Making a Zillion Squares in Sketcher with Mapkey 1

[treddie]

Hello.

I cannot seem to get Mapkeys to do what I want. I have numerous squares that I want to center around individual points in Sketcher (Creo 2). I want to essentially do a macro for drawing the square by choosing a point to build the square about, then letting the mapkey drawing the square and dimensioning it. But I cannot figure out how to make it work. Whatever option I select in the Mapkey, it never just allows me to select the point and let the macro (mapkey) run the construction and dimensioning of the square.

 

[3DDave]

This is probably a bad idea and mapkeys won't easily work. Sketcher is primarily designed to solve simultaneous constraint equations and the more elements involved the more equations to solve. When you get enough squares you will be waiting longer and longer after each one; previous experience suggests that 10 X 10 squares will be crippling. Mapkeys won't easily work because they have no method to save or retrieve the state of the model so they cannot easily refer to geometry in the abstract.

The better method is to create a point pattern and then create a sketched datum curve that refers to the lead point and then ref-pattern the datum sketch to the rest of the points.

 

[treddie]

Got it. Didn't seem like it was going to work my way. Thanks for the tip and sounds like a great way to get the job done!