Solidworks equivelent to "master sketch" in Inventor?

Something that is talked substantially with Inventor usergroups has
been the concept of a "master sketch". What this means in Inventor is
that sketches can be "referred to" if it is not "consumed", (ie. used
to form an extured, revolve etc. solid) by another sketch. So, the
technique is to design a "part" which is made up of a number of
planes, (in 3D space) with as sketch for every part that will
ultimately be in the assembly. One example of this was a fellow that
designed rockets. He used the master sketch to position all of the
components and their relative positions, (via. relationships between
planes and sketches) within the entire rocket. Individual parts were
made into solids, which basically "copied/ referred" to an individual
sketches in the master sketch parts file. Since this process, (at
least in Inventor) does not consume the master sketch it can be used
over and over for each part. Then he made an assembly with all of the
parts. But, since the individual part were referenced from the master
sketch, the origins of each of the parts were relative to the base
origin of the master sketch. This allowed each part to be constrained
to 0,0,0 in the assembly which resulted in every part being accurately
located. The end result of all of this was that when he changed the
length or diameter of the rocket for a new configuration, When a new
configuration is then made, the basic shape of each of the parts are
updated and their positions in the assembly are also modified
appropriately.

The Question: Is this possible in SW and if so, how, and what is the
term that SW uses for this? The biggest problem that I have had
moving from Inventor to SW has been that most of the descriptions the
same functions have been changed, (I assume to avoid law suits for
Autodesk). So I havn't figured out how to do this in SW.

Thanks,

EdT

 

It sounds like Solidworks works the same way as Inventor.
You create a layout sketch in either an assembly, or in a dummy part added
to an assembly.
You can then use the sketch to constrain components to, or use it to create
in-context relations by referencing elements of the sketch when creating
features in other parts.

John H

 

Thanks all,

Constraining to a sketch sounds like it is very similar to the
Inventor approach but more straight forward. I have been hearing
about the benefits of multi-body parts. Both of these have been on my
list of things to look into. I will have to move these two features
up on my list.

Thanks again,

EdT