Eager to get that new idea out of your brain and onto the screen? Good news! Creating 2D sketches in CAD is easier and faster than ever before. Take a look at some of what Creo Sketch Mode offers.
With modernized drawing tools in Sketcher, you can create non-parametric geometry like lines, arcs, rectangles, circles, ellipses, splines, and points. Dragging behavior is intuitive with on-the-fly dimension definition, creating a smooth Drawing Mode experience.
Use the dimension toolbar to set dimension schemes and references. Quick, precise definitions for sketched geometry save you time when it comes to applying those early design changes.
When sketching with these new tools, take full control of the snapping guides when snapping to draft entities or to model geometry. Realizing design intent is fast and accurate.
With Construction mode, you can sketch reference geometry with phantom lines before you create the final geometry. This mode supports a wider variety of geometries, including construction lines, arcs, rectangles, and more. Plus, a shortcut menu option toggles sketched entities between the construction mode and solid mode.
Create a 2D draft view out of draft and imported entities with the Create Draft View option. Select several entities - created or imported - and convert them all into a scalable 2D draft view. This is especially useful for importing legacy drawings that have no model behind them, or when you have a collection of draft entities that you want treated as a single view.
This enhancement also creates relations between several draft views (general-projection view) and shows their hierarchy relation in the drawing tree. It all adds up to easier maintenance of imported/draft drawings and a quick organization of 2D draft views.
You can create a sketch that consists of multiple regions, and then create new features using portions of that sketch. When combining these sketch regions with multi-body modeling, you can generate geometry for multiple components quickly within a single sketch.
Earlier Sketcher versions required additional datum planes for the location and depth of features. Each extrude required its own sketch, too. Now, Sketcher has more definitions of feature depth, including negative depth values, and depth offset from existing references.
Plus, you’ll find it easier to visualize the display of constraints. Adjust the size and color of the constraints to your liking.
Combining the sketch regions with depth features gives you a faster workflow that requires fewer overall features. Sketch regions provide users with significant time savings as well as a simple flexible workflow.
These features in Sketcher give you finer controls, as well as tools to create sketches faster and more accurately. Watch the example video to see each of these new features in action. You (and your accounting dept.) will be amazed at the time and budget your team could potentially save, and how much faster you can push products to market.
Mike Gayette is a marketing professional and freelance writer based in North Dakota. He writes about engineering software, marketing technology, customer service, and team building. He also spends time at the local humane society as a dog walker and cat entertainer.