How to group items in sketcher?

[falviani]

Hello all,

My setup:
OS: Windows 10 (10.0)
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.19.21114 (Git)
Build type: Release
Branch: master
Hash: b0df61ab6712b068a7e0e8713cd57ec105516261
Python version: 3.6.8
Qt version: 5.12.1
Coin version: 4.0.0a
OCC version: 7.3.0
Locale: English/United States (en_US)

Newby question here. Is there a way to select a number of items (say, several concentric circles, or geometric items with a fixed relationship) in the sketcher and create a group so that they can be simply moved around as if they were a single item? I can't find any way in the UI to do that.

Thanks in advance,
Frank

[chrisb]

You don't group the elements, it's all done by constraints., e.g. for the concentric circles you will have the centers coincident. Then you can move them all together.

[TomB19]

As per Chris, I do it with construction lines and constraints.

You create a relationship between sketch elements and they will all move together.

This gangly looking contraption moves around as a unit. The blue lines are construction lines and only serve to describe relationships with other elements.

FC constraints.png (19.93 KiB) Viewed 350 times

[TomB19]

Further,

There are some fantastic FreeCAD tutorial series on YouTube. A few of them are recent and most of them are relevant.

As I sketch things, I always tug them around with the mouse to test relationships. They should either move together or not move at all, to prove they are related. If you grab a line with (left-click) drag and it moves away from another element it is supposed to be attached to, you need a constraint (likely a point or coincident).

It's like testing a mechano design by wiggling it, for those of us over 60 who know what mechanos are. lol!

Check out the YouTube tutorials. FreeCAD is wonderfully easy to learn. I picked up a level of knowledge that was happy enough with after a couple of hours. After that, it's down to an endless bag of tricks to do things like threads, sweeps, and whatever else, that can only be learned by spending time with it, reading, and watching YT.

[TheMarkster]

In the sketcher menu Sketch -> Sketcher tools -> there are options copy, move, clone. Select your objects with block selection, then use the move menu item. When you click a destination the objects selected will be moved, if possible, perhaps depending on constraints already set.