How do I extrude a shape?

meg_brown

Hi there.
I am having trouble extruding my shape. I drew it up on adobe illustator and then have exported it as a dxf file on onshape. The shape is grey, but it still won't allow me to extrude the shape as there is 'input' issues. What am I doing wrong?

I would be super grateful for some help!!

MichaelPascoe

I have similar issues when importing dxf's.

My current solution is:

• Create a new sketch
• Trace the dxf (Your cursor will want to snap to all of those imported points, hold the Shift key to suppress snapping)

dirk_van_der_vaart

Much simpler, don't use illustrator, design the sketch in onshape, and extrude.

meg_brown

Thanks for replying, 

I have traced it as you can see above, but I still getting the same issue- it is 'degenerate' 

How do I fix this??

MichaelPascoe

It looks like your sketch is not "closed". This happens to me sometimes: while you were tracing, one of the corner points probably snapped to the imported sketch or one of the corner points simply didn't get connected. The geometry needs to be "closed", meaning all of the points are connected. When it is closed, it will have a slightly filled in shade which will let you select it.

Also, it looks like you may have used one long spline with lots of points. I also used to do this, and sometimes still do. This can cause it to fail. Try using as few of spline points as possible. This will reduce the failure rate, and give you a smoother looking spline.

bruce_williams

@MichaelPascoe is spot on with the issue and what to look for.

Here is a way to narrow the search quickly - called 'binary search' by the gurus.  See the thread here.

matthew_stacy

@bruce_williams, that is a neat trick for hunting down sketch discontinuities.  Thanks!

bruce_williams

@matthew_stacy
I was thankful for hearing about it from an Onshape engineer; Sorry I forgot who first posted it but I am happy to share it when the question comes up.  Really is slick until a tool is available to auto find/fix...