showing a sketch in drawing

[Niall]

Hi All

How can I show a sketch created in the part file, on a drawing? If I extrude the sketch I can see it, but this gives the sketch width rather than being a single line, and this isn't ideal for my application.

I COULD sketch in the drawing file, but this is a little bit of a messy solution and the tools aren't fully featured, and not best practice IMO.

Solving this will also help with using single line fonts.

I have quite a lot of experience in other CAD packages, but I'm new to Alibre. Is this feature just missing?

Regards

 

[dwc]

Hi Niall,
I'm not sure where the problem is.
I make drawings of parts all the time.
Assuming that the viewing angle is 90° to the part surface you will get a single line for each edge.
Note that AD is optimised for 3D work, it does not know what to do with a single line font, they have no volume.
For such work a 2D package is better equipped.
I hope that helps,
Don

 

[Niall]

Hi Don

Apologies I may not have explained the issue clearly enough, but the second part of your answer is what I was driving at.

Creating drawings of parts that have 3D volume isn't an issue, it's dealing with 2D features within those 3D parts that I have had problems with, for instance Sketch 18 in my attached image.

We are trying to use this small cross as a laser engraved fiducial of single beam width, but I can't find a way to make the sketch appear on the drawing without turning it into a 3D feature, at which point it is no longer a single line. In this instance I worked around the issue, but if the geometry was more complex (like single line text that is used frequently for text engraving) it would be a real problem.

I think the main crux of the problem is there is no built in way, that I can see, to create a 2D file (like DXF) from within part file, you can only do this from the drawing; however the sketches don't appear in the drawing, and so I am stuck

Like you said, maybe Alibre just isn't the package for work like this; but it seems a shame, as this shouldn't be the hardest thing to fix/include (like in other CAD packages). Maybe in the future we'll get it.

Thank you for your assistance Don. Even if it did only confirm my fears

Cheers

Niall

 

[idslk]

Hello Niall,

draw the fiducial in the 2D drawing and dimension it to the lines of the lines created from the 3D-projection



there you can change the layer and so the line width

Regards
Stefan

 

[Niall]

Hi Stefan

This is the "workaround" I came to in the end, and it works fine.

If I am working to my preferred workflow, the part file is the master of all the geometry, and the drawing file is just slave. With this workaround, the part model won't include all the part geometry. But I should probably stop being a pedant.

As long as the sketching environment in drawings has all the functionality that the one in the part does (I don't know yet whether it does or not), then this should be fine.

Again, thank you all for helping out a newbie to Alibre