the right one of those i'll call it five that's what we said and then we'll just give it a dimension from here to here that's fine say close and then i'm going to say pocket and i'm going to pocket it let's say this one we want to go in 10 mil and now we want a different hole but only goes five mil deep so i'm going to do another sketch pick that datum plane say okay and then this time i'm going to zoom in here i'm going to put in a little square and we will just say this and this are equal we'll give one of those a dimension doesn't that the actual dimension doesn't matter we're just going with whatever it happened to draw and then we want to go from here to here add a dimension again we'll just go whatever it draws at and we'll go from here to here add a dimension and now our little guy is completely constrained say close pocket we're only going to go five with that one so now i have a plane that i can create sketches on to create these different depth holes into my model and if i want to see it without that date and playing on remember you just click on the date and plane over here hit spacebar and that will disappear so now you can see i have two different depth holes and they're drawn from a date and plane so the reason you'd want to use the date and planes if you're going to do multiple sketches from the same place use a date and plane makes it much easier if you're just doing one sketch from a certain place you can just do an offset sketch you can just instead of creating a plane and then creating a sketch you can just offset the sketch itself of course i could offset all three sketches but that adds extra work so hopefully that helps in creating a model with um pieces that are not just a projected sketch in one direction so this sketch is projected in this direction so now you can make different cross members here and it doesn't have to be all one piece um one of the features that you can do here is if you take this back part and just add if we just add a chamfer we can chamfer this thing so that give it a little bit of a feature so there you go so again you can see how to create models and you build up from this type of concept you can build up to a complex model now finally i want to save this file so i'm going to save it as i'm going to call this one third file because we had first file second file third file i actually have one called the file but it's gonna overwrite it and so we can use that in the next video if you enjoyed the video please give it a thumbs up and if you would subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already and please take a look at our affiliate links below that helps the channel if you buy something from those links that will really help us in buying the bits and pieces we need to make these videos even better thanks

Channel: Adventures in creation

Views: 87,187

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

Id: 5iMSQ87Jcis

Length: 20min 58sec (1258 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 04 2021