(SolidWorks) Create Sketch Points Around Curve

[Yan Wang]

Can any SolidWorks experts out there answer this question?

Given something like a circle sketch (or something more complex), how do you define it by placing, say, 2000 points around it. I could array 2000 lines around the centerpoint evenly and then click at every single intersection to create a sketch point, but that's not what I'm looking for. Thanks.

[sanddrag]

My SolidWorks trial ran out so I can't really look at it but is it possible to do a "circular pattern" of just points?

[Yan Wang]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

My SolidWorks trial ran out so I can't really look at it but is it possible to do a "circular pattern" of just points?

Let's say you created some crazy squiggly shape that is blob-like...

[Kevin Sevcik]

That's a pretty crazy sort of thing you want to do there, I must say. I'm fairly certain you can't actually tell it to define points in that sort of way. If I needed to do this for some reason, I'd draw the circle, then draw a radius in the circle, make the radius a construction line, and circular array it 2000 times. If you constrain one end of the line to the center point and the other end to the circle itself, you don't shoot your parametric abilities to heck like you would if you made a chord line and arrayed it. So you can still change the diameter of the circle at will. You could change the number of points as well, but it would most likely screw up anything you had constrained to the points.

Thinking about it, you could probably just create a single point and do the same thing.

I'll have to look into other ways to do it for more general shapes when I get home.

[Paul Copioli]

Yan,

First, to define a circle only 3 points are required. Any more points than that and your circle is over defined. In SolidWorks 2005, you can select the circle sketch tool and in the property manager on the left side you can select "perimeter creation". This will use 3 points to define the circle.

For a complex curve you can use the 2D spline tool and insert as many points as you like. You can add points after the fact, too. The points can all be dimensioned to constrain the spline. Also, SolidWorks uses Visual Basic in the background for macros. You can automate the process by putting coordinates of points in an Excel spreadsheet and using that table to generate your spline.

-Paul

[Yan Wang]

Paul, thanks for the help. I'll try it out tomorrow at work and see if it works. This is for work and the SolidWorks model will be converted to another, older program's settings, which requires features to be defined by points rather than radii (radiuses?). Otherwise, I wouldn't imagine who'd want to do this

[Kevin Sevcik]

I would imagine the point creation is taken care of in the conversion process in this case. Atleast something like this usually happens in my experience. For instance, when you save as a .STL file, you have options for the resolution and how it finely it segments curves into lines.