FreeCAD News

In the ver­sion 1.0 release can­di­dates and the upcom­ing ver­sion 1.0 a new “Off­set Geom­e­try” tool can be spot­ted on the sketch­er work­bench. Let’s have a look at how this tool can be used to help cre­ate sketch geom­e­try more efficiently.

In a new sketch we used the Poly­line tool to cre­ate this sim­ple “A” shape with an arc at the top. We set the var­i­ous ver­tices so that is is con­strained as sym­met­ri­cal around the Y axis. Let’s now apply an off­set to this polyline.

Use the con­trol key and left click each sec­tion of the line to mul­ti-select them all. Then click the “Off­set Geom­e­try” tool icon. With the tool select­ed if you hov­er over the line in the live pre­view you should see the off­set geom­e­try appear with an On View Para­me­ter input box. You can now type the off­set dimen­sion into the input box to cre­ate the off­set geom­e­try all around the orig­i­nal poly­line at the desired off­set. We went with a 5mm off­set in the example. 

You’ll see that with the default set­tings the Off­set Geom­e­try tool adds an off­set at all points ref­er­enc­ing the under­ly­ing sketch com­po­nents at the off­set input. This cre­ates an off­set line on all sides of the under­ly­ing sketch com­po­nent. Of course is pos­si­ble to edit the Off­set Geom­e­try in the same way as any oth­er sketch­er item. As an exam­ple, if we were aim­ing for an inter­nal off­set only that we then wished to close to the orig­i­nal sketch item we can first delete the off­set items on the out­side of our orig­i­nal item.

With the extra off­set items delet­ed we are left with the inter­nal off­set parts and we can close our sketch ready for pad or oth­er oper­a­tions by adding line sec­tions and trim­ming them. Sim­ply draw­ing lines and then using the “Trim Edge” tool to remove over­lap­ping sec­tions of our drawn lines and the off­set lines.

With the sketch wire now closed, we can pad our sketch as seen in the image at the top of the article.