Linear pattern of extruded feature

Jonathan

I created a hole in a surface, and two little pins near it (see attached picture).
Is there a method to use linear pattern to create more instances of the hole and the two pins (i.e. to have another set of hole and pins to the left and to the right of the current ones)?

I was able to select all the features of the pins and copy them with a linear pattern, but the hole does not work...

Thanks,

Jonathan.

billy2

Patterns & mirrors only work on bodies, not features. You have to create cylinders, pattern them, and boolean subtract them. 

I'm hoping this is only temporary and OS isn't thinking this is the "new" way things should be done. Working with bodies in this fashion won't work for any of us. I haven't read that this is a temporary thing or it's the way. Lou, what's the future of patterning & mirroring, will it be feature based in the near future?

 

caradon

Currently, patterning bodies and doing booleans is the way to tackle this.
I agree patterning/mirorring of features is critically needed.

Dries

brucebartlett

I agree, patterning and mirroring of features is needed. I find myself regularly backing up the tree to make a feature a body so I can partern or mirror then Boolean from the part. Works ok but not ideal.

elif

@Jonathan Nathan‌  Did you try face pattern? (there's a checkbox in the feature dialog to switch modes). While it does not take the place of feature pattern/mirror, it might help you for the time being.

Ben_

Face pattern will copy some things like what @Jonathan Nathan‌ wants like @elif‌says. I think this feature could be named better. Plus selection can be a pain if you are un aware of selecting a face and right clicking and choosing 'create selection' to make selecting multiple faces easier

brucebartlett

@elif the face pattern does work well, it would be good to also have it on the mirror command. Maybe the feature pattern is not required if this will work in all the same scenarios? Although when patterning a extrude with though all setting maybe better to have a feature pattern but this would not be common. It would also be good if the move face could have a copy face switch and a point to point transform setting.

Jonathan

@elif,
yes,
face pattern is what I did to solve it. It worked, but not fully.. There were some mysterious effects such as when trying to pattern to both ways, all the patterns disappear altogether (including previous patterns of that shape!). 
But doing one pattern at a time, to one direction, worked fine.
Maybe that should be reported as a bug.. how can one report a bug?

Jonathan.

elif

@Jonathan Nathan‌ 
you can send us feedback/bug reports via the feedback option on the help dropdown (upper right corner, question mark).
I suspect I know what you're seeing, but Id rather confirm by looking at your case first.

And thanks everyone for your feedback on improvements to these tools. We are working on making them better and your suggestions are very useful.

jakeramsley

You can do some really powerful stuff using face patterns.  It was something I had trouble wrapping my head around at first, but after using them I almost exclusively use them.  Main advantage for me is the patterns don't have to be bounded by the same face that the patterned face is on.  If I have a cube and create something on one of the faces, I can use a circular face pattern to get it to other faces of the cube.  This way, I don't need to keep a whole bunch of parts around that I eventually pattern and boolean.

Using box select or our selection commands helps overcome pain points of selecting multiple faces for them to work properly.