FreeCAD: Part Vs Part Design: Why use one over the other, understanding and combining workflows

hi viewers and welcome to the channel and today we're going to be looking at the part and part design workbenches we're going to be looking at the reasons why we have two workbenches when you would use one over the other and comparing them and their workflows we're going to be putting some practical examples together to show you what we're using those for and how we can combine them as well so sometimes we need to combine both the part design and the part workbench into our workflows i hope this can answer a few questions regarding these workbenches to understand the reasons why those two workbenches exist if you like what you're seeing please subscribe to the site i also have a co-fire or coffee site that you can donate to if you so desire and that's at ko hyphen fi dot com forward slash min g0 also run a patreon where you can subscribe and get extra content and that's at www.patreon.com for slash mango jelly solutions so to understand the reasons why we have a part design and a part workbench we're going to first look at the part design workflow and how it works now this is a very contained workflow if you look at the screen we've got a simple part in front of us that we created with something that's called a body so this is the first item that we'll be creating when you create a new model to grow new when unnamed when the part design and we look at the tasks if we create a body then we've got an option in here we can start body and we can create a sketch and we pick the plane so straight away we're going to be pushed down a workflow so we're going to create a body then a sketch and then what we do is add material to this with additive or subtractive so yellow is additive and red you can see the yellow tools here these are additive these are subtractive so we're adding and removing material to create our object and this is in line with common day cad practices and you can see straight away with the task is forcing us down a workflow so if we look at the part design compared to the part what's happening is we're gonna be in the contained workflow in the part design which allows us to create our models without breaking out to other workbenches we'll break out to the sketcher but that's basically really the only one that we're going to be using in there there are other workflows that interact with the part design but not many we're just going to add a subtractive action to this office attractive feature and hit ok through these you can see we've got this tree view and inside the body we have a number of actions here these are called actions the very last action will have a green icon with a white arrow in this is known as the tip this is the last action that's been created on the object any following actions will follow on from the tip we can go back and modify sketches of other parts so for instance this one i can create this bigger size and that will take effect down the chain but we have to be careful because underlying sketches when modified may interfere with future features that we place upon here so what we're actually doing is going back in time and modifying these features so these are future features here when we modify a previous feature then we have to be mindful of the next features in the queue let's go back to this item here and look at the body and see how this is built because this is parametric we can see the start of the model so anything like blender we're not using parametric way of creating our models we're creating them for meshes and we're modifying that mesh changing the underlying vertices and faces and molding that mesh like a piece of clay with parametric modeling what we're doing is modeling it like a piece of clay but if you think in sections so this will be a slab of clay and then we add another slab on top of that and then we add another shaped clay on top of that and we carry on we will remove some pockets but we can keep them aside because we may want to put those pockets back in and change let's say the diameter of these pockets for a smaller diameter so if you think of it in that way that you're actually creating slabs of clay and adding or removing them from the object then you won't go wrong remember we've got the yellow and the red so yellow additive reds attractive and this is as we move through we can see the actions or the features that have been results of that actions that create the model going all the way through and these as we go down can be modified example of this breaking would have come into this pad in this sketch and if i go crazy with this and say that's so it's a 50 and hit ok and it close you'll see a red mark come up along this model down here this hasn't actually taken effect but if we move back to the pad and bring back the sketch you can see it has actually taken effect on there and we can move through the model and we can see where it starts to break so that pocket there this pocket you can see the pocket has appeared at the top here the fillet now look at where the fillet is because we moved the underlying geometry and made it wider we've got this feature here now this chamfer cannot be applied to this because we've now got two edges before we had one so this chamfer will be broken you can see what's happened there i know it's taken effect go back to that fill it we can see half the geometry is missing and it's gone back to our original geometry so we've got a problem in here we can come in to this chamfer and see if we can fix it by looking up and looking at the base for the edge 54. if we look at the edges it was one of these edges that was applied to we can see those edges no longer exist because we got two edges in here than what we had before so just hit ctrl z to undo and