FreeCAD News

The FreeCAD com­mu­ni­ty is a won­der­ful diverse place and cer­tain­ly not every­one in the com­mu­ni­ty will be involved in tra­di­tions of bring­ing trees into their homes and then dec­o­rat­ing them! How­ev­er a fes­tive tree dec­o­ra­tion, in the shape of a tree, can be a good mini project for play­ing with the Rev­o­lu­tion tool.

Note that in all our tuto­ri­als on this blog we describe tools using the tool tips that appear when you hov­er your point­er over tool icons. This encour­ages every­one to look through the tool icon descriptions!

To begin open up FreeCAD and cre­ate a new project. Move to the Part Design work­bench and then in the com­bo view click “Cre­ate Body” and in turn “Cre­ate Sketch” and select the XZ plane to sketch in. You should now see that you have jumped to the Sketch­er workbench.

We are going to cre­ate a sketch that forms a pro­file of one half of our basic fes­tive tree design. Click on the “Cre­ate Poly­line” tool. Star­ing from the Z axis line draw a pro­file rough­ly match­ing ours. Notice that we have left a small flat sec­tion at the very top and we’ve closed the poly­line with a final line up the Z axis to cre­ate a closed sketch. Whilst you can con­strain the sketch cor­rect­ly it’s not too crit­i­cal to do so when cre­at­ing a fes­tive tree decoration!

Close the sketch to return to the Part Design work­bench and then high­light the sketch in the com­bo view pan­el. Next click the “Rev­o­lu­tion” tool icon. You should now see that your sketch has been extrud­ed revolv­ing to cre­ate a cir­cu­lar pro­file of a tree. Note that you can change the angu­lar amount of rota­tion, whilst we have left ours at the full 360 degrees you might con­sid­er, for exam­ple, revolv­ing the object 180 degrees so it has a flat back, per­fect for 3D print­ing in two halves.

To add our lit­tle hang­ing loop to our dec­o­ra­tion we sim­ply added anoth­er sketch and use the Pad tool to cre­ate the loop click­ing the “Sym­met­ric to plane” option to posi­tion it correctly.

Final­ly, we are sure that won­der­ful FreeCAD users could cre­ate much bet­ter designs than this! Do feel free to share any fes­tive designs you are work­ing on!