FreeCAD for Beginners pt.6 - Extruded Text

welcome back to another video and today i'm going to show you how you can create some simple text and extrude it inside a freecad this is often useful if you want to add text to some of your projects or if you're looking to get into cnc machining and you want to do some 3d carving so let's have a look so we've opened freecad here we're in our start work bench first thing we're going to do create a new part and then we're going to switch to the part design workbench create a new body come over to our model tab as always create a new sketch select our xy plane okay close for this tutorial i'm also going to make use of my parametric modeling because it's powerful and you'll see at the end why it's so useful so we'll go up to our workbench select spreadsheet come up to the top here create new spreadsheet inside the component tree we're going to right click rename we'll call this parameters if we double click on our spreadsheet i'm just going to enter three parameters here shouldn't take a second so the first one we've got length then we've got width and finally height so for length here we're just going to use 35 width is going to be 12 and height is going to be 5. now remember we need to activate the component so we want to right click properties our unit is going to be millimeters and our alias for this will be length we do the exact same for the other two our alias for this one is obviously width and finally we want to do units of millimeters and our alias will be height hit okay they all turn yellow which means they're active and now we can just close out of this so on the bottom here remember we've got tabs so we just want to click our text tab which will take us back to this workspace let's go into body remember we created a sketch before we want to double click on the sketch what i'll do for this tutorials i'll just create a simple rectangle that we're going to extrude you could think of this as any part or even a plaque for something like cnc machining so we're going to go up grab the rectangle tool and remember we need to select a point of reference so in this case that's going to be the origin of the workspace so hover over that and click then we're just going to drag out simple rectangle shape we're going to add in our parameters so we're going to go up to constraints menu i'm going to select the vertical distance constraint select two of our vertical points remember we can do a parameter in this case i'm going to do parameters dot width that was 12 and we want to grab a horizontal tool this time select two points and in this case we want length and there we go we've got a simple rectangle so we're done with the sketcher we can hit close come back to the model tab now with our sketch selected here in the in the component tree we want to grab the pad tool so make sure you're in the part design workbench grab the pad tool remember we set a height parameter as well so we're going to click on this we're going to do parameters dot height hit ok ok again and there we go we've got a simple rectangle next thing we're going to do is add some text and in order to do that we need to use a new workbench so let's go up to the drop down here and select draft which is the third one down in here what we'll use to create the text is this tool up here it's one of the yellow symbols and it says create text string in shapes so we're going to hit that now just to give you a bit of a overview here in something like fusion 360 what you do is you use a sketch to do your text but in freecad you can't really do that you can convert a draft to a sketch but it doesn't work very well because it loses its constraints so in here we just have to do it in the draft workspace and work with that so that's what we're going to do once you've selected your string tool you'll need to select a point of reference and remember to create this rectangle we use the origin of the workspace as a reference and we should do the same here so we can just zoom into the bottom left corner and select that sometimes it's really tricky to select the corner exactly but if you can if you look up on the menu here on the left you can just do it with numbers so we know the x y origin is coordinate 0 0 so you can just enter 0 mil 0 mil in there and z is going to be 5. sometimes it changes this when you hit ok which is a bit weird but we can fix it if it does that so our height in this case is going to be 10 our string is going to be the text that we want to display in this case that's going to be subscribe and if you haven't already please do subscribe hit that big red button it helps the channel a lot and you'll be notified about my new videos next thing we'll have to do is select our font if you hit this button here with the three dots you'll see that it's going to ask you for a directory for your fonts now typically on a windows machine your fonts will be located in this directory here which is c windows fonts so you can try and navigate to that and select it in my case it wouldn't let me do that because it said i didn't have administrator permissions which i do don't know why but what you can do to avoid that issue if you run into that problem and it won't let you select this directory what i did was just highlight all your fonts copy them out and you can just paste them into a separate directory so on a separate drive i've created this folder here called my fonts pasted them all in and now in three card i can just select that directory with no issues so what we'll do again we'll hit that button with the three dots in my case my font folder is on this drive and for the tutorial i'm just going to use the aerial font and hit open and you'll see in that little box now that we've got a path to the font that we're going to use i noticed what i said before how it changes the x and y notice as i selected the font it did change those so let's go and change them back we just want 0 0 and our z height is 5. so hit ok you can see what it's done there is is placed the text using the reference to the origin on top of our block now there's a few things we're going to fix obviously the text is too big so what we can do is we can go and change the size but one problem you might run into in free card and you might have seen this already is notice in the bottom left you've got these properties if i click on size and i go to change that to say five and then i hit enter nothing happens no changes have been made what you have to do is you have to change it so i'm going to select say 7 and you have to hit tab on the keyboard for it to update so if i hit tab notice it changes a bit of a weird one but you just have to hit tab and it applies the changes in this case i'm going to probably go for 5 so remember tab makes the changes for us remember again under our position property we have this z position variable this represents the height of our block now we don't want this to just be a floating variable we want it to be a parameter because if we change the height of our block we want it to update in real time so again we can use our height parameter here so we're going to do parameters dot height hit enter okay that'll set that up for us and now if we change the height of the block it'll change with it now this next part is a little bit fiddly and it took me a while to kind of work this out in free card but because we're not using a sketch to do this it's really hard to position your text accurately because you don't have access to constraints so like we did before in our original sketch you can use constraints and create dimensions and positions so that freecad knows where everything is well in the case of a