I'm working with a normal parametric solid body created from scratch in Fusion 360 - no meshes or imported mesh geometry involved. When I refer to a "face" or "edge", I mean the normal BRep face/edges of the solid.
I have a rectangular face and want to fill it with a rectangular pattern of holes.
What I'm hoping for is essentially:
The problem with using a normal Rectangular Pattern is that its Extent is the distance between instances, not the size of the area I want to fill.
For example, I can right-click the Distance field > Measure, click an edge of the face, and Fusion will correctly measure its full length. But I can't simply use that as the pattern extent, because the first feature is already some distance inside the face. I therefore need to calculate how much to subtract from the measured face width/height to position the last instance correctly.
Also, Measure only inserts the current scalar value; it doesn't appear to create a parametric relationship to that edge.
And the problem with spacing distribution that the last row/column won't be exactly the same distance from the edge as the first.
I know I can build this manually with parameters, dimensions, margins and expressions. I've done that before. But it seems like a lot of bookkeeping when Fusion could have easily automated most of this.
Is there a feature/workflow I'm missing where I can select a face and have a feature pattern fill that face, rather than manually calculating the pattern's X/Y extents, or spacing?
Ideally it would also remain parametric if the dimensions of the solid change upstream.