From the course: Learning Onshape

Creating sketches - Onshape Tutorial

From the course: Learning Onshape

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Creating sketches

- [Instructor] To get started with sketching, the first thing you need to do is to get into a document. Now I already have the Lynda Skateboard document that I've been working with, but I can go ahead and also create a brand new document by clicking on this Create over here. I can title it, I'm just gonna call it Test. I'm gonna make it private for right now, and click on OK. As soon as it loads the workspace, I'm gonna then have the option to create either a part studio, or an assembly, or a drawing. So down here, on the bottom you can see I'm automatically already in the Part Studio One or Assembly One, they're already created it for me, so two different environments right from the beginning they've been created. So here's my Part Studio One, and if I wanna start a sketch, here's the icon right up here at the top of the screen. But before I choose that icon, I need to choose where I wanna start drawing my sketch. And by default, I've got these three planes directly in front of me. I got the front plane, the right plane, the top plane. And you can actually just kinda mouse over them and they highlight showing you which one it is. So if I choose the front plane, click on it an highlight it, I can click and expand that and drag it out if I wanted to, it really doesn't matter. Planes go infinitely in all directions, so it's really just a placeholder showing you where that plane is. So if I choose the front plane I can then come up here and choose Sketch, or hit S on my keyboard, either one. So go ahead and click and start a brand new sketch. And now you can see, I've got some information here that pops up on my screen. One, it's saying that I'm in sketch number one on the front plane, and there it is. Over here in the feature tree you can see I've got sketch number one called out, and you can see because of this little dialogue box right here, I'm in and editing that sketch. When I wanna finish or get outta that sketch, I can click on the green check mark, or I can click on the Cancel button to get outta that. Alright, the first thing I wanna show you is some of the sketch tools. Now, notice the full icon bar at the top changed to the sketch environment. And over here on the far left, is two different options. One is Extrude and one of them is Revolve. And that's the two things that we can do with an individual sketch. So, we've got the line coming in, we've got the rectangle tool. If you see a little drop down arrow, you can see there's multiple ways to create the same type of shape. So it's a corner rectangle or a center point rectangle. Notice if I kinda leave my cursor over one of those things, it gives me an in-context pop-up window, giving us a little bit more information about that command and how to use it. Also, with a little shortcut, notice it has a little R in there, so if I just hit R on my keyboard, it's gonna automatically create a rectangle for me, pretty handy, so, there's a lotta keyboard shortcuts that will really make designing an Onshape much faster. Alright, moving on. Next one's gonna be a circle command. It's a center point circle, or a option for hitting C on my keyboard to create a circle. You can also click on the drop down and get a three-point circle or ellipse. Next one's gonna be an arc, so I have a three point arc, a tangent arc, and a center point arc. I have the option for polygons, I can, a polygon is basically any multi-sided item. So I can make a triangle, I can make a hexagon, a pentagon, an octagon. You just type in how many sides you'd like to have and it will create it for you. Next one's gonna be a spline. A spline is a multi-point curve that smoothly slides between the individual points. Next one's just gonna be a simple point. After that we've got text. Then we have some manipulation tools after that, so the next one here's gonna be called a Use, or Convert tool, so what that's gonna allow me to do is take some existing geometry, maybe something from a previous sketch, and bring it into the current sketch, or use that in my current sketch so I can convert things over. It's not really gonna do us much good here because we don't really have any entities drawn, there's no lines, there's no circles, nothing's here yet, but in the future we're gonna be getting into commands like that. The next one's very important, and that one is Construction. Basically it's gonna turn a regular line, or a circle, or any type of sketch, and turn it into construction geometry. And that means it won't be used to create a solid. So if I draw a square, and I try to extrude it, it'll turn it into a box. But if I draw a square and I turn it into construction geometry, nothing's gonna happen. It's really there just to help us lay out lines, put things in the right places. And I use a whole bunch of construction geometry when I do sketches to lay things out so I know where they are, and to keep track of things and the relationships between the individual sketch items. So construction geometry's really powerful. And I, like I said, use it quite a bit in my design work, and we're gonna be using it a lot in this course. So keep that in mind. And you can easily switch between regular geometry and construction geometry, just by selecting it and hitting that button right there. Alright, moving on past that. We've got some simple things like a fillet, or trimming, or extending, or splitting. I can do some offsetting, offsetting's a really great tool, very powerful, just if you already have like a, for instance you have a circle, and you wanted to make a piece of pipe, you can offset the circle to get a little, little bit bigger circle or smaller circle. And then extrude that out to get a pipe, and it's all relational. The Mirror command, I can take some geometry, choose a center line, and then mirror that over to the other side, and we're gonna be getting into all these much more detail as we go through the course. Some type of different patterns, we have a linear, circular, and a transform pattern. I can import some geometry like a DWG or DXF file. And then after that, is some really important things. This one here is key, dimension. Hit D on your keyboard, that's gonna allow us to add dimensions to the diameter of a circle, the length of a line, and so on. So pretty much the flow is gonna be using these tools over here on the left hand side to create some geometry like lines, circles, rectangles, things like that. Then creating some construction geometry possibly to kinda lay things out. And then if we need to trim things up or fill up things we can kinda do that right here in the middle, if we wanna mirror things or pattern them, or bring in some other reference geometry we can do that in the middle here. And then we start adding some dimensions, and then over here on the right side, are constraints. So I can add things like coincident, which means they're touching, or concentric, or parallel, or tangent, or horizontal, or vertical, or perpendicular, or equal. And notice as I'm mousing over them it's just popping up with what these things are, so if you don't automatically recognize the icon, just mouse over it and figure out what it is and what it does. Normal to, pierce, symmetric, and fix. So a bunch of different tools, and we're gonna be getting into all these things as we go through the course.

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