ctrl r a couple of times to get back to that so control will refresh the model and recalculate because we'll have these ticks so you can see that it's body here it's got two bytes hit ctrl r and that's gone now so we've gone back to our original philip there so our sketch we look at it it's at 25 and let's hit close so we've got no errors and we can bring back that chamfer so you can see the phillips made up of one edge there which has been chamfered so this was the breaking change that calls that by editing the underlying sketch so we have to be mindful of how the geometry is created as we go along if we get an error like this then we just go back through our chain so as said the last item in here is the tip and you can see how contained this workflow is everything in there is all that you need to create your models for feature based modeling some caveats around there is when we start getting into stuff like nurbs surfaces or we want to do something very specialized freecad if left with just the part design it will have the part design and the sketcher and some of the other workbenches such as the tech drawer and the path workbench to create cnc paths and that's all it will be the other workbench is such the part is a boolean workflow but it has a number of essential tools that are on top of that so before going on to the part workbench that's just recap on what we said the part design if it only existed in free cad and none of the other workbenches such as the part then we would have part design and probably just the sketcher we would have the other ancillary workbenches such as textural and c and c path it works on a linear workflow and the last action is the tip now the parts workbench is a much looser workflow and it allows you to go from one workbench to another flowing through those workflows and creating something a bit more complex part design is good for feature-based modeling where we have a well-defined part in the part workbench we can be a bit more organic with our so let's have a look at the part workflow i've now got the part model on screen and we can see that they're both basically identical so here's the part design and the part and what we're going to be looking at is the workflow between these so in the part workflow at the moment looking at the workflow we can see we've got a nested tree view here of all the different features our top feature is the fusion now fusion is an action that's created by a boolean together so we're building two parts together and creating one inside that fusion you can see we've got a phillip and a phillip mirror so these are individual actions what i'm going to do is hide the top level fusion and bring back the filler and you can see how these are nested in here let's bring back the phillip mirror as well so i'm just clicking on pressing the spacebar hidden the top one and i'm showing the children of the parent you can see these two have been fusioned together to make this fusion so what we have is the result of the action with the two parts underneath if i deleted this one this will break this out and now we have the mirror here but we can't see the actual filler of what we mirrored that's actually inside here because that's an action upon here you might be wondering why they're not separated out underneath because if i go back we can see the fusion and we've got two actions underneath this is to do with the tree view allowing us to create boolean actions with parent and child actions so if i go back and delete this fusion again bring back the philip and we can see that inside we have a phillip here's a parent here's the child and then we have more child underneath we can actually take the parent control click child and create an action against those so we can create union that creates one single fusion which allows us to refine it to true and you'll see that these edges will disappear because they're unneeded so we get our refined model so let's go back to the tree view and explain what's happening so we've got the parent action the top post and then nested in we have the other actions so we can see the fillet there and inside there is philip zero zero one which is the same as this one so if i showed this filler you can see the other fillet is being shown as well let's hide that fusion come back to the filler because these two are the same object this action required these two to be boolean together this is why you see it nested because we have object 1 and object two that was selected and boolean together if i create a new document and create new part we can see what happens here so if i put say a cylinder in here and another cylinder and transform these and then we take these two and boolean them together this creates the fusion so inside here you can see the two items that we fusion together and then we use a mirror against there of the fusion and we'll pick a plane say why is that plane so we've mirrored that across we now got the fusion mirror and what we used to actually mirror that across because it only required one single object to actually mirror then we've got one object under here if i want to bring these together to make one coherent part i have to control set the parent and its child so the mirror and the fusion and we make a boolean or a union of those we now get this fusion with the refine which we can set to true that refines that face down and inside that you can see the two items that we selected to create that action and this is the way the part workbench works so it's boolean operations cuts fusions intersections or commons of those shapes so going back to the model i've expanded the tree out so we can see it's nested deep down to our main building blocks which are these so i'll hide the fusion and bring back these three these were our main building blocks