Discover the techniques to modify existing structural designs in this comprehensive guide. Learn how to add holes for power cords to arms of a model, ensuring all features stay together, with the help of a timeline slider.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates how to add holes to the arms of a model, using a timeline slider to keep all features together, ensuring a cohesive design.
- It emphasizes the importance of constraints and dimensions while sketching new features to maintain accuracy and symmetry.
- The guide also showcases how to adjust the timeline slider to manage the sequence of design changes, keeping all modifications grouped and organized.
In this video, we will edit our existing arms to add holes for our power cord. If you will, please scroll down and find Step 12 and open it.
Once your file is open, you can hide your Data Panel. And I know that I need to create two holes here in the upper arm and two holes here in the lower arm. I know that I can go in, place a sketch point, and then I can go to Create > Hole and create a hole on this point.
Right now, I'm just showing this as an example, so I'm not worried about the size. We can see that when we create that sketch and that hole, it will appear here at the end of the timeline. However, I don't want my arm component group, which is all the way back here, to be separate from these features in my timeline.
So I will undo, and I will move my timeline slider all the way back into this component where I can see my lower arm. Now, I'm right after my Mirror in my timeline slider, so I know that this is the exact moment that I created this arm. Now, I will add a new sketch, create my holes, and put them in this arm so that all of the features for this arm stay together.
So let's get started. Again, I've moved my timeline slider back just after my Mirror, which created my lower arm mirror component, and now I'm activating my lower arm mirror component. I will create a new sketch, and I will click on this face and add two sketch points.
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Sketch point here and here. Let's place some constraints. I'll go to Horizontal/Vertical Constraint, select the bottom circle, and then that point, and then I will go point to point.
This will line it up directly in the middle of my Lampshade Arm. Now I will press D for Dimension, and dimension the distance between the circle and the point as 30 millimeters. I'll do another dimension at the top, and click this dimension to infer that distance.
My sketch on this arm is done, so I will click Stop Sketch and activate my Top component. You'll see my whole timeline reappear, and now I will move my timeline slider in front of my upper arm creation. Now I will activate my upper arm component and create a new sketch.
I'll place it on this face, go to Sketch > Point, and place points here and here, and I will do the same thing. This time, I need to place my Horizontal/Vertical Constraint between the midpoint of the top line here, so I will go to Horizontal/Vertical Constraint, select my point, and then holding SHIFT, I will select the midpoint of that top line. Now I can go point to point to place my next Horizontal/Vertical Constraint.
I'll press Escape, and then D for Dimension. I will dimension the distance from here to here as 60, and the distance from here to the bottom edge as 20. Now that I have my points that are fully constrained and fully dimensioned, I can Stop Sketch.
If I activate the Top component again, I can see that I have four points created, but I don't want to do these in a single Hole command—I want them to be done in two separate commands. So I will slide my timeline slider back again to just after this sketch. I will activate my lower arm mirror and go to Create > Hole.
Now I can see that I can select At Point for a single Hole, or From Sketch for multiple Holes. I'll select From Sketch. Now I can click both points on my face, and again I'm not worried about the size—I just want to make sure I select both points. I'll change my Depth to T, which is thickness.
I'll change my Diameter to D, which is the user-defined diameter, and I don't need to change my Tip Angle because this is going through my part. I'll click OK, and now we can see our new Holes have been created. We may need to edit these features when we place our power cord to make the Holes a larger size.
I can now activate my Top component and again slide my timeline forward. This time, I'm going to this sketch so I can create another Hole command. I will go to Create > Hole again, and again I'm selecting From Sketch, selecting both of my points, and you will see that my distances have updated, but these are not our parametric user parameters.
So I'll change this to T, and this to D, and click OK. I would like to keep both of these Holes and the previous Holes the same size so that they can be made with the same drill bit. Now let's scroll our timeline all the way back to the front, and our model will automatically update and compute those changes.
Notice that our features, because they were made in this group, have remained in the group, and our Holes are now in an appropriate time in our timeline. I'll go back to the Home view and save my file. In the next video, we will start sketching our power cord.
I will see you in the next video.
