Creating repeating patterns in a sketch

- [Narrator] There are a couple different ways to create patterns inside of SolidWorks sketches. The first one is going to be the Linear Sketch Pattern. If you click on this icon right here, you can see we can get into that tool. Now my first option is the direction which is going to be in the X direction. You can see here which is going to be going to the right. I can choose the pattern spacing which is going to be right here. I can then choose which piece of sketch I'd like to actually pattern. In this case, let's go down here and choose the Entities to Patten. In this case, let's go ahead and select these lines here or just window around them so I can just select each one of these lines.

Those are the lines we want to pattern. Or you can just go ahead and preselect those lines and then come up here to Linear Sketch Pattern. Couple of different options of how you can do that. In this box right here, you can use the up or down arrows to adjust that pattern to the right. You can see here as soon as I get passed there, I've got an option to move it a little further. Same thing with the amount of pieces that you want to pattern. In this case here, I've got three. I can continue pushing that further and further out if you'd like to. We can also change the angle. So in this case here, I can change the angle to an angle that matches the pattern I'm looking for, or just leave it back at zero.

We can also go in the other direction at the exact same time. If you want to go in the Y-axis direction, you can pattern that direction as well. We can change the spacing to maybe like half of an inch, actually I maybe go a little bit higher than that. We can see we get a little past. Alright, looks pretty good. Then we can define the angle, if you'd like to. So I can adjust this angle up or down. It's moving it to the left there if I go that way, and moving it to the right if I go on the down arrow. So I can adjust the pattern slightly that way.

Once you got the pattern you're looking for, go ahead and just click on the green check mark. Now I have that sketch pattern. Anything I do to change the original shape will automatically change all the pieces in the pattern as well, so keep that in mind. Anything that's happening to that seed, will automatically happen to the entire pattern. If you want to go back and modify this pattern, you can right-click on it and say Edit Linear Pattern. Now I can then add instances if I want to. Add more this way as well.

I can then also come down here to the very bottom, click on this little drop-down arrow here and say Instances to Skip. This puts a little pink or purple dot on top of each one of those. Any one of those dots I click on, it will remove that piece from the pattern. So we have a couple different options on how to do that. That is the Linear Pattern, it is a pretty useful tool especially if you're creating some type of repeating element. It's definitely a lot less work than creating each and every one of those elements. Alright, once we have that one, I'm going to hit Escape to get out of it. Now I'm going to come down here. Come back to this sketch here.

Let's go ahead and rebuild that, so let's go back in there again one more time. Let's go ahead and delete this pattern 'cause we didn't really want that entire pattern. Go ahead and window over everything. Hit Delete, click on Yes. It's going to take everything out of there. Let's go ahead and create one more shape like a parallelogram. Here's our parallelogram again. Let's draw it out. Now I have the option of using the circular pattern. So if you click over here on the drop down, I can say Circular Sketch Pattern. As far as my rotation or my center of rotation, that's the first question I have here, I'm going to choose the origin.

Then I'm going to define the Entities to Pattern as these ones right here. So I'm going to select these actually ahead of time. Come up here, Circular Sketch Pattern, going around that point there, and now I can adjust how many of them you like. So you can kind of push those around there. Looking pretty good. There it is. So let's do 10 of those. Of course you can define the radius if you want to, the angle and so on. You can also define if you want to have it going in a full circle or maybe just like half a circle. So I can type in 180, so I'm only going a half way around there.

I can also change the origin of what I'm patterning around. In this case here, it's just zero zero which is right at the origin, but you can move that if you needed to. You can also make a couple other changes here as far as the radius, the angle, and so on. But anyways, once you've got that figured out the way you want it to be, I'm going to go back to the 360, hit Okay and there's our circular pattern. So a bunch of cool tools for creating patterns and it really allows you the ability to create one simple shape and then come up with a lot of complex geometry using just a couple, simple tools.