- The surface extrude command is very similar to a
regular extrude inside of SolidWorks.
To get started, let's go ahead and jump up to the
Sketch toolbar.
Start a sketch and I'm gonna choose this Front Plane.
Now, I can use just about any of my favorite sketch tools.
Jump up here, go ahead and grab the line command.
I'm gonna start a line here at the top.
I'm gonna go grab a tangent arc here,
and then I'm gonna go and grab a spline.
Grab a spline, couple of points here at the bottom,
and there's my basic shape.
I can also go back here and add,
holding down ctrl,
a tangent relationship between the two.
You can really draw anything here.
I'm just trying to illustrate
what you can do with the extrude sketch.
Once I've got that, go up here to Surfaces
and go to Extruded Surface.
So, I'm gonna take this sketch here
and I'm gonna extrude it out.
Just like a regular extrude command,
I can just drag out the arrows.
I can even drag the arrow in the other direction
if I wanted to.
You can type in values over here or there.
And we also have the option for extruding Blind,
Up To Vertex, Surface, Offset From Surface,
Up To Body, and Mid Plane.
We don't really have any of those other entities
available at this point in time,
so let's just go ahead and use the Blind offset.
Click on okay and there it is.
Now, if I wanted to make
another surface extrude on another plane,
notice I've got the Top Plane right here or the Right Plane,
that one happens to be right in the middle,
so that's not really gonna work out for us.
But if we go over here to Reference Geometry,
I click on Plane,
and use that as my reference and just drag it out.
Uh oh, hold on.
Make sure you're not choosing Additional Face,
so I'm just gonna choose this and type in a value,
let's say 2.0 inches, and this is gonna put a new plane
about two inches away from my Right Plane here.
And click okay.
Once I have that, I can click on that plane,
and I can go back up to Sketch,
start a sketch here,
and this time, I'm gonna draw just a basic box.
So, I'm gonna drag that out.
I just wanna illustrate that you can use just about
any of these sketch entities to create extruded surfaces.
Once I have the shape I'm looking for,
I can go ahead and go up to Surfaces,
Extruded Surface,
and then, instead of Blind, I'm gonna say Up To Surface.
I'm gonna choose this one right here.
Notice, as soon as I do that,
it creates a surface extrude up to the other surface.
Click on okay, and there you have it.
Those are your basics of surface extrudes.
They're really a fundamental tool
in any type of surfacing you're gonna be working with.
They're pretty straightforward
and most all the tools that you are already
familiar with using regular extrudes
are also true using the surface extrude command.