Building parametric models with driving sketches

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Hey guys, today we're working in Shapr3D and we're gonna be learning about the project command. The project command can allow us to create a layout sketch in our design, which will drive individual parts and we can create a pseudo assembly and actually create some mechanical motion. Let me show you how it works. Right over here you can see on the screen, I've got this sketch right over here on plane one. Here's my sketch and I have all these individual components that have kind of been predefined inside.

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of that single 2D sketch. Now, take a look at this model right here. If I click over here in the sketch, I can rotate that around and notice what's happening. As I'm changing that layout sketch, those entities have been projected forward and now they're driving these individual components, so I'm actually getting mechanical motion inside of this part because Shapr3D doesn't have an actual assembly mode, right? This is a multi-body part assembly.

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inside of Shapr3D and by creating this layout sketch and projecting those entities, I can derive these individual parts from that sketch. If you don't wanna create mechanical motion, that's fine. You can just use that sketch to define all types of different shapes and stuff like that, which will be your building blocks for your individual components or parts you might be making in a later design. So let me show you how we get started. So first things, let's go over here to File and create a brand new project.

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All right, I wanna create a plane that's kind of behind where I'm actually gonna be working so I can create that layout and I can project those entities and it's not gonna be kind of in the way. I can always reference that sketch kind of behind the scenes. So to do that, I'm gonna go over here and click on Add and Construction Plane. I'm gonna choose this plane right here and I'll say, I'd like to make a plane that's kind of behind that one and I'm gonna type in like 20 millimeters behind and I can see right over here is that plane, that's where we wanna get started. So click on that one there.

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and say, let's start a sketch. Boom, all right. Now we're looking at that origin here and I wanna choose the L or line command and I'm gonna choose the kind of center point there and I'm gonna type in 100 millimeters. So it's going out to the side. Now notice what happens is as soon as you do that, right, if I zoom kind of out here, I can see I gotta kind of zoom way out here. All right, keep going, keep going, here he goes.

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Now we can see there's my line, I can spin it around, I can see where I wanna go, and I wanna go over here and make it horizontal. So click over here, horizontal, notice that command keeps being active, I can hit L again to turn it off, and notice what happens, I got this little horizontal relationship that's been added to that line. Now if you didn't want that, which we do want that, but if you didn't, you of course can always click on it, and you can say hey delete, hit delete on your keyboard to get rid of it, but in this case we make sure we do want it. But if I click on it here and say delete, notice that I can make

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grab that point and move it around. And notice it's kind of floating all over the place. That's kind of a problem, right? So we really want that point kind of stuck at the origin. So I wanna make sure I'm locking that first point. Now, as soon as I've locked the point, now I should be able to kind of rotate that around. And if I want to make sure that's horizontal, I can click on the line itself and say, hey, go over here and say, I want to make that horizontal. Bam. All right, so now it's locked down. Hit the L command one more time. I'm gonna go over here to the origin. This time I'm going up 100 millimeters, type in the 100.

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and looks pretty good. And of course I wanna snap that right there and then get out of that command. So this case I wanna grab it and notice it is linked together, it's locked on the vertical, that's what we want. And I wanna turn both of these lines now into construction geometry. So I'm gonna go over here, I'm gonna window over both of those and say hey, turn that or make that construction. All right, now I wanna create a motor that's gonna drive my assembly. So.

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To do that, I'm gonna use the circle command or C on your keyboard and come over here and drag out a circle. So as far as the diameter of my circle, I want 50 millimeters for this example. And I wanted to find where that's gonna be, right? So I can, right now I can click on this, I can say, I can drag that wherever I want to be. That's not really what we want, right? We wanted to find this with a dimension. So I'm gonna hold down shift and select this line right here and automatically it's gonna give me the option of creating a dimension. So I'm gonna take,

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Type 65, type that in there. Same thing, I'm gonna grab the center of the circle here, hold down Shift, select this line over here. And in this case, I want that to be 120, so 120. And now notice it shows up as green, I mean, it's defined where it's supposed to be. Now, the next thing I want to do is I wanna create the kind of driving pin. So I'm gonna use the line command one more time. I'm gonna start at the origin. I don't wanna go vertical and I don't wanna go horizontal. I want to make sure I'm kind of coming...

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coming over here at some arbitrary angle. Click there and then do it one more time from the center point over here to this other line. I wanna make sure these two lines are in a row. select that line there, hold on, shift, select that line over there. And I wanna say these two guys are gonna be parallel, right? All right, so there's what I want. Now I wanna pin right over here. So click on this over here, hit C. I'm gonna zoom in a little bit and let's see, hold on, let's zoom in.

