From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2021 Essential Training

Creating circular patterns - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2021 Essential Training

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Creating circular patterns

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- [Narrator] The circular pattern tool works very similar to the linear pattern tool. However, we need an access to rotate around. So let me head up here under features, come over here to where linear pattern is, and click on a little dropdown. You can see here, we've got a circular pattern directly below that. Go ahead and choose that one here. My direction, or my axis of rotation has to be right here. So two things I can do here. One is I can come up here to the view, and I can turn on view temporary axes. As soon as I do that notice this little right in here, I get this axes. So if you didn't have an edge there, you could choose that axes, but we have an edge so we can use either one. Let's go ahead and choose that little line right there. And as far as the angle, I can define the angle here as well as the quantity. And the next thing I need to do is choose the feature or body that I like to pattern. So let's go ahead and start with features. And the feature I'd like to pattern, is going to be this little countersunk screw hole. So there it is, and notice automatically I get one more right over here. And of course I can add more and more and more as I go around that part. And if you want to, you can say equal spacing. But in that case, we've got a bunch of holes that are not going to be actually on the part. So it's probably not the right choice for this design, but you could easily make them all equal space, if you did have a full bolt circle that you were trying to create. Let's go ahead and change that back to instant spacing, and as you can see there. Click okay, and there you have it very simple and easy to use, that we're able to create all that geometry that quickly. Now I want to point out one of the things. So this is a regular circular pattern of a feature. What if you wanted to pattern this entire part, like a body? How could we do that? Well, let me show you how to do it. So first thing we need to do is create ourselves a line or an axes, and I'm going to choose this face right here, and I'm going to start to sketch on it. And I'm going to just kind of draw a random line out here, right? That's all we need is a line, to create something that we can rotate around. So here's my part. Now let's go back over here to features and let's come down here to circular pattern. What I would want to rotate around. Well, I want to rotate around that line, I just created, and what do I want to pattern? I want to choose a body this time. I'm going to choose this entire body. Wow! Check that out. Right, so now instead of instant spacing, let's go over here to equal spacing, and we don't want 12 cause we don't want me to touch, but we can get these pretty close and we can easily pattern all those things around there. Think about making like a cool logo or a cool cutout in laser cutting and just taking a simple shape, like this little Pac-Man shape and rotating it around. And next thing you know you've got all this cool shape that quickly. You can use it for creating shapes like this but you can also use it for cuts, right? We can pattern a cut or rotate a cut around. So a lot of things you can do with circular patterns and it's definitely, a really cool thing, and you can create some really neat, intricate geometry by using a simple shape and just patterning it around. So definitely take a look at this tool. It's a great tool inside of SolidWorks.

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