Sketch pattern

00:00

Linear and circular patterns are very easy to create and to edit in Shapr3D and are extremely powerful when you would like to add a nice pattern detail to your design. Let me show you how we can create them. To create a circular sketch pattern, make a new sketch. Select the Rectangle tool and somewhere on the grid, not on any of these guidelines, just draw a rectangle.

00:30

Then call the pattern command, make sure circular option is selected, double click on the rectangle to select everything. And there you see, we have a center point, which we can drag out. This is the center point of the pattern rotation. And to start the pattern, we can click and drag this arrow. You see this then visually shows you

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the amount of rotation through this half arc, which is thicker now and wide. And we have a digital readout of the total amount of rotation. In this case, minus 182 degrees. If you continue rotating till 360 degrees, it will then snap to 360 degrees. We have here various options we could specify, for example,

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the spacing between them.

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So now I have three copies and 120 between them. If I make six copies and say minus 25 or 25 degrees, you see now I have six copies and each one is rotated 25 degrees. I will go back to total, change this to 360. I will change this to

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because here we also have an option to select rotated or uniform. When I select uniform, you see that the square was copied on the circular path, but not rotated.

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When I click somewhere else and you see there is now the center point and the icon for the pattern. When I click it, I can change the total angle or spacing, the degree and the quantity, but I cannot change the type anymore. So rotated to a uniform. That's one thing to keep in mind. What else can we do now? You see here is a center point and with this center point,

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I can move and continue specifying where is the center point of this rotation. Now we can create really nice abstract shapes. This is for example, very useful for anything that is, for example, like a car wheel rim.

03:15

To make sure that this is always horizontal to it, one little trick is we draw a line from the midpoint here or any other element we can reference to the pattern center, right click, right click. This line should be a construction line, so it doesn't create any geometry. And those two should have a perpendicular relationship.

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we can continue editing everything. And you see that this then updates the sketch pattern automatically. What we cannot do is select individual element and delete it because this pattern was created with a complete rectangle selected.

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If we go ahead and select this sketch pattern icon and then delete it, we applied the sketch pattern and now we have three unique and individual elements. And then there we can go ahead and delete parts we, for example, don't need anymore. To create a linear sketch pattern, we can create a new sketch. In this case, I will use a circle.

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And somewhere on the grid, I will create a circle with four millimeters diameter. Then to create that linear sketch pattern, let's call the pattern command, make sure linear option is selected. Click on the circle. And for our first test, we will just only drag out one arrow. You see here with this arrow, we can continue.

05:12

moving kind of like the last circle and the center circle updates automatically. This specifies basically the maximum distance. We click on total. You see here we have pattern definition, total and spacing distance. So if you take a look at the interface, you will see from the center point of the first to the center point of the last circle, our two arrows, that distance is measured.

05:40

20 millimeters and with a quantity of three. If I change this to four or change this to five, you see we are putting off five circles into this 20 millimeter distance. I changed this to spacing distance. Here now you see from the first to the second circle, center point to center point, it measures five millimeters.

06:08

If I change this now to 6, you see how the whole length of this linear pattern updates. Every circle has a diameter of 4 millimeters. If I change the spacing to 4, every circle is going to touch each other. Let's click somewhere.

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If you move your mouse to any of these circles, you start seeing there is the pattern icon. So something there is active. And then if you click any of these circles, you see that interface for the pattern command becomes accessible. And we could continue working with it and adjusting it.

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If you click the first, second or last or any of these points and drag this around, you see how we can move this around. The first circle center point, I will snap onto the scene origin. You see now the circle is green because it has a four millimeter diameter dimension constraint. It also has a coincident constraint to the origin.

07:19

And now all I can do is, for example, change the rotation of this pattern. So that's a way how you then rotate patterns. I can create here a new line from the origin to somewhere else. Right click, right click and drop the line tool. Select this line, say, make a construction with this line, select it, and then shift left click.

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in this case, my axis, I can specify this line to be 30 degrees to the axis. And now what you can do is, one tip, select the first circle, center point, not the last one, and then snap it onto this line. You see now how it is coincident constraint to there.