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Slide it over here and see if we can't find that line. So this is the line, this is the sketch that I'm working in, right? I wanna be defining where I wanna put things. I'm gonna hit C, I'm gonna go to that midpoint and drag out a circle. It's gonna be 10 millimeters, okay? So that's pretty much what we want for that first step of this thing.

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And if I click on this point here, I should be able to rotate this thing around, right? It's gonna be like my little motor that I can spin this thing around with. And I wanna make sure I do have that rotation motion defined ahead of time, right? If for instance, this line here got a horizontal or vertical applied to it, that's gonna keep that from rotating, right? And if you didn't define where the center point of this thing is gonna be by either like locking it down or give me some dimensions, it's gonna kinda like.

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wiggle around and move around when you're trying to rotate it. So we wanna make sure we're locking down the center point, as well as defining what we're gonna be pivoting around and making sure there's no relationships that are keeping it from spinning. All right, next thing is I want to make a little rectangle. So hit R on your keyboard and let's drag down a little rectangle. So here's my rectangle. As I'm dragging it, I can just start typing things in here. So I'm gonna type in 20 and then I'm gonna hit Tab and I'm gonna type in 40, right? And then hit Enter and there's my rectangle.

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Right? Now, I wanna make sure that rectangle's gonna be like sliding around in this design on this bottom surface here. So I'm gonna choose that line right there, hold down shift, that line right there, and I wanna add that relationship. I wanna say, hey, these two guys are gonna be tangent to each other, right? So click on that and then let's try it out. I wanna slide this thing back and forth. Try to move it up and down, doesn't work. Right to left, it does. So I'm sliding this back and forth, and that's what I want. This thing rotates, that thing slides.

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Perfect, now we need to connect them together. To do that, I'm gonna start with this basic line. Actually, before we do that, let's put a circle here, so that's gonna be my pivot. I'm gonna, here's my pivot, I'm gonna put 10 millimeters for my pivot there. Then I'm gonna use the line command. I'm gonna go from this center of that pivot and come down here and go to the center of that pivot. Now, of course, I do wanna define the length of this line. In this example, we're gonna type in 80. All right, so.

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Pretty much everything's defined here, which is looking pretty good. Now let's try it out, see what happens. here's my sketch, everything's looking pretty good. If I click on that center point, it should rotate around back and forth, and now I'm sliding that block back and forth as I'm rotating the motor around, exactly what I'm looking for. Now of course, what's really powerful about this is if you're trying to find a four-by mechanism or some slide or some kind of thing like that, there's a lot of work to figure out the math and figure out how far you're gonna be going and what you're doing and stuff like that.

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by defining everything in one sketch, I can quickly come in here and change the location of where this is, maybe the diameter or the circle, or change things around and start adjusting the motion, how it's gonna be, how long is it gonna be the link. All these things are all gonna be continually changing till you define exactly what you want. And if you can do that all in one sketch, it's really powerful. All right, so now that I have the sketch done, I'm gonna go ahead and exit out of my sketch and I wanna now start creating individual parts.

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All right, so now that I have the sketch done, I'm gonna go ahead and exit out of my sketch and I wanna now start creating individual parts. Right, so if I spin this thing in 3D, I'm gonna go ahead and start a new sketch and I'm gonna choose something like this front plane. Right, so I'm referencing, now notice behind the scenes is that reference sketch is exactly what I wanted. So I wanna now project that over into my current sketch. So here's my reference right behind and now I'm drawing on that kind of that front plane. So I'm gonna hit P for project.

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And the things that I wanna project are gonna be, click there, click there, click there. So we're getting those lines and then this one's a little bit hard because there's that center line showing up. And I want the edge, that one. All right, so those are all the lines I want. So I'm projecting all those over. If you click on the little gear icon, make sure that we're linking the sketch. So that's linking back to the original sketch for this design. Make sure that's good, we are. So we're good there and hit done.

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So now what that does, notice it shows up as purple, meaning it's linked back to another sketch, and that is what we have in this design. Now of course, if I click on this thing, I can drag this thing out. I can create a solid, right? Here's my new solid. And that's what I want. So I'm gonna type in, say we got dimension here, and I'm gonna type in the negative 20, right? So there's my shape, but you actually I noticed that we forgot that center.

