merge sketches

[jmaustpc]

You can now in FreeCAD 0.15.4217 on wards, select a number of two or more sketches and then PartDesign menu ....merge sketches... and a new sketch will be created with all the contents of the previously selected sketches merged into this one new sketch. The old sketches are left as they were.

here is a simple demo file of five sketches merged into one new sketch.

mergingsketches.fcstd

(14.88 KiB) Downloaded 355 times

and here is a screen shot. The group of "numbers" on the left are five different sketches and the group on the lower right are the new sketch created by merging all the first 5 sketch at once.

mergesketches.jpeg (85.38 KiB) Viewed 9746 times

A big thank you to Abdullah for coding this and to Werner for merging it into master.

Jim

P.S. this is just a link to the archived pull request topic.
viewtopic.php?f=27&t=8475

OS: Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.15.4217 (Git)
Branch: master
Hash: c04c513b41ce3a8d3cc758b072e41e07a03fdb38
Python version: 2.7.6
Qt version: 4.8.6
Coin version: 4.0.0a
OCC version: 6.7.1.oce-0.17-dev

[NormandC]

Thanks for the heads up Jim.

What's cool is that everything, including geometric and dimensional constraints is copied to the new sketch.

One more thing: the sketches do not need to lie on the same plane. If a sketch's plane is not parallel, it is rotated to be coplanar to the other selected sketches.

A big thank you to Abdullah for coding this and to Werner for merging it into master.

+1

Thanks, very well done!

P.S. Just had a thought, this tool might help circumvent sketcher performance problems with complex sketches? You work on separate smaller sketches and fully constrain them, then you merge the sketches.

[sgrogan]

A big thank you to Abdullah for coding this and to Werner for merging it into master.

+1 very nice Abdullah

Just had a thought, this tool might help circumvent sketcher performance problems with complex sketches? You work on separate smaller sketches and fully constrain them, then you merge the sketches.

Or user performance problems. I think this will help when trying to upgrade imported geometry to a sketch. You can quickly get to 100's of degrees of freedom, and the solution is start from sketch and use the imported geometry as a reference. Now you can build up smaller sketches adding constraints in a more understandable manner, then merge the sketches.

[TT-RS]

Thank you Abdullah !!!

I think many FreeCAD users will agree with me, that Sketcher lack of few other functions, especially offset function (it is one of the most used I think).

[abdullah]

I have just seen this thread...

You all are welcome!! This really took me only a couple of hours. If you have nice ideas to improve the sketcher, let me suggest to do a feature request in Mantis. When I have free time, I navigate in there to see what to do... thus "offset" that I do not know what exactly it is may be a new feature request example...

[Tandini]

Hi, I'm completely new here ...
This functionality is exactly what I was searching for - desperately
But - sorry - can't find 'merge sketches...' in 'Part Design' menu ...

OS: Windows 10
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.17.7834 (Git)
Build type: Release
Branch: master
Hash: a8c95189fcccea587f04a961ecabc0c944194770
Python version: 2.7.8
Qt version: 4.8.7
Coin version: 4.0.0a
OCC version: 7.0.0

[NormandC]

Hi,

Welcome here. But

Version: 0.17.7834 (Git)

Why exactly are you using the pre-release version? It is very early in the development cycle, huge changes were made in the PartDesign workbench, and there are a lot of bugs. It is provided for testing purposes and bug reporting by experienced FreeCAD users. To be blunt: IMO newcomers have no business learning FreeCAD on this version (even experienced users such as myself have lost their bearings in this version), and should stick to the latest 0.16.670x release.

FWIW, among the changes in 0.17 is automatic workbench switching, along with a clear separation of PartDesign and Sketcher. Therefore anything relevant to the Sketcher has been removed from the PartDesign workbench, those tools should be found only in the Sketcher workbench.

[Tandini]

Hi NormandC,
thanks for your advice - and I found the tool.

Why exactly are you using the pre-release version?

Well, I thought to learn FreeCAD with latest functionalty ...

[NormandC]

Hi,

Well, I thought to learn FreeCAD with latest functionalty ...

The problem is that it's not finalized, nor stable, at least where Part Design is concerned. And as I said we're all newbies on that version, even the FreeCAD old-timers.

It will be much easier for you to learn FreeCAD on 0.16, there are many videos on Youtube that are obsolete where 0.17 Part Design is concerned.

You can still keep 0.17 besides 0.16 for testing purposes, once you're comfortable enough.

[VanderBuggy]

Is this feature still available in version 0.18? If so, where is the "merge sketches" button?

EDIT:
Found it.
From Sketcher Workbench Sketch --> Merge Sketches