those were combined together in a boolean union to create a fusion so i hide these now and bring back the fusion you can see it there so let's collapse that one next comes an extrude which sits in the bottom there and that was used with that fusion so you can see them side by side underneath its parent the cut to create the cut so those two were taken and that creates the cut next we have an extrude which is in line with this cut for this operation here so the child is this cut and this is strewed we come around we can see that there and those were used together to create this cut notice that if we come in here we're using sketches this one i've used a circle it's just because i can there's no reason why i've done that i've used a circle from the draft workbench and this is a thing we'll get into later regarding pulling in other items from our other workbenches so the extrude and the cut we used to create another cut between those to create this cut so you can see that's been removed from there and then moving up we've got some finishing actions such as chamfer highlight cut you can see the chamfer going along there and then i fill it hide the chamfer you can see the fillet going around here now and then moving up we've got the other fillet which is just rounding off the edges we then took that filler and you can see if we close that we've got this fillet showing and the bottom because they're both the same object and we mirrored this here this one's outside of the parent because this is something as we said before this is totally different action that was created so ignore this one just look at the parent and look at the philip within so we end up creating these two the ending result is this fusion which we look underneath let's close this one down it's taking these two which is the fillet and the mirror so we took this for that and this fill it because this one wouldn't be shown because the action wouldn't have created it yet because the action hasn't been actually run and we combine those together to make the mirror to make this last fusion and we can hide this that's the way the part workbench works what we'll do now is understand the reasons why we'd use one over the other so when would we use the part workbench over the part design other workbenches can utilize the part workbench in their workflow for instance if we come into the curse workbench then making something in here such as a suite profile on two rails then this will work hand in hand with the part workbench so we go to the sketchup and we'll create a number of edges we can even use something like the draft workbench to create these edges instead of the sketcher we can use the curves workbench to create some curvature across here then we need to create planes to connect these two together we can only do that from something like the part workbench to create an old surface then we can swap back to the curse workbench and use that ruled surface against the arcs to create a point cloud which allows us to create a nerve surface we can then take that nerve surface open the part and create offsets against that and fill the offsets so the part workbench allows you to create and manipulate surfaces and also allows you to modify those into something that is solid the part design only allows you to create features that create solids so the following video shows me going through actually taking that propeller blade and creating it into something a bit more coherent so an actual propeller for a toy you can see how i've created a primitive object and i'm positioning that blade on that primitive object ready for the boolean operations in the future you'll see me jump to another workbench in a moment we'll actually clone that blade in the draft workbench and create a clone of that rotate it and transform it into place as you can see i'm working in a non-restrictive manner i'm not being forced on a workflow i'm jumping out to different workbenches using the features in networks workbenches bringing the results back into the part workbench and using the features of the part workbench to add more detail to the model so i'm flying from one workbench to another so i've used a clone from another workbench that's the draft workbench i'll then come out of that workbench creating some features with the sketcher and then extruding that feature over the part workbench add some chamfers or some fillets just to create the rounded surface and then finally boolean them all together so when would i use the part design over the part well considering the part design is a guided process it's a well-defined process when i have something like a technical drawing like here and this is the prop of our previous project without the propeller wings attached to it then i'll be looking at something like the part design because i know from this picture here this drawing now i can create this shape just from one single revolve i know i'm not going to go out to other workbenches because i don't need to i can do what i need to do in the part design in a well defined manner that's not to say that you're limited to using the part design creating stuff from technical drawings you can use the part as well it's a preference at the end of the day i use both the workbenches but i tend to stick to the part design when it's well defined process and i don't need to use other workbenches when i'm modeling that part so let's take this technical drawing and start from the beginning in the part design and show how i will create this so we're looking at a technical drawing at the moment and it's quite a simple object to create we'll first start in the part design and we'll create a sketch along one of the planes and we could be using simple geometry in there such as arcs lines polylines etc we basically work our way down through the