- Now one of the neat things about Weldments
is that we're working in only a single part.
We're not in an assembly at all here,
even though we have multiple pieces and mulitple parts,
we're still in one part.
Now it's a multi-body part, and that gives us
the ability to take those individual parts
and mirror them and pattern them.
And that's exactly what we're gonna be doing in this video.
Now we can also do the same thing with assemblies,
and we're gonna be doing that later in this series.
However, right now, let's go ahead and jump in
and do some patterning first.
So I have this vertical member right here.
And I've got this base plate directly on top of it.
And I have one directly below it as well.
Now I can choose the Pattern command over here,
click on Linear Pattern, and do it exactly the same way
I would pattern in just about anything else.
Choose my first direction.
That's gonna be in this direction here.
I'm gonna choose the Spacing and the Amount,
and then I'm gonna choose the Features to Pattern
or the Bodies to Pattern.
In this case here, I want to choose Bodies
cause I really have a bunch of bodies here.
So I'm gonna choose first, this structural member here.
I wanna choose this base plate right there.
And then come back up here to the top,
and I wanna choose this header plate right there.
Now the spacing is gonna be a little bit
more than 0.1 inches.
In fact, the size we really need to be at
is at 73.25 inches.
Now I didn't just guess that.
I measured it out and made sure it
was the right spacing before, but I can go ahead
and add a few more, and it actually looks like
my spacing wasn't quite correct.
So let's go ahead and just add a little bit more to that.
And one of the nice things about doing this
is I can see how they're all gonna lay out in my design.
Alright, so we're not really using six.
We're using only five.
Make sure we drop that back to 5.
And let's go ahead and increase this a little bit more.
Alright, they're looking like they're starting to get close.
And that's exactly what we need to do.
You can obviously take and define this shape
and figure out really exactly where we need to be,
but sometimes just by clicking on this,
we can get a pretty good estimation of right where
we really need to be, so let's just say
8'12".
And it should be pretty good.
Then click on OK.
Alright, so there's our spacing there.
Click on zoom to fit.
Looks pretty good,
and we've got a couple other issues we need
to deal with here.
One is notice how in this upper right hand corner here,
we extended this line a little bit
so it hits the end of the plate.
We can do the same thing on the other side here
to make sure we've got enough material on both sides.
So let's go ahead and do that right now.
Let's go up to Weldments.
Let's go to Trim Extend,
Bodies to be Trimmed is gonna be this one here,
and the Face / Plane is gonna be the end here.
Make sure you choose a Body in that case there.
Let's try it one more time.
There it is.
Face and Plane, not the body.
We're gonna use the edge of that face of that body.
Click on OK.
There it is.
Alright, now that we have all these
defined on this side, we wanna just basically
take all of them and put them on the other side
of the building, so to do that,
notice I have this Cut List here,
and there's 16 of them available.
Let's go up to Features.
Let's go to Mirror.
And my Mirror Face/Plane is gonna be this Right Plane.
Now my Bodies to Mirror are gonna be
all of these bodies here.
Now I can choose them from the window here
or from the tree, so either way will work just fine.
Let's just go ahead and choose these different items.
And notice as soon as I'm choosing each one of these,
they just happen to be popping up on
the other side, so again a nice preview
of exactly what I'm mirroring over to the other side,
and again, this is gonna save us a huge amount of time
in the long run because I don't have to define
all these structural members over there.
And actually that trimming, extending, none of that,
and if, anything I change on this side of the design
is automatically gonna update to the other side,
so again it's gonna save us a huge amount of time.
Now like I said before, probably a better way to do this
would be instead of actually creating all
of these structural members and trimming them
all in place here, would be to create a vertical post
as an assembly with a top plate and a bottom plate,
and you can even add in weld, bolts or nuts
or anything like that, and then do a pattern and mirroring
of that total assembly, and we're gonna do the same thing
with the roof sections, so I'll show you both ways.
But I just do want to point out some of those might make
your design a little bit more handy, and that way you can
also define that section later if you want to make a drawing
for it showing what gets welded together
what gets bolted together, the size and shape,
and you only need one of those drawings
to define the entire shape.
So that's patterning and mirroring inside of a weldment.
Both of these are very, very handy tools.
Make sure you're putting your origin right in the center
of your design, so it makes it easy to utilize this type
of commands in your design.
But it really will save you a lot of time
and make for a very smooth and slick design process.