08:15

we can then still adjust the, for example, the spacing of this pattern. And with the angle, we can now drive the orientation or the rotation of that pattern. I will undo, undo, undo till we're here. And now I will go to the last circle and move that center point to this line. We can still do the same, but what happens if I, for example,

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Add a piece. So this all looks great. But what happens if I go to three and then you see, oh, there's a piece missing. And that is because now the pattern has only three pieces, but I constrained the fourth copy onto this line. That's the reason why I said in best practice, just use, for example, the first copy.

09:14

because then later you can grow or shrink this pattern as you want. Let's delete everything. And we are creating a pattern one more time. Somewhere here, four millimeters. we are. Then we call the pattern command, drag this one out, drag this one out. So you see now how we can create a pattern that normally

09:43

goes one direction, but fills a square area. This is now an interesting area where we also can introduce how to add variables. Now we have total 11.8. Here we have minus 10 because this goes downward. So this is positive Y, this is negative Y. We have quantities. We could set this to four.

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move this to here, set this to 16. And if we then later want to adjust everything, you see, there is a lot of manual work we have to do. So what we can do now is I show two ways. We could go to this value here, total 16, click on this variable icon, and then I create

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and your variable code length 1.16. And there it is. This variable, right click, I can rename and let's say pattern length. Give this a good name. If I go back to my sketch and you see here, Fx16, that comes from here. Fx stands for... There's a function happening here. We say...

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minus 14.6. So if I click on this, I can then click on this variable. And here is my now corrected and created variable. Because this has to go downwards, I still need to keep the minus in front of it. There we are. Let's exit the sketch. Let's go to Add, we go Variable, go Number, and let's say, Pattern.

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1TT, sorry for the spelling. There we are. And let's say 6 and create. There it is. Now we go to the sketch, click to here, select pattern quantity, then we can do the same there. Now you see here, the pattern is adjusted.

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And the advantage of this is if I adjust one variable, you see all the pieces are being adjusted at the same time. This is pretty cool.

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So I'm going to rework this one. This should be not a total distance, but spacing. So 20 millimeters is a little bit a lot. I would like to have two millimeters. The circle is four, so I need six. I changed then the pattern length to six and everything, as you can see, was updated. We changed the amount of pattern quantity to six.

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And what we now are going to do is draw a nice rectangle that is going to frame this pattern. So inside the sketch, we will create somewhere a rectangle, but how do I know center this one? The solution to that is very simple, basic geometry. We just draw a line somewhere. Here, we'll do a diagonal. I have

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six pieces, so six patterns in this case, that works really well. Again, keep in mind, if we change quantity patterns, then we might have to update these type of sketches. Right click and drop the tool. This line, we will make a construction line. There we are. And then here, this is our rectangle. I can snap this to the midpoint of this line. The rectangle shouldn't really

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rotate, that's reason why I give this a horizontal constraint. But because this all works from the center, you see, if we move everything, it all moves together. And what I can do now is, so from here to here, so that is we want two millimeters. So this is basically a distance.

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Sorry, a diameter of 4, so radius of 2. So this has to be 4. You see now, this is exactly the same. And then I could say the same also here, 4. I would like to center this in my design and then I can put this origin right into the center there. Wonderful.

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Kind of like as you can see, rotate a little bit. That is because this line has absolutely no rotation limitations. We can select this line and either to the Axis Constraint or here to this line and say 45 degree. And boom, everything is nice and green. Let's go to Constraint Settings. I have all these things here turned off, so it is good to turn these elements on. So you see what type of constraints are active in your scene.

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If I now go ahead and change this to five, you see, now I have one millimeter distance there, but I have two millimeters there. So how can I change this, for example? This is now where here for these dimensions, we can go ahead and say, if we go to the kind of like,

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the diameter of our circle minus the, sorry, the pattern length minus the diameter of our circle. We don't have this function there yet. So let's add this one. We call this circle diameter. It should be four. And then here, this circle, there is this diameter dimension and we swap this one out.

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Very good.

17:00

And you can see now that this line is intersecting with there because we have to add to this calculation because we figured out the distance between the circles. Now we have to add the radius of the circle. So we now say, plus, and then in brackets, we will create

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the radius of the circle diameter divided by two. And there it is. This function we can copy, then we can go to this other dimension, paste in the expression. And there we are. So to prove this, if we switch this to, let's say, pattern eight, you see how this actually goes over. This was my fault. We need to change this to six.

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And there you see everything nicely expands as it should be. And that's it. How you can create really nice linear patterns only in one way, one way at an angle, or for example, in this case, create a sketch pattern that fills an area. And then we even create a boundary frame around it

18:25

with a distance that reflects the spacing between the individual circles. If you would like now to adjust certain elements of this beautifully rigid laid out linear pattern, we have to apply the pattern command. We can do this by simply selecting the icon, then pressing delete. And now every of these circles, we, for example, could adjust.

18:54

This is not a pattern command anymore. We simply use the pattern command to position all these copies because what we also now can do is I can select this circle and say, hey, this is a diameter of minus 1 millimeter. This is a diameter of minus 0.75. This is minus 0.5 and this is minus 0.

19:22

So you see, I created a small transition. These distances we can still keep, but keep in mind, because we do not have a pattern, it does not necessarily function the same way anymore. So it might not be bad practice at this point, for example, to simply remove them. But what we can do now is we can call the Linear Pattern command. Then now we select

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all those, and then I drag them out. And then based on the parameters we created, now the variables here, I will say this is the pattern quantity. We will switch this to spacing and then here, select pattern length. In this case, should update the naming for it

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because it's not pattern length, this is actually more the spacing length. But anyway, you see kind of like what we now created was multiple smaller individual linear patterns. To stabilize this a little bit, we could create a dimension to there and there. We could add the dimension from there and from a dimension from there to there. We could draw

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a line, for example, to connect all these start and end elements, you see, then these lines, I will make horizontal and vertical. I will make them also a construction line. And here, now I will put in 4 and 4 there. good. Same here and same there.

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And this distance, for example, I can now specify at this distance, can specify. And then those here, I will snap onto these lines. These can move up and down. And maybe what might make things a little bit easier in this case is I will just draw individual lines there.

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Geometry is so beautiful. These lines I will all select. Then I will make them all construction lines and then make them all horizontal and vertical. Then I will select them one more time because you see how these circles are not blue, make them equal. And there we are. Because these lines are equal, that means if I change this to 46,

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You see the overall height of the rectangle changes, and then these spacer lines are being adjusted for me automatically. That's it.

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You can also combine linear and circular patterns together to create even more intricate designs. Let me show you how that goes. First, we will create a circle at the origin, and then I will call the linear pattern command. I will draw out a pattern with four copies. Then let's go back to

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the circular pattern, I will select the first copy or the second circle, and then move the origin to the center point, which is our first circle we drew. Then I do a circular pattern. I will specify this to be for six copies.

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I can then go ahead and select the next circle. Do a pattern, same way, go around, but because this is on a bigger parameter, I can do more than six copies. What about 12? 12 copies perfectly fit in there. And let's do this one more time.

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I will select this, bring this over to a copy. And here we create just a copy of 6.

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You see that everything is blue and that is because we did not dimension anything yet. So I will dimension the circle diameter. This then adjusts all the other circles in this pattern design. I can rotate this. So I will try to snap this to an axis. Now we have one line that is perfectly green. The rest is not.

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And that is because the individual pattern centers can freely move around. So I select each pattern, select then the center point and simply snap it to the origin. And then this way, everything is perfectly constrained. What you see here is a concept model of a small desktop speaker. And everything of those details was created with a sketch pattern.

25:15

The grill in the front is a linear sketch pattern. The holes in the back is a circular sketch pattern. And even the feet at the bottom or the buttons on top were created with linear sketch patterns. And this is the way how they look. Pay attention to these dashed lines. These are guidelines I drew to center and align my circular

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or linear sketch patterns to the center of specific elements of the faces I drew them on. So when I go into this sketch pattern here on top, there you can see we have the spacing. If I change this to 14, you see everything seems to grow away from this midpoint. But actually this is the center from there, the linear pattern grows. But then I positioned this

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linear sketch pattern by drawing these four lines and snapping them to the midpoints of the face. And this then allows me when I change the linear pattern, it grows and shrinks always towards the midpoint of this face. And even when I change other values of

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the geometry of what a pattern you see, then the holes change and also the buttons change. So you see those sketch patterns can be extremely powerful, not only for very complex designs like the grill, but also for interface design of a product. For example, here with four buttons on top to press and perfectly centered on this face.