technical drawing to create a profile of the object and what we need to do is just do one single action upon here so we're not going to be panned or pocketing what we're going to do is create a revolve you can see how this object is being built up quite quickly using the constraints in there to fully constrain the model down and we're creating one side of the profile and also the inner part that will be a void in there to allow us to connect that to our toy and then all we have to do is then select that sketch and create a revolve from there once all the constraints are in so it's a very simple process a single action and it doesn't take long to create and we have the finished product so let's compare the two objects we're in the part design at the moment we've got both the objects open part workbench and the part design and in here we create a body and we created a sketch because we knew exactly what this object will look like from a cross section to create the cross section in there and we use the revolve we have a well defined object and we was working quite contained with a well-defined process compare that to the part workbench and i'm just going to hide the offsets and we'll come to those in a minute we were quite organically we may not have known the dimensions or had a rough guess of the dimensions we might not have known the overall shape of the object and we started from our base objects working our way up and deciding what it should look like as we was building the object allowing us to get to the final shape that we wanted but what happens when it comes to these propeller wings that were created in a different workbench how do we get these into the part design well we could go for a loft in the part design to make it all one single object or we could utilize the part so this is where the part workbench allows you to take other features from other workbenches and include them into a part workbench workflow we can rip the part design model apart and even rebuild it in the part workbench if we so desire let's see how we can get these into the part design object as one single body so i'm going to come over to the part workbench object and i'm just going to control click both of these and hit ctrl c and hit ok and we're going to paste them into here into this workflow i'm going to come down to the part workbench object and just close it so it's out the way so what we've got is basically a body and also we've got the offset clone and the offset which originally come from the sweet two rails from the curse workbench so these are not part of the part design flow they're just in the same document to get these boolean into this object the body what we can do is come over to the part workbench this body right click transform it and let's move it into position we're just roughly moving this into position hit okay and then we can use the part workbench to boot in this into the original object so we're going to take all three objects and then union those shapes together and we created a fusion so now we've combined the part design in with the part workbench that part design is quite safely embedded in here we can then go off and 3d print this or export this out as stl model one thing to remember with the part workbench it is also a set of tools so we have a number of tools in here for instance i can split this object apart by using any of the tools in the draft or the sketcher to make a cutting surface so let's go for the sketcher go down on the top make a new sketch objects y and we're looking at this and i'm going to create a cutting surface let's say a boolean b spline and we can come over to the part workbench extrude that so making sure the sketch is selected extrude we're shooting along the z plane i'm going to do a symmetrical and make sure we cover the object so this can be used as a cutting plane now so we can take our fusion control click the extrude and split this object apart by going part split slice apart our object is now sliced into two we look at the exploded slices we've got a slice zero and a slice one so we can right click and transform so we can actually see inside that object and do other modeling actually inside these parts so i hope that's giving you some idea of how the part design and part workbench actually differ we're going to be going into how we use the part and part design together in other videos it's down to your personal preference of how you want to use these i just find that the part design is very good for say something that you've already got a technical drawing for whereas the part workbench is when i want to go in there and just start modeling something and see it grow organically in front of me where i can just do adjustments i may even take that part look at the dimensions create technical drawing of it and recreate it back in the part design as i've done here oh that's giving you some ideas of how these workbenches differ and also work together in that way thanks a lot for watching and i'll see you again soon if you like what you're seeing please subscribe to the site i also have a co-fire or a coffee site that you can donate to if you so desire and that's at ko hyphen fi.com for slash min g0 also run a patreon where you can subscribe and get extra content and that's at www.patreon.com for slash mango jelly solutions any money that's currently donated will be used to expand the channel thanks a lot for watching and subscribing and i'll see you again soon

Channel: MangoJelly Solutions for FreeCAD

Views: 17,410

Keywords: CAD, three, 3D, CNC, Printing, solidworks, autoCAD, freecad 0.19, freecad 19, freecad basics, basic course, fundamentals, learn freecad, freecad beginners, freeCAD 0.20

Id: 0fyU_vzQPTE

Length: 29min 13sec (1753 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 02 2022