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that center circle, right? We need to go back and grab that circle. So here's the body, right, it's been defined. Here's the sketch itself, right? So, you know, how we're defining each one of the things. And here's my extrusion. So if I go over here to my extrusion, I say edit. And as far as this face here, now I actually want this surface, right? So that whole shape there, click okay, and I can easily go back to the history bar over here and modify how I'm designing or creating these individual shapes.

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I wanna do the same thing right up over here. So in this case, I wanna create, and it's important to do this all as separate bodies, or separate features. So I'm only gonna create that piece in this operation. Then I'm gonna go create another piece. So those are all individual units they can operate independently. So as far as a sketch, I wanna create a sketch again. This time I'm gonna choose that same front plane. Over here, I'm gonna choose.

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I'm gonna hit that P command again. So P is where I'm gonna project the sketch. I'm gonna project that guy and that guy. And again, make sure it's linking together, which it is. And click on OK. And now everything shows up as purple, which means it's linked back. It's defined, it knows exactly where it is. And I'm gonna spin it in 3D again so you can kinda see right where we're at. And actually notice a couple things we did wrong. Notice this one's going backwards, right? And I really want it to go forwards.

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So we can go back and adjust as needed. In this case I want to go forwards. I'm going to type in negative.

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negative 20, right? So that's where we want it to be. That's looking good. This one over here is defined again by that extrusion, right? So click on this extrusion. The distance is 20, type in 20. Let's see what happens.

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So I basically went in here and we ended up having a little bit of an issue because that originally was projected not from the plane that I wanted to be on, it's a different plane here, right? So I can say, hey, I want to select a different plane here.

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And that original plane, which we defined it was, is back over here. And that's what happens is I started there versus picking something that was on the original plane, right? So that's the error that I made by selecting that other plane here, right? So let's just go back, and then this is a good example of, you know, something that gets messed up, it's okay. Let's go ahead and let's just delete these things out, right? So, you know, I don't want this thing here. I'm gonna click on this thing. I'm just gonna delete that, right? I'm gonna go back in here and I'm gonna say, hey,

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Again, I don't want this thing. I'm just gonna go ahead and delete it and this happens, right? I mean because we've got this sketch. It's back here. It's an issue, right? But I want to make sure I'm projecting things the right place, right? So here's my projected sketch here. Here's my other projected sketch. So these things did actually project to the right locations, right? But in here's my sketch. Here's my other sketch, some another when we created that feature. We're good. We went the wrong direction, right?

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What I really wanna do is when I'm projecting that sketch, let's go back and look at that sketch and see what really happened. So here's my sketch. I wanna click on that and hit project, right? Because what happened here is we didn't bring that circle forward, right? That's what we really wanted to do for this design, right? So while if I'm in this sketch here.

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I can hit normal, right, and then can go over here and I hit P for project. I can bring that back in, click okay, and now I've added that back to the sketch. So you may need to do that when you're going through your design. Might say, hey, I wanna go back to that original layout, add something else to it, and then bring it in. So that's what we needed to do. Then I can click on this, right, and I can drag it the direction I want it to go originally. So negative 20 here.

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Just one negative, and there it is. So now I've got that one shape defined. I can come up here, same thing, drag that one out, click over here and say, hey, this is gonna be also 20, right, or negative 20. And now I've got my two different shapes, they're in the right locations and so on. Looking good, right? All right, the next thing we wanna do is we wanna create the link between the two, right? But prior to do that, if I click on this little sketch here, notice if I spin that around,

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I'm already getting the motion I want, right? So notice I'm spinning the motor section, it's little hole is spinning around, it's sliding the block back and forth. We know we have what we need at this point, right? We're getting the motion we want, we're just adding components at this point in time, right? So in this case, I'm gonna choose like this surface right here, I'm say, hey, I wanna start a sketch, right? And the sketch I wanna create is gonna be this link. Well,

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I wanna make sure I'm bringing or projecting something from that original layout sketch into this design so I make sure we're capturing it, we're tying everything together. So hit P and I'm gonna choose this line right here. I'm also gonna choose this line right here and I'm gonna choose that line, sorry that circle and make sure they're all linked together and hit done. All so now we've brought all those things in and then I wanna make this line itself right here a construction line.

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I'm actually gonna, I'm not gonna use that one, but these two other holes I'm gonna use, all right? Now I'm gonna create the rest of the links. So I'm gonna hit C, and I'm gonna snap to the center of that. I'm gonna come over here, I'm gonna snap to that, I'm gonna take, type that's gonna be 20. And I'm gonna say this, hold down Shift, that one and that one, and those guys are gonna be equal, right? So now they're the same size. And then I wanna use the line command.

