FreeCAD Forum

I love using Sketch and Part Design to build up bodies. However, in a part with a lot of randomly placed holes, it gets monotonous doing a sketch for each hole.

Why couldn't sketch be allowed to have multiple profiles in it ? Profile = a closed face.

There would have to be some rules in sketch.

1) Profiles cannot touch or overlap. They must be independent.
2) All profiles must be closed before they can be used.

There would have to be some rules in Part Design about using such a sketch.

1) All the profiles in a sketch get applied. You can't pick and chose.
2) All the profiles in a sketch get applied for the same plane, depth, etc.

So if I have a part that has 8 bolt holes in it, I could do one sketch containing the 8 circles and then use pocket or hole to apply them en masse.

This would really clean up my models as well as my workflows.

Thanks

What makes you think that it's not already possible ? Are you using an outdated version of FreeCAD ?

I understand that OP wants to use parts of the same sketch for different features; e.g. give the small holes a different depth than the big holes.

chrisb wrote: ↑Wed Jun 22, 2022 1:27 pm I understand that OP wants to use parts of the same sketch for different features; e.g. give the small holes a different depth than the big holes.

That could be the case but he said:

techGuy wrote: ↑Wed Jun 22, 2022 4:39 am 2) All the profiles in a sketch get applied for the same plane, depth, etc.

chrisb wrote: ↑Wed Jun 22, 2022 1:27 pm I understand that OP wants to use parts of the same sketch for different features; e.g. give the small holes a different depth than the big holes.

In that case he can sketch all in one then use shapebinder to pick individual profiles

Thanks for the replies. I'll test this out and get back.

My bad. Using multiple profiles to create multiple pockets works fine.

What doesn't work is padding multiple profiles. I understand why that can't be done, because it creates multiple bodies.

Thanks for the replies in this post.

note that when it doesn't create multiple bodies it does work, in newjoker's example that sketch could have been padded too without issues

techGuy wrote: ↑Wed Jun 22, 2022 9:38 pm What doesn't work is padding multiple profiles. I understand why that can't be done, because it creates multiple bodies.

For that, you can try the Realthunder's version which doesn't have such limitation and offers also many other improvements: https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/releases

techGuy wrote: ↑Wed Jun 22, 2022 9:38 pm What doesn't work is padding multiple profiles. I understand why that can't be done, because it creates multiple bodies.

Padding multiple profiles doesn't always create multiple bodies.