Sketch, extrude, and revolve

Draw a 2D profile and turn it into a solid.

Sketching makes shapes primitives cannot. Extrude pushes a flat profile to a height; Revolve spins it around an axis. The profile stays editable from the Properties panel.

Open it. Press P or click the pencil on the left rail to sketch on the work plane, or on the build plate when there is none. To sketch on a part, right-click one of its faces and choose Sketch on this face. A sketch opens in the 2D view, square on to its plane, and closing it returns you to 3D; turn that off with Sketch in 2D view in the View menu.

Edit a sketch later. Double-click an extrude or revolve, or select it and press P, to reopen its sketch. The banner names the part, and New sketch starts a fresh one instead. While its sketch is open the part shows see-through and the move gizmo steps aside, so every click reaches the sketch.

Place a point exactly. After the first point, type the next line’s length in L and its angle in ∠, counter-clockwise from the X axis, and press Enter; Tab moves between them.

Curve an edge. Point at an edge and a handle appears at its middle. Drag it to bow the edge into an arc. On a touch screen, tap an edge of a closed outline first.

Move a point. Drag any point to move it. While you place or drag a point it snaps to edge midpoints and edges, lines up with other points, and snaps onto the first point to close the outline, with dashed guides to show it; with nothing selected, hold Shift to place it freely on the grid. Points held by constraints follow a dragged point. A fixed point stays where it is. Once the outline can close, the region that will build is shaded, and clicking the first point closes it. The sketch stays open, to round corners, add constraints or move points; Finish (or Enter) builds it, and a new extrude opens Push/pull on its top face: drag it, or type a height and press Enter, then Done (Esc). Turn that off with Set height after a sketch in the View menu. In a closed outline, double-click an edge to add a point on it (or pick the edge and choose Add point), and Shift-click to pick more points or edges.

Sweep and Loft sit in the same group but behave differently: they are placed first and then authored from the Properties panel rather than opening the sketch tool. A Sweep carries a cross-section along a path; a Loft skins between a stack of outlines. Each has a worked example — a channel through a model and a duct between two openings.

Constraints. While sketching, select vertices or edges to constrain them — horizontal, vertical, equal, a fixed distance or angle — and the profile keeps them as you edit. The chip in the banner says what freedom is left: Fully constrained means the sketch cannot move, and Shape defined means its shape is fixed but it can still slide until you fix a point. Click it for the list, where you can change a dimension, remove a constraint, and see any that are redundant or cannot be met. Entering a dimension again changes it rather than adding a second one.

Copy and paste. Ctrl+C in a sketch copies the outline, arcs and constraints included, and Ctrl+V pastes it into another sketch, centred on the cursor, replacing anything drawn there — in this tab, another tab or another project. Right-click an extrude, a revolve or a sweep and choose Copy profile to take its outline the same way. Pasted outside a sketch, an outline opens a new Extrude sketch with it, on the work plane if one is active, where it was drawn. A Revolve sketch pastes an outline where it was drawn, since its distance from the axis is the shape, and so does an outline with a symmetric constraint.

Round a corner. Select a point where two straight edges meet, type a radius in R and choose Round corner: the point becomes an arc tangent to both edges, and the sketch keeps it tangent as you edit. A radius that reaches the next point joins it, so rounding both corners at one end of a rectangle with half its width makes a slot. It works on a sweep path too.

Undo. While you sketch, Ctrl+Z undoes the last sketch edit — a point placed, added, moved or removed, a curved edge, a constraint, a rounded corner, a paste or closing the outline — and Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y redoes it. The Undo and Redo buttons at the top do the same while a sketch is open. Backspace or Delete removes the selected points, or the last point when none is selected. Escape drops a selection first, and cancels the sketch when nothing is selected. Once you finish, the whole sketch is one step in the model’s own undo.

1. Press P, or click the pencil on the left rail. To sketch on a part, right-click one of its faces and choose Sketch on this face.
2. Pick Extrude or Revolve in the banner, then click points to draw the profile; drag any point to move it.
3. Finish to extrude to a depth, or revolve around an axis.