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and I wanna tie in some lines between the two. So I'm gonna choose from this circle here to that circle there, and then do the same thing over again, is right here from there to there. I've, oh, I messed up there. So let's zoom in here, and notice that I didn't actually connect the dots here, so connect that to that. But I wanna make sure this line here and that circle are tangent to each other. So to do that, I'm gonna choose the circle itself. I'm hold down Shift and select the line. Now,

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You can come over here and hit tangent, which works just fine. Or if you choose like the circle, you hold down the line, can hold down shift and hit T. So shift T will also be tangent. Pretty handy. Just saves you a little bit of time. Same thing over here, because you're already holding down shift a lot of times for these two things, just hit T, brings it together.

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and do it one more time over here, bam, and there, and shift T. Now once we have the, we're gonna use T one more time, don't hold shift this time, just hit T for trim, and I'm gonna trim away this line segment here and that line segment there, and then come down over here and trim this away, that away, and notice this little section right there, we gotta also trim away. So that's gonna be my little drive link, and that's exactly what I want.

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and hit E on the keyboard and I'm gonna spin this thing around to be able to extrude it. Now notice what happens, as soon as I try to extrude this thing out, it's kinda highlighting this area that's kinda between the two, right? It's only being this area or that area. And that's really not what we want, right? So I wanna hide these other bodies. And if I hide those bodies, now I can choose the entire link and it brings it all together as one section. So check, kinda a cool little trick there. So five millimeters in that case, there's my link.

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It's tied together and let's go ahead and now we can show those bodies back and now let's take a look and see what's gonna happen, right? So again, you got this sketch behind here. If I click on it, I can drag it. Notice everything is moving together, right? We've got that link, it's tied together. If you need to make any adjustments to the design, I can go back to this original sketch and make those modifications and everything's gonna automatically adjust.

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Right? So, and then of course, you can do all the rest of the things you're gonna normally gonna do. You're add screw holes and chamfers and tangents and adjust these parts as needed. But now, the base part, the one that you're really trying to create is linked back to that sketch. So, let's go try something else. Let's say, hey, what if we made this instead of 50, what if we said, let's make that 70? Right? Boom. As soon as I change that, notice,

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the part automatically updates. That link arrangement automatically updates, right? You might say, hey, this 80, you know, that should probably be like 120, right? Boom, all those parts, because they're linked, because they're, you know, because they're all connected together, because they're a projection of that original sketch, I don't have to go back into these individual parts or those individual drawings.

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or those sketches to define the shape, because it's all driven from that one individual piece. So it's a really powerful tool to allow you to really kind of look at the different layouts of how this thing goes together, grab that sketch and start kind of moving things around, testing out mechanisms, seeing what goes into it and how it actually operates, and then again, playing around with things like that. One other thing I do want to point out here,

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If for instance you're on a part like this one right here, and you said, hey I wanna create a sketch, right? So I'm gonna say here's a sketch, I'm gonna create it on here, and let's go ahead and just put a circle. So I'm gonna put a circle, here's my circle, and there it is, and then let's just go ahead and do an extrude, let's just cut it into the shape. So here's my shape, I'm just gonna cut it in a little bit, click okay, all right? Now, take a look at this. When I go back and I start, and I grab,

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that original sketch. Let's see if I can spin it around so we can see where that is. So here's the sketch.

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little bit hard to see. Let me see if I can spin this around a little bit differently. As I'm working on that sketch, I can grab that little point right there and move it around. And notice as I'm moving it around, the cut that I just put in there is not moving, right? That's not linked together. So even though I'm modifying this original part, right, because nothing's linked back to where this hole is or any of the original sketch,

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this hole is just gonna stay there and it's just gonna cut from where it happens to be. So if you wanna make sure you're bringing this in, you may wanna go back to the original sketch, the original linked sketch and add some type of reference there. Or in your new sketch, make sure you're linking back to something that is referenced so it knows where it is in a relationship to a reference back to the original layout sketch. Anyway, so there's a lot of really cool things you can do with layout sketches, with projections.

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It allows a very nice way to quickly modify a design and really figure out what's gonna work well for your design. Hopefully this helps out. Definitely play with projected sketch, layout sketches, and using skeleton models like you've shown in this example. Thanks for watching.