Patterns within Dynamic Blocks?

[Anonymous]

We love using dynamic blocks since they meet so many of our needs right now. We havent invested a lot of time into figuring this one out but since we had the Q&A today I figured it would be a good oppurtunity to ask. 

Basically my need would be to stretch a rectangle to a distance that could be accesible in a drop down. I believe I have found information on how to do this. The tricky part becomes having a pattern that grows along with the rectangle as it goes. So for example say I had a piece of Uni-Strut that I wanted to grow to a certain length. Well inside of the unistrut there are a series of holes, how would I get the holes to grow along with the lines? 

I was thinking a pattern would work well but havent had the time to investigate to see if this will work or not. Thanks in Advance for all of your patience with my many questions today, your team has alreadt been a huge help to us.  

[jerry.ford · Accepted solution]

Good question.  

You can add hatch patterns to the dynamic block defnition and they should update when the block changes size.  I recomment selecting the object boundary rather than a point within the boundary when defining the hatch. 

However, it sounds like you want more than a hatch pattern, you want additional items to be created or moved as the size of the block changes.  For this I recomment using the Array action.  For example, you could create a conference table that adds more chairs as the length of the table increases.

Hope that helps.

[Anonymous]

@jerry.ford that sounds like what I need. Currently we are using hatching that grows with other geometry and it works great. 

Like you said that that wont work in this situation though. The array is interesting, I have not played with that command at all yet. Is that something that I can do within a dynamic block and have a drop down when I select the block to change it's length and in turn update the number of holes that correlates with it's desired length? 

This solution sounds like it should work, do you have a source for a tutorial or a video that may show me how to work through this process? Thanks for the help!

[rob.maguire · Accepted solution]

Hi xjer88,

Here is a video on how to create an Array Action in a dynamic block definition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jItUeoosFC8

Hope this helps,