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The sur­face work­bench has some fan­tas­tic tools that sim­pli­fy mak­ing sur­faces allow­ing for com­plex parts to be made. Let’s have a quick walk through some of it’s basic approach­es. As a reminder in these tuto­ri­als we always refer to tools using the names that appear in the tool tips when you hov­er over the tool icons. This encour­ages every­one to look around and dis­cov­er more tools!

To begin, open a new project using the “Para­met­ric Part” option in the new file sec­tion of the start page. This will open the Part Design work­bench and cre­ate an active body. Next click to cre­ate a sketch either in the task tab or click the “Cre­ate Sketch” tool icon. When prompt­ed attach the sketch to the XZ plane. This will open the sketch­er work­bench. We’re going to pre­sume you know the basics of sketch­ing in this tuto­r­i­al so cre­ate a sketch that looks some­what like ours. 

Hav­ing com­plet­ed our sketch close the sketch to return to the Part Design work­bench. Next we are going to copy and paste our sketch 2 times so we end up with 3 sketch­es. When you copy paste sketch­es they will be placed out­side of the active body, left click and drag the copied sketch items in the file tree into the active body. You can then also delete any extra XY Plane object entries that exist out­side the active body. 

Next select one of the copied sketch­es by left click­ing on it in the file tree view. Then in the objects dia­logue use the Attach­ment Off­set drop down to adjust the posi­tion of the sketch in the Z axis direc­tion. We moved one sketch 40mm and anoth­er sketch ‑40mm to spread out our sketch­es. Final­ly, just to show the capa­bil­i­ty of the sur­face work­bench, we went back in and edit­ed the sketch in the cen­tre of our design so that it was larg­er than the oth­ers. Our sketch­es end­ed up look­ing like the image below. 

Next let’s move over to the Sur­face work­bench. The first tool we are going to use is the “Sec­tions” tool. This tool enables the cre­ation of sur­faces between sec­tion­al edges like the ones in our sketch­es. Left click the “Sec­tions tool” and a dia­logue launch­es, click the “Add Edge” but­ton. Then click one of the curved sec­tions of one of the sketch­es, in turn click the sim­i­lar posi­tioned curve in the next sketch and then the sim­i­lar curve in the final sketch. Do this in a sequen­tial order mov­ing across the sketch­es along the z axis, rather than select­ing the mid­dle sketch curve then the out­er sketch curves. As you add the edges you should see a curved sur­face appear. 

Once you have select­ed the three curved edges and cre­at­ed this first sur­face you can then click the OK but­ton. Repeat­ing this process we cre­at­ed addi­tion­al sur­face items for the top and sides of our item. 

At this point it’s worth not­ing that you could add a thick­ness, or use off­set tools to make these sur­faces into a sol­id object, how­ev­er we are going to use a dif­fer­ent tool to make the whole of our sketch­es sur­faced into a com­plete object. For the remain­ing sur­faces which are all in sin­gle planes/flat we can use a dif­fer­ent sur­fac­ing tool. Click the “Fill­ing” tool icon. For either the ends of our object or the base item, we again clicked the “Add Edge” but­ton in the “Bound­ary Edges” dia­logue sec­tion. We then could click edge ele­ments in sequence work­ing around the perime­ter of the desired sur­face. As you do this the sur­face adapts and often looks quite incor­rect until you work ful­ly around the bound­ary of the sur­face. Once you are hap­py each sur­face is com­plete click the OK but­ton and relaunch the “Fill­ing” tool to work on the next surface. 

With all the sur­faces com­plete you might now notice that the sur­faces have all appeared sep­a­rate­ly out­side the active body. Com­mon­ly you might want to join these sur­faces togeth­er to cre­ate a sin­gle object per­haps for export for 3D print­ing or oth­er onward process­es. To do this click and drag to high­light all the sur­face items in the file tree list and then click the “Boolean” tool icon. This will cre­ate a new “boolean” item that will be placed inside the active body.