Circular Pattern - Can't Select the Thing to Duplicate

Wingsy

Trying to make a ball chain sprocket. I'm trying to do a circular pattern of that hole you see up there and it won't let me select it. I thought I found the answer in the drop-down menu "pattern type" but all that allows me to select are edges and faces of the invisible hole. How do I select this?   (What is it the Borg say???  "Assistance is futile..: or something.)
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/f6baa4466f87ddff8639e4da/w/bf8456ec5531b3b060ccfb07/e/12a1cc6e7b354b5963e3dea5

john_faraci

Try changing it from a part pattern to a feature pattern.

Jake_Rosenfeld

Why not face pattern?



https://cad.onshape.com/documents/55898a5c58cd88ef5bf40186/w/4a7f404cdafbb78e9f3a1a16/e/9b7bf8b3f85b5f65416b749c

john_faraci

Jake, is there an advantage to one or the other?

bradley_sauln

@john_faraci a face pattern is a lot less resource intensive as a feature pattern regenerates the features for each instance.

Jake_Rosenfeld

@john_faraci

Face pattern used to be a lot faster than feature pattern.  Now feature pattern with "Apply per instance" turned OFF comes pretty close.  Feature pattern with "Apply per instance" ON is much slower than face pattern (because that flag controls whether a regeneration is done for each instance of the feature).

Face pattern is more declarative of which exact faces you want to pattern, but feature pattern is more parametric in that if the selected feature changes its output, the feature pattern will pick up the change, rather than having to go in and select more/different faces.

john_faraci

OK Thank you Bradley and Jake for the explanations.

brian_brady

Jake_Rosenfeld said:

@john_faraci

Face pattern used to be a lot faster than feature pattern.  Now feature pattern with "Apply per instance" turned OFF comes pretty close.  Feature pattern with "Apply per instance" ON is much slower than face pattern (because that flag controls whether a regeneration is done for each instance of the feature).

Face pattern is more declarative of which exact faces you want to pattern, but feature pattern is more parametric in that if the selected feature changes its output, the feature pattern will pick up the change, rather than having to go in and select more/different faces.

Face patterning is more intuitive as well since parametric modelers are "feature based" (hence the feature list/tree). Using faces for patterning feels so AutoCAD 2006 to me. I am glad feature patterns added the "apply per instance" to make them faster. To a normal CAD user, how a pattern is generated behind the scenes is not that important. To us a feature is a collection of faces, so we don't understand why we should perform a lot more picking/selecting to improve performance instead of just picking one feature from the list and letting the software figure out how to do the task efficiently.

Wingsy

Thanks Jake. Your mod to my drawing was very helpful. I had been there before but I expected to see the entire object selected rather than just it's pieces. Had I just moved farther along it would have materialized right in front of me. 

Wingsy

Finished that sprocket and the chain fits perfectly. Try doing that with Tinkercad! (Which I actually did but it doesn't look nearly as nice.)

owen_sparks

Nice

OwS.