Sketches

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In this section of the Solid Modeling Basics Tutorial Series, we're going to take a look at our sketch features and also the constraints that go along with creating sketches. Those sketches are the underlying structure that helps us create geometry in Shapr3D. And so I'm going to start here. I'm going to try to detail out some more features on this. So originally we were trying to make a water pick head. So I'm going to create a new sketch.

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I'm going to select this plane that we created earlier. And I'm going to draw in some new features here. And then the next video, we'll go over and make those solids. So the first thing I want to do is I'm going to make a groove that is going to be a detent where we can connect this waterpick spout to the rest of the body. And so we're just going to select our line tool here. You can see that our contextual panel here pops up.

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allows us to select a bunch of different features. And there's also some letters next to each of the buttons. Those are hotkeys, so you can use those to select the individual elements that you're trying to create. So the first thing I'm going to do here is I'm just going to quickly draw out some geometry. And I'm going to try to make areas so that that way, the software knows that we can use that as a tool for what we're creating. So I'm going to do some revolves in the next video.

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And I'm also going to do some extrudes and lofts. So I'm just going to draw a center line here because I'm going to be revolving some features around that axis. Another thing I wanted to do was to create a curved section that is going to revolve around here. And it's going to smooth out from the very tip of the waterpig head to the base. So I'm just going to close this area off.

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I'm going to draw another line across the bottom here.

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And what else can we do? I also want to create a loft here. So the waterpik head has a little curved spout on the end of it. So I'm going to create some geometry here just to sort of define what that shape looks like. And right now I'm just drawing some lines here that's helping me kind of lay out what I want, but I'm not really focused too much on any of the constraints that we can add in here to make this more precise. So I think that's good there.

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So if we look at our, the constraint settings on the right hand side here, you can see that they're all grayed out and that's because I haven't selected anything. But what I can start doing is start creating relationships between all of these elements. So for example, here I want this center line here to be a construction line. So I can create a line that isn't going to be used as part of an area. I'm also going to

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make sure that it's a vertical line. So you can see that there's these constraints that pop up as I select them. And some constraints are already placed in here. So as a result of just putting lines in here and drawing things out, Shapr3D does a good job of starting to add in constraints when it's necessary. Another thing I wanted to do here was to make sure that this curved edge here is...

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tangent to this vertical line that's above. So I'm going to make sure that this vertical line here is in fact vertical. And I'm going to also select this edge here and this edge here and I'm going to select our tangent tool. So you can see that these pop up. If I want to delete them, I can click on them and delete them. But that's looking good so far.

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I'm going to revolve this surface area around here. I'm going to do a revolve cut with this area here. Another thing I wanted to do was to smooth out this edge here. So I want the tip of the water pick head to curve over, but I also want to have an internal fillet here that makes a nice smooth transition instead of having a sharp corner. So I'm going to select our arc tool again, and I'm just going to select again on these edges.

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go like that. And you can see that I've already created some coincident constraints here. And I can come in here and just make sure that these are tangent. So that way that I get a nice smooth feature. I'm also going to make these edges here construction lines so that that way I'm controlling how my sketches are being laid out in the software.

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but they aren't going to impact how the geometry that I'm using to actually create those features. So I'm going to add another straight line from the edge of our arc all the way to the other point here.

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You can see that if I click and drag, I'm still getting a lot of motion and rotation from all of these elements. So one of the things that we want to focus on is making sure that as we're drawing things, we're also adding in dimensions or adding in constraints that help us drive the sketches so that they don't move around as things happen. So one of the things that we can do here is add a dimension for this line across. I really only want this to be one and a half millimeters wide. And you can see that I didn't constrain this point down here.

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So I'm going to add an extra element there. So let's see if we can do a midpoint constraint. I'm just going to add a line here, and then I'm going to select the end point of the line and the line I'd like to constrain to. And I can create a midpoint constraint like that. So now this edge is in the midpoint of these two edges here, which is great.

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This set of edges here isn't constrained by anything either, so I'm going to just add another dimension by clicking here. I'm going to add a dimension here and we're going to say that this is 5 millimeters from the bottom. I'm also going to say that this is 4 millimeters is great. I am going to add an angle constraint, so I'm going to select two edges that are...

06:27

an angle apart and I'm just going to make this 50 degrees. I'm going to select this edge, bring this measurement over. I'm going to also make this 1.5 millimeters. And you can see here that this edge, it kind of tilted over and that's because it also doesn't have a vertical constraint. So I'm going to add a vertical constraint to help us along there. I'm going to also make sure that

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This is aligned with the edge here and I can make a coincident constraint that way. This line here is coincident with this point. That helps me constrain that edge as well. So you can see that this is now spinning around. I need to make this a vertical constraint. So if I select any one of these points now, I can see that nothing's moving. So I know that that's fully constrained.

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Same thing over here. I wanna make sure that everything that I have is correctly constrained. And right now this arc is not specifically aligned to anything and we have some endpoints connected but then we don't have a real radius. So I'm gonna select the radius. I'm gonna just say that's a 60 millimeter radius. The key here is being able to fully constrain a sketch.

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and still be able to modify it effectively as you're modeling. We have a few more constraints to add here. This line here needs to be horizontal in order for everything to work. And I think this is looking good so far. I'm going to leave this unconstrained because I really would like to be able to review it and look at it later as we build a solid model. So I'm going to allow that to be flexible. And I think that's looking good right now.

08:25

That's going to finish up our sketching and constraints exercise for this tutorial. In the next video, we're going to take a look at how to use simple revolves and extrusions in order to make more details in the solid model.