Introducing fully-defined sketches

Design intent is often slippery, difficult to tackle, and requires a reliable, smart system to ensure it’s never lost. That’s why we’ve leaned into making the groundwork of 2D sketching even more robust.

A fluid 2D sketching experience equips you to precisely record design intent, facilitating early alignment and avoiding costly downstream errors. To enhance your experience, get familiar with our latest sketching updates. Targeted at improving sketch control, you’ll gain a more reliable design system for progressive refinement, unlocking more precise design intent. Let’s take a closer look.

What are fully-defined and under-defined sketches?

Sketches are made of interconnected parts that influence one another's positions and orientations when modifications are made. When a sketch is altered, the 2D sketch engine recalibrates the positions and orientations of all its elements.

To control the movement of the sketch parts, dimensional constraints (such as length or angle dimensions) and geometric constraints (such as perpendicular or tangential constraints) can be applied.This limits their degree of freedom.

• A sketch is under-defined if some of its parts can still be moved or resized. You’ll now find this displayed in blue.

• A sketch is fully-defined if it has enough constraints applied to it so none if it can be moved or resized. Find this displayed in green.

Why are fully-defined sketches useful?

Until a sketch becomes fully defined, there's always some ambiguity left in how sketch parts will be positioned. Upon any adjustment, the 2D sketch engine may solve the re-positioning of the sketch by moving its parts around, potentially against the design intent. This can easily occur and be missed specifically if a change to an earlier history step affects a sketch later in history.

So it is always a best practice to fully define sketches once they are ready to be used by features later in history, to ensure design intent will be met.

Improvements to sketch visuals

As you gain more control in defining sketches and ensuring design intent, it’s crucial that you preserve design momentum by minimizing distractions. Here’s a walk-through of the key changes.

New sketch colors

From now on, instead of the previous teal sketch color, under-defined sketches will be displayed in blue, while fully defined sketches will be displayed in green.

Reduced visual clutter

We made series of changes to reduce noise and to achieve a better visual hierarchy, for example:

• Smaller dimension labels
• Thinner dimension lines
• Reduced visual emphasis on sketch constraints

More striking selection color for sketches and bodies

So from now on, selected sketches are visually separated from body elements to help you make modeling moves faster and with less mistakes.

Error states in red

With the selection color modified to orange-yellow, everything that is error-related now shows up as red instead, such as missing topology references or erroneous steps in history.

By taking advantage of these changes, you can leverage 2D sketches to improve clarity of design intent, reduce cognitive overhead, and inform decisions better. Now enough about our UI. Time to get back to designing.