Sketching to 3D Part

Turning a 2D sketch into a 3D part

This quick guide will continue off of the previous guide on sketching by turning a rectangle into a 3D rectangular prism. This rectangular prism will then be modified with one other feature

Extruding your sketch

You made a rectangle in a sketch now what? You can now extrude it. Confirm your sketch by clicking the green checkmark and then click the tool to the right of the sketch button.

Extruding cont.

First click the sketch or surface you wish to extrude, you can either do this by clicking the sketch on the left or clicking the physical projection on the working plane. Make sure you click 'new' on the menu of the extrude.

Dimensioning your extrusion

In order to change the 3rd dimension of your now 3D part you must alter the 'depth' on the extrusion you just made. Altering dimensions can be done in numerous ways with other extrusions and sketches but this is the easiest and simplest method for now. This is depth, and to change the dimension you must alter the value in the depth text line.

Modifying your part

You can always go back to the original sketch and alter the dimensions for a quick change. If you change the sketch entirely you might have to redo the extrusion. Once you have this first extrusion, one thing you can do is use the FLAT faces of your new part as sketch planes. Just click the sketch tool and then click the face you wish to sketch on. This can now be treated as any other sketch!

Sketching and cutting a circle

In our sketch, we're going to add a circle to the middle of the face. There are many ways to do this in Onshape but we're going to do this in a way to learn more tools, first select the point tool and place a point on two perpendicular sides of the face.

Set points as center points

Next we need to set our points as the center of the sides. First click the midpoint constraint and then click the points and then their respective sides.

Use construction lines to find the center.

Next, let's find the center by using construction. First select the construction tool and then the line tool. The construction tool allows for anything to be sketched without directly affecting the sketch when it comes to extruding (they can be used as a reference but can't be used to fill in a space to be extruded). Have these lines go straight to the opposite sides.

Sketching a circle

Make sure you unselect the construction tool as we want this circle to be able to be extruded. Select the circle tool and click and drag a circle with its center point as the intersection between the construction lines. Dimension the circle to 1 inch.

Extruding the circle

Now, let's extrude our sketch! This time we want to select 'remove' on the extrude menu. (Those more experienced with Onshape will know there are other ways to do this process! There is a tool to make holes directly but we'll go over that later), set the depth to 2 inches so we go through the whole rectangular prism. Click the green checkmark to confirm.

Extra Tutorials

*highly recommend*

Onshape has a course here: Part Design Using Part Studio , Introduction to Part Design, Multi-part Part Studios. You can follow the videos and get a better understanding of what you are doing.
YouTube has a lot of videos that go really in depth, but some do involve more complicated sketches and 3D features. Below is a list of some good videos on simple parts.

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