I can't get anything to render properly

[Kol3slaw]

Hello,

I've been using FreeCAD for two days. After finally wrapping my head around constrain a sketch and completing one of the drawing exercises from the website, I was able to draw up something to test my skills. Trouble is I can't get this drawing to render properly. I can get one or two added features to work, then it freaks out and turns yellow shaded and renders none of the features. I've tried mirroring and creating individual sketches. Also I tried it on two different PC's thinking maybe it was a hardware or OS problem. I like this program it's fairly easy to use, but I can't get to the next step without being able to render a part properly. Help! I have attached a screenshot with the dir tree and mouseover to show the yellow oddity I get.

[PrzemoF]

Hide some parts (select and hit space key) - it looks like you have overlapping elements.

[triplus]

Yes only last feature in Part design tree should be visible to get what you are after.

[Kol3slaw]

How do I check for and remove overlapping elements?

[PrzemoF]

They are OK - that's the way FreeCAD works. Just hide all except the last one

[Kol3slaw]

I made another drawing and followed what you said about the last thing in the model tree being visible. Does the model tree look correct now? I made this happen by randomly selecting sketches and pockets and hitting the spacebar until the drawing looked as I expected. So, I can think of the labels and attributes as layers? When they are all on it covers certain things up? Is that what you mean by "overlapping" elements? Thank you for your help! I'd have never figured that out!

[PrzemoF]

Yes, it looks fine for me. No, they are not layers, but I don't want to confuse you with explanation - I hope someone can do it better than me.
Go to Tools->Dependency graph if you want to get a hint what you've created and how it's internally linked.

[triplus]

You are looking at features in feature (design) tree. Features like Pocket or Pad are intermediate steps linked together with relations and they form the final part. You can have more individual parts (each with its own features) in design tree and don't let that confuse you.

In process of making one single part as we said you add features and by default only the last feature added will be visible. But you can always view previous features and that is what you did. If you will add a sketch to one of previous features and use for example Pocket on it you will create fork. That is generally speaking something you should avoid doing for now as you should always map sketch to the last feature.

[Kol3slaw]

Yay! Got it to work! Couldn't get the 4 corners knocked out using single sketches and mirroring, the result was very random where they would disappear or render in the mode that appears when you select pocket and haven't entered dims. yet. Also if the larger pockets are 2 separate sketches and the linear pattern is used on both they have problems rendering. I was able to put them both in the same sketch with one instance of linear pattern and it worked fine.

[triplus]

Yay! Got it to work!

Great to hear that.