Festive Toy Baking Set Tutorial

In this tutorial you will see a range of SOLIDWORKS sketch techniques such as circular pattern, dynamic mirror entities and offset entities to create some festive cookie shapes. The tutorial also demonstrates the use of thin feature and saving bodies separately from a multi body part. The decals and this dough part seen in the rendering below are available to download here. The baking toy set was designed to be wooden.

The main part of this tutorial focuses on the design and sketching of the cookies. For the snowflake design, I used centerlines as guides to create one of the snowflake points, so that I could use circular pattern and know it would connect together. I started the design with 12 circular patterned centerlines with equal spacing. The snowflake point was then sketched within two segments made by the pattern. I used dynamic mirror entities to create the even pattern of the snowflake which I could then pattern by 6 instances.

With the other two cookie designs, I created a simple line drawing of a candy cane and used the offset sketch tool using bi-directional with arc capped ends, this created the candy cane cookie very quickly. For the wreath cookie, I used a centerline with a circle attached to it, ensured the sketch was fully defined and then circular patterned it. I then deleted all the inner circle entities without deleting the centerline. This ensured that my sketch would remain fully defined.

For the cookie cutters, I created these using the cookie parts. With the cookie part saved, I offset the cookie shape and used thin feature to extrude the cutter up with a 1mm thickness. The cutter part had an appearance added and was the inserted into a new part under solid bodies. To export the part with its attached appearances ensure propagate visual properties is ticked. The part will open into a new part and it must be saved with the file name it automatically renames as, this is to keep the file referenced to the cookie part it was made from.

The reason this can be so useful is so that if I make any changes to the cookies shape the cutter will automatically update to match the design, as you can see in the example below. The cookie cutter changed after I amended the cookie.

With all the furnished parts I created an assembly, this included importing the dough part. I used SOLIDWORKS Visualize to render the final design, the background is a photo I took of my own table with some flour added. This was then added as a backplate in SOLIDWORKS Visualize to create a more relevant backdrop for the final rendering.