- The surface offset command is something I use
all the time.
It's real powerful and it's very easy to use.
Let's go ahead up to Surfaces toolbar
and go over here to Offset Surface.
The first thing you wanna do is just choose a surface.
There it is.
And type in a value.
I'm gonna type in .5
and just that easy, I got a new surface
directly above my existing surface.
I can also do something like a copy surface.
I can choose a existing surface
or I can go ahead and choose a solid face or solid body.
Go back to Offset Surface,
come over here and I'm gonna choose
the outside of this shape here, which is a solid.
And you can see it just automatically offsets that.
I can then choose the other faces as well
and I got a nice, little outside ring around there.
Click okay
and again, I've got a surface now surrounding a solid.
Pretty straightforward and simple.
Here's how we actually use it.
Let's go back to this Offset here
and let's switch the direction
and I'm gonna type in .1,
so now what I have is a surface offset
inside of the solid here.
Now I've got this Plane2 which I created earlier,
I'm gonna show it.
And right on that plane, I'm gonna make a line.
So Sketch,
and let's just make a little line right here at the bottom.
I'm gonna snap to the edges from here over to here
and there it is.
Then, I'm gonna use this text tool.
For curves, I'm gonna use this line here.
And I'm gonna go ahead and write the letter A.
Notice it's showing up very small right there.
That's not where I want it to be.
I want it to be centered and I want it to be a lot larger,
so I'm gonna go over to Font,
under Units, I'm gonna type in 2.5
and there I have a big A right on the side.
Now, what I can do is I can
extrude cut that into this shape.
Let's try that out first.
Let's go back over to Features,
Extruded Cut
and I'm just gonna go ahead and just type that value in
so it's just gonna cut right in to there.
Let's go that far, so .9,
click okay and let's take a look.
Now, I have this surface body.
I'm gonna hide for right now so we can see inside.
So you can see, it just does a straight cut
but over here, it's a lot deeper than it is at the top.
It's not probably what I want,
especially if you're gonna mold this part
and do something else with it.
I probably want that surface cut
to follow the outside shape of the
outside of this container here.
To do that, I'm gonna go back here to Extruded Cut
and I'm gonna say, instead of Blind,
I'm gonna say Up To Surface or Offset From Surface,
so either one, so Up To Surface will be fine.
In this case, I need to choose the surface I wanna use.
So I go down here to Offset2, which is that one.
Notice, as soon as I choose that,
now it does a cut but it cuts it up
and follows that inside shape.
Click okay
and that looks a lot nicer now that it's cutting
up directly to that surface, so it's uniform.
Again, that's what I use this for quite a bit.
I also wanted to point out that
you can do what's called a copy surface.
So if I go back to Surfaces here,
Offset Surface,
and if I choose the outside of this again,
notice it leaves that A out
because it's not part of the surface,
but what you could do is type in 0.
Notice what it says right here,
it says Offset Surface.
As soon as I click it to 0,
it's gonna now say that's a Copy Surface.
So I'm just copying that outside shape.
Click okay, there it is.
Then I can go back and I can hide that solid body.
Then I have just that outside of that surface.
So it's very handy to convert from a solid to a surface
and then you can continue on
with your surface editing from there.
The offset surfacing tool is a
really, really handy tool to use
when you're working in solid modeling techniques,
but you wanna use a little bit of surfacing technique
to get some cool effects
or things like this, we're cutting up to a surface
or extruding up to a surface.
Very, very handy tool.
That is the Offset Surface tool.