From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2020 Essential Training

Creating repeating patterns in a sketch - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2020 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Creating repeating patterns in a sketch

“

- (Instructor) There are several different patterns we can do in SOLIDWORKS Sketches. The first one is a Linear Sketch Pattern, which is available under the Sketch toolbar. And if you click on the little twirl down there you can see we also have the Circular Sketch Pattern. So let's start with the first one here, Linear Sketch Pattern, and the items I'd like or the entities I'd like to pattern, let's go ahead and just choose these lines that make up this parallelogram here. And there's our entities. And then as far as the direction, it already has the x direction selected. And you can flip that if you like, just flip it to the other side. And then define how far or what the spacing is between these objects. So you can type a value in here or just use those arrows. And same thing with the dimensional x spacing. I can turn that on or off. And then how many do we want to have? I can just type in a value there, or just use the up and down arrows to create a pattern, a linear pattern. Then I can also define what is the angle. So I need to go either less than that, so here's our value here or even type in a value like one or 30, something like that. So that's going to be 30 degrees from the x axis. Of course, these are overlapping, so you'd need a little bit more spacing there so you would extend this out here, and then you've got a series of those going in that direction. Now if you go back here, put a zero, now we've got a direction going that way. Now what about the other directions? The direction two is based upon the y axis over here. And I'm going to go ahead and just add in a couple more of these. And my spacing, I need to increase that a little bit so I can just add a little bit more space between 'em, and now I've got a nice linear pattern in both directions. So I've got a whole grid of these shapes now. So here's my entities. Now below that, notice down at the very bottom if you scroll down here, you can see Instances to Skip. Click on that and now if I click in that box notice I get this little pink or purple dot on each one of those. So if you don't want to create all these Sketch entities, you can actually click on those little dots and get rid of them. So if I click on these dots, it's going to bring or remove these items from my pattern. And if you want to bring them back, they're just listed right over here. So select it there, hit delete on your keyboard and it's going to bring that item back. When you're done, click on the green check mark and there you have a nice Sketch pattern. All right, that's one way to do it. Now the next way, if I hit undo, it's going to go back to where we were before. Let's go ahead and look at the circular pattern. So the circular pattern is going to do pretty much the same thing. I have to choose a point that I want to rotate around. I'm going to go ahead and choose the origin right here. So there's my origin point. And I click that point right there. And then as far as the entities I'd like to pattern, I'm going to go ahead and choose all these line segments that make up that shape. And there they are. I can define where this is by these values here, but zero-zero happens to be at the origin. I can define if I want to go in full 360 or if I just want to do a segment of that. Maybe I only want it going to 60 degrees, and then you've got a pattern that only fills up that 60-degree segment. And I have equal spacing or I can also define how much spacing is between each one of those parts. Equal spacing would be fitting them all in there. So either way you want to do that. And then I can define how many of these I would like to have. So if you go too many, they just start overlapping each other. In this case here, I've got 10. So you go to 11 or 12 they start overlapping, so it's causing some issues there. Make sure you're not creating overlapping sketches 'cause it's going to make a very hard time to actually extrude that into a shape unless you're going to be doing some trimming. But let's go ahead and change this back over here to 360. Let's make equal spacing. And now let's make 360. All right, there they are. Add a few more for fun. And there is our circular pattern. Also down here under Instances to Skip, you can choose any one of these items by clicking that box and then you can say hey, I'd like to get rid of some of these patterns by clicking on that little pink dot there. And that will remove them from the pattern. When you're done, go ahead and click on that green check mark. And there is our circular pattern.

Contents