How can I stop sketching on bodies being infuriating?

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1

What I mean about this is whenever I’d working on something and just want to add a simple rectangle into place on a body face to extrude a section etc it just turns into a never ending nightmare of it sticking to other sketches without me even asking it to. I’ll make the perfect size rectangle and im trying to line it up and it’ll keep shouting about being locked or constraints. I have auto-constraints turned off should I have it turned on? It just seems to turn a 2 minute job into a massive battle every time.

If I use the disconnect command it will then turn my rectangle into 4 separate lines? Am I doing something fundamentally wrong? I just want to control my sketches without the AI thinking it knows what I want to do all the time.

Thanks

2

I know this post comes off as being negative but I am needing help with how to detect where sketches are getting locked together and what I’m doing that makes it happen? It seems a lot of the time even if I move a sketch in the vicinity of another it will automatically try and get attached it in some way? Is there a good tutorial I can study because if I knew why it was happening it wouldn’t frustrate me like it does.

Thanks again

3

Hello Automatom,

Have you tried the plane tool. Set a plane where you would like the new sketch to be…

4

Ah okay so that will create a new instance of a sketch plane and avoid all the tangles?

5

In the current, non-beta version, sketches that are on the same plane will always be combined into one sketch IIRC.

The history/parametric beta changes that behavior.

Though, reading your post, it sounds like you might be struggling with constraints more than sketches. Constraints 1 - Tutorials - Shapr3D

6

Hi Justin, thanks for the link, I’ll have a watch. I just get frustrated when I can’t get the computer to translate what I’m thinking in my head! I’m getting there slowly though, it seems sketches will get automatically locked if a line or point overlaps? But the confusing thing for me is how to unlock it again…

7

Yup! It depends on how they’re locked.

Turning off auto-constraints can help prevent that to a certain extent, but yeah, I still have to kind of select things and guess to figure out what’s locked. If you click on a point, you’ll see a lock (open or locked). Locked means that point is fixed in space and can’t be moved (I think?) Unlock it if needed. You’ll also sometimes see a red/black link icon, which means that point is linked to one or more other points, so moving it will move other things too (I get this most often with corners and center points of objects, which makes the centerpoint object move when I try moving the corner). Just click the link icon to unlink it (or the “Disconnect” button in the right toolbar).

If moving something has weird effects (like moving a circle moves lines connected to it), they’re probably part of a constraint. Select the affected parts and you should see an icon pop up by them showing the constraints applied. You can click that icon to turn off the constraints.