Create a sketch with TopSolid

As soon as you open the software, you will land on this page. To get started, click on the “Part” button on the left of the menu.

On the new window that will appear, select “Create a new project” if you want to start designing a sketch from the beginning. Then, click on the green button to validate. 

Then, you will be asked to name the project. Let’s call it “3D part” and click again on the green button to validate. 

After that, your project is created and you will be redirected to the sketch menu that looks like in the following picture. The software automatically names it “part 1” and it corresponds to the first sketch that you will create. Of course you can rename it as you wish.  

There are 3 possible ways that you can start designing. 

One is to create a sketch simply by right clicking on the empty sketch area and select “Sketch”.

The other is to left click on the pencil button (as indicated by the red arrow in the following picture) or directly select the shape you want to draw by clicking on the dedicated shape buttons (as indicated by the green arrows in the following picture).  

Alternatively, you can select the “Free Sketch Tool” or “Contour” and draw a sketch of continuous lines on your own. 

Either way, the result is the same. By selecting the “Contour” Tool you will create the outline of your part. Validate, and the shape will look like this:

If you don’t want to have such a simple sketch, you can add some more design features. Let’s add a circle, by clicking on the “Circle” button on the upper menu tab. 

By creating two circles of different diameters, the sketch looks like this: 

Click on the center of each circle and move it around. You can place it anywhere you want in the sketch area, without it losing its size. 

Now let’s put some arcs to “bridge” the circles with the rest of our sketch. To do so, go to the arc tool on the upper menu bar. Select the “Radius” option, and deselect the rest of the checked options, as indicated in the following picture. 

Click from one point of the circle to the other, to form the arc you want. 

Then, exit the arc mode in order to change the direction of the arcs. Let’s say we want the 2nd arc to have the same curvature as the 1st arc.  

You can invert the curvature of the drawn arc by right clicking on the 2nd arc and select “Symmetric”. 

As you can see on the following picture, the arc’s direction is automatically flipped. 

Now that your sketch is ready, let’s trim everything together, to give it the final shape. Go to the “Trim” button on the upper side of the menu. 

Keep the box of the “Delete Selected parts” checked, and start deleting the lines of the sketch that you don’t want anymore. 

After trimming, the final sketch should look like this: