Grid and sketch settings

00:00

Welcome to this video on the grid, sketch settings, and sketch constraints. When you open up Shapr3D, you'll get a view that looks like this. And to start a new Shapr3D document, just click on the new project plus button in the upper right-hand corner. In Shapr3D, the grid is always on. You can control what plane it is always associated with. If you take a look at the view cube, the blue axis is Y.

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The red axis is X, and if you swing it around, the green axis is Z. To control the grid, go to the views and appearances button, and you can control the grid position by XY plane, XZ plane, or ZX plane. When you open a sketch on a plane, the grid will automatically move to the sketch plane. And when you get out of the sketch, the grid automatically moves back.

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to the default that's selected here. The default view for the software can be showed by selecting the default view here in the views menu. You can also click on named views here in the list, or it's probably more easy to select on the faces of the view orientation cube. You can also use the arrows to spin around, or just click and drag the view orientation cube.

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as if you had a Space Mouse. Speaking of a Space Mouse, Space Mouse is easy to use with Shapr3D. You just have to hook it up. On the View Orientation Cube, you can click on Edges or Corners, or just double click anywhere on the icon to get to the default view. There are a couple other grid settings we should look at. Under the Appearance, you can control the orthographic or perspective.

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view of your model. Most CAD is run completely orthographic, but most visual representations require a perspective view of a model. So you'll probably want to choose something in between, and this is something you should play with on your own to determine what works best for you. The snap icon allows you to control the snap to grid, which can be very useful if you're used to

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sketching very round numbers, and it helps you get things lined up easily. Also in this dialogue, you can control the sketch guidelines, which will be the purple guidelines that show up as you sketch. Sketch guide points will help you find the ends or midpoints in your sketch. Snapping hints are like tool tips that will show up on geometry as you mouse over it. We'll see examples of all of these shortly.

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Also in this bar of settings up here, you can control your units, metric inch, fractional decimal, and you can control how the grid reacts while zooming. If I leave this setting off, the grid is not locked. And so as I zoom in and out, you can see the grid changes as I get tighter in or further away. And if we change that setting,

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to turn that setting on. The grid will remain a given size as we zoom in. It's always an inch, whether you're up close to it or far away. When you create a new sketch, the software brings the view square to the sketch to make it easy. So let's do that. Let's click on the sketch button and then select on a sketch plane. Notice the view changes. Makes it easy for us to sketch.

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were automatically kicked into the line command and I'm just going to draw a couple of lines here and you can notice that there's a purple extension that's showing me that I can snap to a vertical line and same here and there's a line another vertical purple line that shows me I'm lined up with the first point. If you take a look at all of these

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sketch tools, each one of them has a hotkey. So you don't have to click on the toolbar icons, you can just use your keyboard if your setup makes one of those available to you. So I'm going to use the A key to switch to an arc, click on the end point, and there's one of the snapping hints, the tooltip, and

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Notice that the arc kind of snaps into place here, and that's where it's picking up tangent relationships. And if I place it there, you see I've got an icon on this end, an icon on this end, so it's tangent on both sides. That is a setting called the automatic constraints. I have auto-constraining turned on. This will include things like, oh, if I'm drawing a line and I've...

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got a line and an angle, I can draw another line and it will snap to the perpendicular. Notice the purple guideline that shows up. You can use Ctrl Z to undo and get rid of things. Also, if you need to select something, you can use the box method. A box from left to right selects everything that's inside the box. A box from right to left selects everything that's crossing.

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and you can use Ctrl A to select everything inside the view. With everything selected, I'm going to grab this endpoint and drag it up onto the origin and drop it there. I will use the lock to make sure that it stays in place. So now if I grab a point of the sketch and drag it around, it won't move off of the origin. To apply dimensions, just click on

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the entity that you want to dimension. And if that's a dimension that you want to keep, click on the dimension and then click the check mark. Same thing with a radius value and a height value.

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I'll change this to 6. Let's take a look at another one of these constraint settings. Always show constraints. I would usually have this turned on unless your sketch gets very busy. When it's on, you can always see these constraints. And when it's off, you'll only see the constraints when you mouse over or select an item. If you have extra lines in your sketch.

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such as this one, you can select that line and turn it into a construction line. Also notice that each one of these constraint settings has a hotkey associated with it that's preceded by SHIFT. So if I have two lines, let's just say I have two lines that are connected like this, and I box select right to left,

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to select both of those lines, I want to make them perpendicular, then notice the perpendicular is up here. I can either click on the icon or use Shift P on the keyboard. And they snap together. And if I show the constraints, then there is a perpendicular constraint on those items.

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Also, if I click on the constraint symbol itself, there's a tooltip that shows up in the middle of the bottom of the screen that shows that that is a perpendicular constraint. If you have any questions about anything. Also down here, if you select anything at all, it will give you certain information about that entity. Thanks for watching the grid and sketch settings chapter.

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Come back next for view controls.