How To Use 3D Sketches To Reduce SolidWorks Features

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solidworks-tips Here’s a slightly useful and not-at-all complicated tip on reducing features by using 3D sketches. It’s more fun to have people gather around your desk, get all attentive and then yell the first step very, very loud as they hunker down around your screen… Now move in close people…

Two Tips in One
This is really two tips in one. What a deal. I’ll show how to create a plane at any angle against a curved surface and do it with a minimum number of features, all thanks to the handy 3D-ness of the 3D sketch tool. There’s a video later on, but here’s the step-by-step.

TICKS!!!
Giant Ticks, my friend. Some call them points or dots, I call them ticks. And they’re thirsty for 3D bloody sketchiness. Say you have a curved surface (like this one you can download). Remember to yell.

Start a 3D sketch and plop 3 points in space with perpendicular lines in between!
Put one point on the bottom edge of the surface
Add some dimensions to lock things down a little bit
Exit the sketch
Insert a Plane (Insert, Refereence Geometry, Plane) by selecting the 3 points you created

Ok, you’ve effectively eliminated 1 feature (an extra plane) from your FeatureManager and have learned to create a plane angled to a curved surface. What a day. Here’s the Example file.

You can apply this process or way of thinking to other areas of your models. There’s at least two other ways you can reduce features with 3D sketches. Know what they are?

Here’s the video of the process.

SolidWorks Angled Plane on Curved Surface How-to from Solidsmack on Vimeo.

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Viewing 5 Comments

Devon T. Sowell 5 months ago 1 point
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Hi Josh-

Great tip, thanks for sharing.

Devon

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http://www.3-ddesignsolutions.com

Dale Dunn 5 months ago 1 point
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This can be done even more quickly... Use a single line, with one end coincident to the curved face, and the line perpendicular to the curved face. Once that's done, you can create a plane entity in the 3DSketch, or exit the sketch and create a reference plane on the end of the line.

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Chris 4 months ago 1 point
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I've done both ways. The faster way is the one you've suggested Dale but I've had issues where I wanted more control over the feature and the video solution allows for a few more degrees of control.

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Josh 4 months ago 1 point
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Cool Chris, nice to see that someone else has tried this out. If I'm not able to do something with the typical sketches or have a lot of extra reference features, I'll try it out with 3D sketches. Comes in handy for sketch patterns as well as Component Patterns in assemblies.

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Chris Jackson 3 months ago 1 point
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you don't have to draw points, just draw lines in the 3d sketch. the plane dialog will let you pick the line end points.

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