Page 334 - Mastering SolidWorks

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306 CHAPTER 9 PAtterning And Mirroring

The name Variable Pattern may be somewhat misleading, because technically, it’s not really a
pattern, in that there is no discernable recurring pattern; it’s just a collection of several versions
of a single feature in different positions and orientations.
Let’s move on to a more complex but less abstract example. I will set it up the same way:
several parametrically driven entities that enabled me to position, size, and orient one or more
features, which are placed in any way that the parametric scheme allows. In this case, I patterned
a flower around an irregularly shaped bottle.
The first try at this didn’t work. Well, it worked all except getting the feature to pattern all the
way around the bottle; it only worked on the front half, as shown in Figure 9.27. The error here
says that “Some instances were disjoint,” which to me suggests that the Extrude features are
pointing off into space instead of toward the bottle. So I simplified it by applying the same
pattern to a cylinder, which could more easily be done with a circular pattern. I got the cylinder
to work, as shown in Figure 9.28.
Figure 9.27
Patterning around an
irregular shape works
only on the front half,
Variable Pattern
Bottle3.sldprt.

Figure 9.28
Variable Pattern around
a cylinder works all the
way around, Variable
Pattern cylinder
.sldprt.