FreeCAD for Beginners pt.5 - The Mirror Tool

welcome back to another video in the free card for beginner series and today we're going to take a look at the mirror tool so we're in an empty workspace and by now you should probably be picking up the workflow and i should be able to speed things up a bit in terms of these tutorials first thing we always do is come up here and we create a new path and make it active then obviously we create a body so that we can create a sketch so we're going to create the body inside the body we create a new sketch and we select a plane that we want to use in this case i'm going to select the x y plane hit ok and we're ready to sketch once again we're going to design something really simple just so i can emphasize and show you the mirror feature so let's go up to our menu and we're going to grab the rectangle tool then we're going to click anywhere on the screen drag out a rectangle and now of course we have to go and add our parameters so we're going to do that as well because it's good practice we're going to go back to model we'll select our path switch workbenches to the spreadsheet workbench come up to spreadsheet create spreadsheet we're going to rename it parameters double click on it and we're straight in here i'm just going to go and create two parameters here just like we did in the previous videos so you can copy them down if you want to so here are the parameters they're going to be 50 millimeters each i've activated both them by adding an alias so now i'm going to go back to our sketch and here we can set up our constraints and apply our parameters so as always we're going to go up and grab our horizontal constraint we're going to select two points on a horizontal line and we can set up our parameters so i'm going to enter our width here as a parameter so we can hit the little button parameters dot width i'm going to select that hit okay and we've applied that parameter we do the same for the vertical parameters we're going to type in parameters dot length and now we're just going to center everything up so that it's in the origin of our workspace so we can do that again using the same constraints but this time we're going to select our center point as a reference and remember we can do arithmetic operations in here so we can just do parameters dot width divide by two we'll do the same for the length as well to grab our vertical constraint enter a parameter and we're gonna do parameters dot length divide by two and there we go we're now centered in the origin of the workspace drag off all our dimensions out of the way and we've now got a nice square now if we zoom in a little here gonna go and grab the circle tool and we're just gonna sketch out a circle somewhere in here we're gonna add a constraint so we can give it a diameter so i'm going to go up here to the constrain an arc or circle constraint click on the edge of the circle i'm just going to make it five millimeters for this example and hit okay and remember we also need to set the position of this because if we can click and drag around from what we've learned already we know that's bad and we need to tell free cad about the position of this circle so let's do this again we're going to grab our vertical constraint we'll click on the center of the circle and the center of our workspace which is the origin we can still use our width and our length parameters as a reference but obviously this time we can just divide by four instead of divide by two and then i'll position it in the correct place if we create a parameter i'm going to enter parameters dot length divided by four you can see we've now added another one in here that is the full length of the square divided by four do the same for the horizontal but this time we're obviously going to use the width so we select our center points click on the parameter button we're going to type parameters dot width divided by four okay and once again we can see all of our sketch objects are green freecads happy and now i'm going to show you that mirror tool so you can see here if we look at our large square we could dissect this up into four quadrants and obviously the circle is centered in one quadrant but let's say for example we wanted to add the circle to the other three quadrants and we could either go through and sketch each of those or we can do it quite easily using the mirror tool there is a downside to this in free card which you'll see in a second but it can still save you a lot of time especially if you're sketching out something complex using arcs and curves and those kind of things in order to use the mirror tool the first thing we have to do is select which component of the sketch we want to mirror so in this case it's a circle so i'm going to click on that once hold down control on the keyboard and the next thing we need to click is the line that we want to use as a reference for the mirror let's say for example we wanted this circle to appear in the next quadrant on the left in the exact same position while holding ctrl and having already selected the circle click on this line here and that's going to represent the mirror line and be our reference for our sketch once you've clicked it it'll turn green and now up in the top right you'll see a set of tools here and there'll be two arrows that you can click and this will bring up a brand new bunch of tools you want to click on this one here that says create symmetric geometry with respect to the last selected line or point click on this once and you'll see on the sketch we now have another circle in there mirrored on that line now as i said previously there is one downside in free card with this and that is that it doesn't mirror the constraints and this is really really frustrating because in something like fusion 360 this is a really fast and seamless process but in free card we've got to add in the constraints again and what i mean by that is if i click on this circle notice that i can drag it around whereas i can't do that with this other one now you'd think if you were creating a mirror reference it would know about the other constraints usually it does but it doesn't in free cad but as always we're not going to take any shortcuts we're going to go with our good practice and we're going to add in those constraints again so let's use the mirror tool one more time but this time we're going to mirror the two circles so again if we hold down control we need to select which sketch objects we want to mirror it's going to be this circle in this circle then the final thing we need to select is the line that we're using as a reference in this case it's going to be the horizontal line then we go up to that tool again click the two arrows select the tool and there we go we've now got four circles created relatively quickly remember we need to go and add in those constraints so i'm going to do that really quickly and i'll skip ahead the video so all i did there was just adding those constraints like we did before we've got the 12.5 mil on the horizontal on the vertical and i've done that for each of the circles now that we're done with this sketch i'm going to click update and close we're going to go up and change our workbench to the part design workbench we're going to select our sketch and i'm just going to quickly extrude this using the pad tool and i'm going to make it 10 millimeters and hit ok you can see now we've got a nice symmetrical model with four holes in it the next thing i'll show you is how you can mirror entire bodies it's really straightforward and all we have to do is select the extrusion or the pad in our part tree so we're going to click that once then up on the toolbar make sure you're in the part design workspace we want to click on this tool that says create a mirrored feature that's going to bring up another menu on the left and we've already selected our pad as a feature here so there's a little drop down at the bottom that says plane we're going to click this drop down and choose select reference so this is going to ask us again to select a reference for our mirror remember in the sketch where we selected the line to create the mirror reference in this case we need to select a face so if i want to mirror this toward me we need to select this face but you can actually mirror it any way you want we can mirror it to the left we can even mirror it above or below so i'm going to select the face closest to me as a reference and you can see instantly what happens is we get a duplication of our body if we hit ok come back to our part 3 you can see now we've got this mirrored object in there and that's how straightforward and easy it is to create mirrored bodies in freecad this can save you a lot of time especially when you're designing larger things this again is one of the most commonly used tool as it can save you so much time so that's it for this one guys that's mirrors in free card we've already covered most of the tools that you're gonna find useful for designing almost anything i hope you're enjoying these videos let me know how it's going in the comments below as always thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: thehardwareguy

Views: 62,512

Keywords: freecad, freecad tutorials for beginners, freecad tutorial, freecad 0.18 tutorial, freecad part design tutorial, free cad software, free cad, free cad 0.18, fusion 360 alternatives free, cad beginner course, cad beginner tutorial, cad beginners guide, beginner cad software, cad beginner, freecad course, free cad course, cad course, freecad mirror, freecad mirror sketch, freecad mirror part, freecad mirror body, freecad mirror solid, freecad mirror object, freecad mirroring

Id: 4tywHKDg3NI

Length: 7min 48sec (468 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020