Documentation
Solid features and the timeline
Features turn sketches into solids and then change them. Extrude, revolve, sweep and loft make material; hole, fillet, chamfer, shell and draft shape it; pattern, mirror and move copy and place it. Each feature is a step on the timeline along the bottom of the window, which you can roll back, edit, reorder or suppress at any time.
How do I make a solid from a sketch?
- Extrude E: pick one or more profiles, or a flat face of a solid, and give a distance. The extent can be a distance, up to a face or plane (curved faces too), or through everything; the direction one side, two sides or symmetric; a taper angle slants the walls. Thin makes a wall along the profile or along an open curve. An extrusion that starts into material becomes a cut by itself, and turns back into a join when it leaves.
- Revolve: pick the profiles and an axis, either a sketch line, an origin axis, or an edge, cylinder or circle of the model.
- Sweep: a profile along a path (the chain of connected curves you click). Options include a guide rail, a twist along the path, and sweeping only part of the path.
- Loft: through sections in order, which can be sketches, faces, edge chains or points at the ends, optionally held square to a centerline.
Each of these can join, cut, intersect, or make a new body or a new component. A cut reaches bodies in other components too, so one hole can go through two parts of an assembly.
How do I change a solid?
- Hole H: click a face to place a hole and pick up to two edges to dimension it from, or place holes on sketch points. Simple, counterbored or countersunk; ISO clearance holes (close, normal or loose fit) or tapped holes drilled at the tap size; flat bottom or a 118° drill point.
- Fillet F: click edges or whole faces. Constant radius, chord length, or a radius that varies along the edge through points you set; curvature-continuous (G2) if you want it; rule fillets that find their own edges and full round fillets. Corners can roll a ball or set back.
- Chamfer: equal distance, two distances, or distance and angle, with chamfer, miter or blend corners.
- Shell: pick the faces to open. Sharp or rounded offset, inside, outside or both.
- Draft: tilt faces against a pull direction, on one side, both sides or symmetric.
- Press Pull Q does what the selection suggests: extrudes a profile, rounds an edge, offsets a face or reopens the hole or fillet a face belongs to. Offset Face and Delete Face work on any solid, imported ones included.
- Thread (ISO metric, M1.6 to M64, cosmetic or modeled), Coil, Pipe, Rib, Web, Scale and the primitives box, cylinder, sphere and torus.
How do I copy, place and combine bodies?
Pattern repeats bodies, features, components or construction geometry in a rectangle, a circle or along a path, and lets you switch single copies off. Mirror works about an origin plane, a construction plane or any flat face. Move places bodies freely, along a distance, by a rotation or from point to point, optionally as a copy; Align puts one face, edge or point onto another. Combine joins, cuts or intersects bodies, and Split cuts a body with a plane, a face or a sketch curve.
What can I do on the timeline?
- Drag the marker to roll the model back to any step, or use the step buttons at the left.
- Double-click a feature to edit it. While you edit, the model rolls back to that point, so you see only what existed then.
- Drag a feature to reorder it. A move that would put a feature before something it uses is refused, and the reason is shown.
- Suppress a feature from the right-click menu to switch it off; features that depend on it are suppressed with it and come back with it.
Why do features survive changes upstream?
Every face a feature makes gets a name from the feature and the sketch curve it came from, and every edge is named by its two faces. Fillets, holes, sketches on faces and joints remember faces and edges by these names, and by a geometric fingerprint as a fallback. Change a sketch dimension and the fillet on the edges that moved still finds them. When a reference really is gone, the feature is marked in red and says so, instead of attaching itself to something else.
How exact are fillets?
As exact as in the expensive desktop programs: rounds meet, cross and stop the way they do there, and the volumes match to the last digit. Three R5 edges meeting at the corner of a 40 × 30 × 20 mm block give 23538.071403320 mm³, and all twelve edges at R3 give 23340.849375 mm³. When a fillet cannot be made, the feature says why, and no broken solid is shown.
What is construction geometry for?
Planes, axes, points and coordinate systems from Construct give sketches, mirrors, patterns and revolves something to refer to where the model has no face or edge: a plane at an angle, a midplane, an axis through two points, a point along a path. They are timeline steps and follow the model when it changes; their offsets and angles take expressions.
How do I check what I made?
Measure I reads the exact model, not the display mesh: lengths, areas, radii, and minimum distances, angles and centre distances between two things. Section Analysis cuts the view open, Interference check finds bodies that overlap, Zebra shows how smoothly faces meet, and Mass properties gives volume, mass and centre of mass from each component’s material.