Sketching on multiple planes

[hanbury.martin17]

Hi guys,

Please excuse me if this is a well documented question, I'm afraid I'm very new to CAD software and don't know the terminology to search for what I'm looking for.

Basically what I want to know is if it's possible to combine sketches on multiple planes into one extrusion, or how one would go about achieving that. To give you an example of what I'm trying to do, imagine you are drawing a car. You've got a sketch of the front view of the car, call that the Y-axis. Then you've got the side view of the car on the Z-axis, and a birds-eye view of the car on the X-axis. All of these sketches are dimensionally accurate and constrained, but if you were to extrude just one of them then that obviously wouldn't give you a 3D model of the whole car, you would need all of the sketches to do that.

Now what I'm trying to do is significantly more simple than that, I'm not trying to draw a car. But what I am trying to draw can be 2D sketched quite easily on each plane, only I come across the same problem when it comes to turning it into a 3D model. Is there a way to do this? Or could one point me to a video/tutorial that documents the process one would go through to achieve the end result?

Thanks for any help, and apologies again if this is something that I should be able to find quite easily.

Martin.

[Anonymous]

Hi Martin,

Try this.

Extrude all 3 sketches so they overlap.

Then, in Model, click on Modify and select Combine.

Pick one of the extrusions as your target body, and the other 2 extrusions as your tool bodies.

Set your Operation to Intersect and click on Ok.

Brett

[HughesTooling]

A couple of tools for you to experiment with.

First using the intersect operation on the extrude dialog, it will default to cut.

Change to intersect and you get this, when you click OK you'll be left with the grey part.

Or you could use Boundary Fill, just click the white boxes to select the parts you want to keep.

Mark

[hanbury.martin17]

Thanks for your replies guys, I appreciate the help. I shall have a play with the techniques mentioned and see if I can make it work.

I actually managed to draw the shape that I want using t-splines, but whilst it was a nice looking drawing it just didn't have the dimensional accuracy that I need. Is there any way to define dimensions or set constraints on a free-form body? I can imagine that sort of defeats the purpose of the -t-splines, but worth asking.