Gotta pattern something in SOLIDWORKS? Reduce your effort with a Sketch Driven Pattern!

A SOLIDWORKS Sketch Driven Pattern is a great way to control instance locations, but did you know you can use the same sketch for both the instances AND the feature?  You can!  To demonstrate, we’re going to dive into the universe of one of my all-time favorite sci-fi novels and movies, “2001: A Space Odyssey”:

Science teams have located a monolith here:

To study it further, we’ll attempt to bore holes in it thus:

Holes applied

In order to minimize the sketching, we’ll create a single sketch that includes both the hole (represented by circle) AND the patterned instance locations (represented by sketch points):

Sketch for hole and pattern feature

Next, we’ll create a cut-extrude with that sketch.  And then we’ll create a sketch-driven pattern that references the cut-extrude AND its sketch!  So basically, one sketch to rule them all (that’s yet another book/movie reference)!  With the sketch-driven pattern, every sketch point will result in another patterned instance of the feature. Here, a pattern of holes!

SOLIDWORKS Sketch Driven Pattern

Whether we can actually cut through this exotic material is unknown.  Failing that, unconfirmed rumors tell of a second monolith, but that’s highly classified.