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Inside or outside of sketch?

acciardi

New member
Hello all...


Back again with a few (hopefully) simple questions...


1. When creating a sketch, I notice that there is no option to select whether the material inside or outside of the sketch is to be acted upon (added or subtracted). In Pro and Solidworks, this option is available. If for example you were to sketch a rectangle on the face of a brick, and wanted to raise a protrusion there, NX knows what to do. But if instead of raisinga protrusion you wanted to *cut away* the material outside of the sketched rectangle, you have to project the edges of the brick onto the sketch tofullyenclose the first rectangle. Am I getting this right?


2.Did I miss it, or is there no option to extrude/revolve on bothsides of the sketch plane? Again, this is a common feature to Pro and SW. I want to extrude a solid on both sides of my primary datum plane, but it seems like I have to make two features to do this.


3. I discovered that by selecting Extrude before Sketch, and defining the sketch from within the Extrude dialog, the sketch is absorbed into the model. I like this approach better than having the sketch hanging around in the solid. Is there any downside to doing things this way?


Thanks in advance for any input...


Ed Acciardi
 
Ed, let me tryand answer at least a couple of these. And let me preface this with the fact that I'm not using NX, I'm still working with V18 but the princible should be the same.


When you select a set of curves to extrude, you should get a dialog box that has some variables to input, such as 'Start Distance', 'End Distance', 'First Offset' and 'Second Offset'. These are how you change directions from inside to outside.


Example: A rectangle boundary is selected, if you choose Direction _Distance you should see a red arrow pointing in the first direction. If that is the direction you want to go pick OK, if not pick Cycle Vector Direction. The second thing you should see would be the Extrude Body dialog box and a dashed arrow showing the First and Second Offset. If I choose to make this extrusion a solid part that is .0625 thick I would enter .0625 in the End Distance and click OK. If I wanted to make it .0625 thick from the sketch plane (bi-directional) I would enter it as .0625/2 in the Start Distance and .0625/2 in the End Distance. Now I can edit my expressions (this is where UG kicks everyone esle's butt IMHO) to say one equals another.


sorry so long and incomplete,


Steve Calvert


[email protected] if you need some more explaination
 
Thanks Steve - I think I just had what we call "a moment of clarity". I've been thinking like Pro/E where the extruded sketch must always be an area. UG lets you extrude a single curve entity which, using the offsets, is then "fattened" into the area to extrude.


I also was able to figure out the "Start" and "End" methodology. It eliminates having to make offset datums to extrude up to. I really like it now.


I must admit that I've been trying to work using Pro/E methodology - so I'm using all internal sketches (we tend to not reuse any sketch data anyway) by picking "Extrude" first. But I have been putting all the sketches on my primary datum plane A.


Thanks for all the help - I'm sure I'll be back for more.


Regards,


Ed Acciardi
 

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