Probably a painful question

larry_athey

Since I come from the 2D world and got used to having grids to work with in order to precisely place entities/shapes in a sketch, there are still a lot of things in Onshape that escape me.

For example, say you have 3 circles along a horizontal plane. How do you specify the distance between each of their centers to put them a precise distance apart? Or, specify the distance between the edge of one of those circles and the edge of whatever other shape that I want to extrude a hole through?

NeilCooke

Hi Larry, you add parametric dimensions and constraints. Add dims between each circle and modify the value and add a horizontal constraint between the hole centers. Please take a look at the tutorials at https://learn.onshape.com

larry_athey

I've looked at quite a few tutorials on that page and it doesn't appear that it's search function does any more than send me on a wild goose chase on Google. Happen to have a more accurate link to a tutorial since entering the word "parametric" in the search field just yields a pretty much useless Google search?

Jake_Rosenfeld

Hi @larry_athey !

The Onshape Fundamentals: CAD course is a good pace to start on the page Neil linked.  It'll walk you through the basics of getting started with Onshape (including our sketcher).

Some other links you may be interested in:
https://www.onshape.com/videos/dimensions-and-constraints
https://www.onshape.com/videos/sketch-constraints
https://www.onshape.com/video
https://www.onshape.com/videos/topic/intro-to-cad