One of my ongoing frustrations with the extrude surface tool is that you have to extrude an entire sketch. Why can't the Extrude Surface Tool use the Selection Manager (like Boundary). This would save us so much time and slash the number of sketches we have to make. In fact I'd like to see this applied across all tools in SolidWorks that enable geometry creation.
Sorry Steve, I wasn't making myself clear.
We often create a set of master sketches to drive a form. These sketches will have multiple splines/lines etc. Below is a very typical example.
What we often need to do is generate helper surfaces for Boundary/Loft/Fill etc, and we use the extrude surface (often with draft) for this.
In this scenario, Extrude Surface does not let you pick the individual splines or elements (or groups of splines etc) contained in a sketch - rather, it just selects the entire sketch - as below.
In your example the splines are not continuous - but linked by a construction. In that scenario Extrude allows picking of individual elements. Like below:
But if you go back and edit that sketch and turn off the construction spline so you get a contiuous form, two things happen. If you try to add extra splines to the extrude, it selects the entire sketch. It does also not allow you to select additional splines as contours. So clearly there is no technical reason why SolidWorks cannout allow selection of sketch elements - it just does not allow you to - hence the reason for the request to open up Selection Manager to all geometry creation tools - then we can pick what we want, reduce the number of sketches we require, and simplify things.
Hi Kevin, I do think it's a good idea to have selection manager for extrude surface. In the meantime, I am not sure if the following suggestion would be palatable to your workflow. Maybe you have already tried it.
An alternative would be to do a sketch for the extrude direction and then use boundary surface. Besides having the selection manager available, you would also be able to trim by dragging on the pink dot (red arrow).
Sure its a workaround but sometimes Boundary doesn't do what Extrude does. Maybe the solution is to lose the Extrude surface command and have a universal Boundary surface where you can define it from 1 curve and a direction (x/y/z or existing geometry) then apply a draft from that. Whatever the solution is it is already built into SolidWorks so all that needs to be done is to turn on the capability.
Frankly this kind of stuff is so basic and easy to do that it should just be done - SolidWorks needs a good clean out of all these tools to unify the interface and tool capabilities. Having recently been trying out other systems returning to surfacing in Solidworks often seems clumsy.
I see and I like what you're trying to do.
Steve C
Use sweept
Kevin, I am able to have one sketch and two different surfaces. I'm in SW2015
Steve C