Everything that's editable...

I stumbled on this one almost by accident and thought it was something neat to share, for those that, like me, didn’t know it was possible. You know how easy it is to edit feature patterns, right? There’s an icon for the pattern on the feature manager, you just right click on it and select “Edit feature” and voila, you can make all the changes you wish. But what happens when it’s a sketch pattern? Editing the sketch pattern doesn’t seem that evident. There’s no icon for the sketch pattern on the feature manager. Only for the sketch. You can edit a sketch, but there’s no way to “roll it back”. Well, there is a little trick for this kind of situation. If, while editing the sketch, you click on View, Sketch relations, so you can see all the relations on the sketch, you will notice that the entities in the pattern all display the following symbol.

 

That means they are part of a pattern. If you double click on any of those pattern symbols, you will reach the following Display/Delete Relations dialog box.

Right click on any of the “Patterned#” relations inside the box and select Edit pattern… from the menu that displays. Voila! It takes you straight to the dialog box of the sketch pattern, and from there you can modify the number of instances, the spacing between them, instances to skip, etc. Neat trick, isn't it?

Comments

[fcsuper]

Mmmmm, its editable. Sounds tasty. ;) Good tip!!!

[Gabi]

Thanks, Matt! You know, sometimes, when running into little things like this one or the ones that Brian found using the keyboard, I think of those video games magazines loaded with cheat codes and tricks to find things that are hidden in the game. Wouldn't it be neat to collect all this stuff into some sort of "SW cheat guide" or something?

[fcsuper]

Join the SolidWorks Yahoo! Group. I uploaded a .txt about just that to there. Just joining will have it automatically sent to you.