- [Voiceover] One feature that can be really useful
when you don't have exact dimensions for your design
is the "sketch picture" feature.
In this example that I've got here,
I've tried to replicate a logo of something
that I'm a fan of, and create a form tool
for being used in a sheetmetal punch.
Now if I go down to my feature tree here
and expand this Boss-2 I can see that in my sketch,
I've got a sketch picture, so I'm going to go ahead
and show that sketch and you can see in the background
I've got the logo there, and I've actually used it
to roughly trace that geometry.
I'm going to just edit that sketch so we can take a look at it.
So there it is, the geometry that I created
which is a combination of splines and lines
and offsets and different things, but again
it roughly follows that picture that I had to trace.
When we're done using that feature, we can just hide it
and then it's not in our model causing basically
a big roadblock that we can't really see anything through.
So how do we do this?
We start by just opening a new sketch, and going to
the "sketch picture" feature. So we can go down
to tools, sketch tools, and down towards the bottom
you'll find "sketch picture," we just click on that
and then it basically gives you the open dialogue box
and you just got to find your image.
Now you can take bitmaps,
GIFs, JPEGs, TIFs, all various types of
Windows typical formats and image formats
I'm just going to select this one, drop it in.
The first thing that you have to do is position it,
so here we get our x and y position based
on the bottom-left corner. We can also set the degree,
so I can move it from the left to the right,
up and down,
I can also rotate it.
I can also change the width and height of the picture.
Usually I try to lock the aspect ratios
so that I don't mess up the aspect ratio of the picture
so for example, right now when I increase one,
they both change but if I unlock the aspect ratio,
you can start stretching it in one or the other dimensions.
That's not really preferable, especially when
you're trying to do something to scale,
you'll want to lock that aspect ratio.
You can flip the image as well, so you can flip it
horizontally, you can flip it vertically,
sometimes that's useful depending on what plane
you're trying to work in, so I actually did a lot
of the work for my sheetmetal tool backwards
so that was really helpful.
You can also do things like adjust the transparency,
so right here I can turn that up if I really want to
fade it out or just give it a little bit
of a light transparency and then here, also,
we can use this line to set the scale of our model,
so if we know that for example this things is supposed to be
three inches long, we can draw a line here that's
three inches long and stretch this to match it,
and then we've got our scale set.
So it's a pretty useful tool, pretty easy to use,
it stays in your sketch while you're working,
so you can start drawing, adding line features,
it's just going to be there right behind it
so it won't be in your way. And then when you're done,
you just hit "accept sketch," and it's there
and it's going to look like a block
or some of the other features that are part of sketches
and be down below it. You can always go in and suppress that
separate from the sketch, which is nice and then
unsuppress it, or you can just hide the sketch,
and it'll hide both of those features together.
So that's how you use sketch feature in the most basic way,
and it's, like I said, very useful, especially when you have
a picture of something already, you can for example
take a front, right, and top view picture
and then have references on all of those planes
to be able to build something.