Bodies and patterns, part 2

00:01

Welcome to part three of the wheel. In this video, we'll talk about Boolean operations. With the pattern of bodies in place, go to Tools, Subtract.

00:17

The tool tip in this case is not very helpful until you know what it means. So I'm going to make a mistake and then show you how to go back and correct the mistake. Let's say we just start selecting bodies because we know we have to select bodies to subtract. So I'm going to try to select all of these bodies. And then I noticed that I've got a purple one and a bunch of blue ones.

00:46

Notice also that the purple one has a plus next on it. So if I click on the plus, now the purple turns blue. And so now you understand that the blue minuses mean that these are going to be removed from the purple plus. Okay, so that's an easy one to set up, but you've got to get it set up before you finish the feature. You can't come back later and edit this.

01:29

We'll click on done and we've got something that we don't necessarily want. We've got all of the tool bodies that are left there. So I can go into the history tree.

01:46

and turn off keep tool bodies. And now we've got exactly what we hoped we would have originally. Pattern of large and small holes centered around the axis of the wheel. And because this is symmetrical, we want to do this on the other side as well.

02:14

So we'll go to Transform again, Mirror, select Items to Mirror, and then select the mirroring plane or item. So we'll click on Body 1 again from the item tree, and then we'll select the plane.

02:45

Once this is created, you'll notice two things. One is that you can see the sketch plane highlighted inside and we can turn off the sketch plane in the items list. When the sketch plane is visible, it is also selectable. So sometimes you may select the sketch plane when you don't intend to. It's good practice to always turn that off after you've used it.

03:15

And the second thing you'll notice is that there's an edge that goes right down through the middle of the part. That's because these are two bodies, two separate bodies. They're called the same thing, but they're two separate bodies. So what we need to do is again go to the Tools, List.

03:38

Click on Union. Select the two bodies.

03:46

And done. That line.

03:52

The line goes away. There's only a single body left in the list. And we've added another feature to our history tree.