What do the different parameters in a sketch driven component pattern do?

When working in an assembly, using component patterns is a common technique to quickly replicate a single component in a given direction or in a circular direction. A sketch driven pattern is another way to pattern components, but instead of a linear direction or a circular direction, a sketch driven pattern allows you to pattern components at manually placed points in an assembly level sketch. This guide will briefly cover what each parameter in a sketch driven pattern does.

Bounding Box Center

The first option to create a Sketch Driven Component Pattern is “Bounding Box Center”. This option will mate the center of the component’s bounding box to each node in our pattern driving sketch.

We can see this more clearly if we actually draw the bounding box around our component (to see how to create a Bounding Box in a component, see our article here).

When we look at the screenshot above, we can see that the center of the bounding box of the component’s patterns have been mated to the nodes in our sketch. Note that the seed instance (the original component that we’re making patterns of) does not move. The pattern parameters only affect the pattern instances, not the seed.

Component Origin

Now that we know how the Bounding Box Center parameter works, understanding how the next parameter, “Component Origin”, works is relatively easy. Choosing this parameter will mate the pattern instances’ origins to the nodes in our sketch path.

For clarity, I’ve shown the component origin in the screen below. We can see that by choosing this option, all of the pattern instances have their origins mated to the sketch nodes.

Selected Point

The “Selected Point” parameter mates a manually selected point or edge to the pattern driving sketch’s nodes. In the screenshot below, I’ve selected the top edge of the example component.

We can see the effects of choosing this edge below:

Now that you know how each of these options work, you can now create complex sketch driven patterns in your assemblies at the orientations that you want.

If you’re having trouble creating sketch driven patterns or getting these parameters to work the way you want them to, feel free send a support email to support@hawkridgesys.com or you can call our Technical Support hotline at 877.266.4469 (US) or 866.587.6803 (Canada).