How to specify angle of linear pattern?

I know how to do linear patterns in my sketches, so long as i want the pattern to go left to right or up and down. How do i specify that I want things repeated along a specific angle?

I can’t rotate the view to a specific angle so that left-right / up-down are at the angle i want.

The best workaround I’ve come up with is to make the lines at the wrong angle, do a linear pattern, REMOVE the linear pattern constraint, but leave the products of its action, and then rotate them all as a group to the right angle.

This feels very Not Right™

Does this help?

7 Likes

a) holy crap.
b) I would have never thought of that
c) Yes! that’s a much more reasonable workaround. :bowing_woman: Thank you.

This is indeed a great tip for patterns in sketches. Can something similar be done when patterning a body?

Yes, exactly the same way. Sketch a line at the desired angle and align the center of the linear pattern gizmo to the angled sketch.

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Thanks, that makes complete sense. The problem was that I was trying to modify an already-created pattern. The gizmo is only available when a pattern is initially created. When modifying an existing pattern, the gizmo doesn’t appear. This is not ideal. When modifying a pattern, one should be able to change the position of the gizmo.

After playing around with this, I noticed a couple of other undesirable behaviors. When I set the spacing between pattern elements, I expect that number to set the spacing between the elements, not the spacing between corresponding element faces.

The body in the video is a 0.75" x 3.5" board. I want the pattern spacing to be 0.5", i.e., I want each board to be 0.5" apart. To do this in Shapr3D, I have to set the spacing to 4" instead of the more intuitive 0.5". This also fails to convey design intent because if I later increase the board width to say, 5.5", I’d have to update the pattern spacing to 6" to maintain the desired 0.5" board spacing.

Lastly, when I create a pattern, the body automatically gets put into a folder named Linear Pattern xx. This is fine, but if the pattern is deleted, the folder remains. If I delete a pattern, the folder that was created as part of that pattern should also be deleted.

That is amazing, thank you