draft you cannot really do that effectively so we're going to have to use the measurement tool which is good to learn about to find out the length of our text and then use our parametric modeling effectively with that you'll see what i mean in a second because we want to get this text centered in the middle of this block you can do this pretty easily by going back into our properties go to position and you can just increase this x position and notice it moves around and you could kind of eyeball it and be happy with it so we could go to y and just be like okay that's good enough but we know that that's not really good practice and it's something you want to avoid especially if you're going to change the design in the future so what we'll do as i said we'll use the measurement tool and we can use our parameters to make it automate this for us so if we click on shape string here in the part tree up here on the menu notice this little ruler symbol and it says measure distance we're going to click on that and you'll see this little ruler on your cursor all right basically we're going to select two points that are the furthest away from each other so we can measure the length of the text so we're going to hit the ruler select our first furthest point here and once again on the other side and again it's going to be rough it's not going to be an exact measurement which is a shame but this is one of the best ways i've found to do it so now if we rotate around you can see it's added a measurement here 28.72 that's going to be the length of our text and you can see in our part 3 there's a measurement there so you can easily read it now we're going to do the exact same thing for the height so let's grab our measurement tool again i'll make sure you click make sure you click shape string first so that it highlights in green then grab the measurement tool i'm going to select the bottom of the b here and then the top that should give us a rough measurement and we can see it's 4.78 so now we can use these measurements to center our text so let's go back to our shape string drop down into the position properties down in the bottom left and notice we've got this x parameter now this is currently set to zero at the origin but we can do a little bit of math here and center it up so what we want to do is take the length of this block which we know so let's enter a parameter we'll create a set of brackets inside the brackets we want to do parameters dot length minus the length of our text which in this case is 28.72 and then we're going to come outside the brackets and divide the whole thing by two and that should position our text uh in the center horizontally so let's say okay i know it's where it's done there for us so that's centered up really nicely we need to do the same now with the the y coordinate so let's go back in here use our parameter so we want a certain brackets inside it we want to do parameters dot width minus the distance of the height which is 4.78 and we're going to divide that whole thing by two and hit ok and if we go to our top view you can now see our text is centered up really nicely and it looks great once you're done with these distance measurements you can actually delete them so you can either delete them or you can hide them we'll hide them for now so if we hit space on the keyboard that'll hide the two of those and we still got our text down the center now because we used parametric modeling if we go back to our spreadsheet and let's change these to something random so let's change it to 60 uh we'll change the width to 22 and we'll change the height to 7. and now let's go back to our model view and look what's happened because we use parameters and because we use measurements it's adjusted everything for us so our height has changed our length has changed and our width has changed our text is the same size but it's kept it all nice and constrained for us now what it won't do is if we go back to shape string if we adjust the size of our text so let's let's make our text 10 hit the tab now that won't fix it and the reason is because we made those manual measurements in order to reposition this all you'd have to do is measure this again and update your x and y parameters here on the property list okay so i've changed everything back to how it was and these are the parameters that we have we've got 35 length 12 with five height so now we can take a look at trying to extrude or cut this text so if we go and switch to the part workbench so we can select our shape string in the part tree and up on the menu here there's a symbol called extrude a selected sketch we're going to hit that and it's going to ask us for a distance to extrude so we're just going to enter three millimeters for now hit okay i notice what it's done there is just pull that text upwards uh we've created an extrusion obviously that looks a little weird at the moment it's a bit high so what we can do is over on the component tree hit extrude remember we can drag this as well up into our path so that it's all nested click on extrude and come down here you can see our length forward is currently three so let's try one hit tab remember to update and there we go we've now got a little bit of text on top of a block you could also use this for cnc to subtract the rest of the block away leaving only the text or you might want to extrude the text into the block which we can show you now if we wanted to create a cut here instead of an extrude what we can do is on the part tree click on extrude and hit the space bar that'll hide that make sure that you are still showing your shape string so your extrude might have hit both so hit the tab here make sure you press space on shape string once you've done that we're going to move over to the part design workbench come into the model tab select our shape string up on the menu here select create a pocket with selected sketch we're going to create a cross reference hit ok and now it's going to ask us for a length so we're going to lower this back down to one hit okay now you can see now we've created a cut into the block and we've got our text in there let's make this look a little better so we're going to go and select all the edges of the corners and we'll add a little fill up on there we've got that one that one we can select fill up we're gonna make that say 2.5 let's make it two we'll make it two okay there we go so there we are guys that's what we end up with that's a simple block with some nice centered text using parametric modeling and this has obviously been a really simple example but you get the idea you get the workflow you can now go away have a play around with this play around with the parameters and one of the next videos i'll probably work on is how to add text to a curved surface that's definitely a lot trickier inside a freecad than say some other software platforms hopefully you found this video useful if you want to request a tutorial leave a comment down below and as always thanks for watching i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: thehardwareguy

Views: 31,217

Keywords: freecad, freecad tutorials for beginners, freecad tutorial, freecad part design tutorial, free cad, free cad 0.18, cad beginner course, cad beginner tutorial, cad beginners guide, beginner cad software, cad beginner, freecad course, free cad course, cad course, freecad text, freecad text on surface, freecad text tutorial, freecad text pocket, freecad text engraved, freecad text extrusion, freecad text on face, text in freecad, how to create text in freecad, freecad 3d text

Id: KdFYyOJE_5I

Length: 15min 28sec (928 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021