Indent

Presses one body into another — the target's wall wraps the tool into a conforming boss, or Cut carves a conforming pocket. Clearance sets the gap; the tool body stays.

Indent shapes a target body using a tool body, and keeps the tool. That is the whole difference from Combine ▸ Subtract, which consumes what it subtracts: Indent leaves the tool in place so it can go on driving the shape, and so the same tool can indent several parts.

Two modes:

• Form (the default) deforms the target: its wall is displaced to wrap the tool, leaving a conforming boss or pocket with a wall of Wall thickness, held Clearance away from the tool.
• Cut removes the intersection instead — a conforming pocket the tool would drop into, with the same clearance. There is no wall thickness in Cut; the pocket is solid through.

The bodies must actually meet. A tool that passes right through the target is fine and common — that is how you get a raised collar around a pin.

Steps

1. Build the target and the tool as separate bodies that overlap — in Extrude that means Merge result OFF, or the tool becomes part of the target and there is nothing to indent with.
2. Click Indent (T). Both boxes open empty — it never picks bodies for you.
3. Click the target body in the viewport. The pick then moves to Tool bodies — click each tool. Picked bodies light up, and clicking a tool again removes it.
4. Check Wall thickness and Clearance, then ✓ Save.

Options

• Cut — carve the pocket instead of wrapping a wall. Wall thickness does not apply.
• Wall thickness (Form) — how thick the displaced wall is. A new Indent starts at the target's own thickness, measured where the tool meets it, so the material carried around the tool reads like the part's material. Change it freely — the value is stored on the feature, so it never moves under you later.
• Clearance — the gap held between the tool and the new wall. It may be negative: that is an interference fit, where the wall bites into the tool's space rather than standing off it.
• Keep tool body — on by default in both modes, as in SolidWorks. Turn it off to have the indent consume its tools, the way Combine ▸ Subtract does.

A kept tool stays visible, sitting on top of the result. That is deliberate — it is what lets the tool go on driving the shape — and it is what SolidWorks does too. To get it out of the way without losing it, right-click the body and Hide, or Isolate the target. Both are display only: the body is still there, still driving the feature, and the eye toggle in the tree brings it back.

• Wall Pieces — one checkbox per piece of wall the feature produced, named for what it is: a Cup sits inside the target, a Collar wraps the tool outside it. Untick a piece to drop it. This is the whole side control: SolidWorks offers a single global side because a picked point is all it has to nominate one, where a checkbox per piece can say "this collar but not that one".

A tool body made by a pattern counts as one selection, however many instances it holds — see Patterns & mirror.

When it fails

• "the tool doesn't overlap the target — nothing was indented" — the bodies do not meet. Move one, or raise the clearance until the tool reaches through.
• "no wall piece is on the keep side" — the wall was built but every piece is unticked. Tick one under Wall Pieces.
• "Indent (form) needs a wall thickness > 0" — set a thickness, or tick Cut.
• "Indent needs SOLID tool bodies" — a surface body cannot be offset into a cavity. Thicken it into a solid first (see Surfaces).
• "the offset surface could not be built — reduce the clearance/thickness" — the clearance or wall has outrun the tool's own curvature; a rounded tool cannot be offset further than its smallest radius. Reduce it.
• "the indent wall could not be joined cleanly" — the wall met the pocket at a tangent the kernel could not sew. A slightly larger clearance usually resolves it.

Form mode does real work per tool region — offsets, a shell and several booleans each — so on a large curved target with several tools it is not instant. Open Performance from the command bar (⌘K) to see where a rebuild's time went.

Related

• Combine, Split & Intersect — Combine, Split and Intersect, which consume their operands
• Patterns & Mirror — making the several tool bodies an Indent wraps at once
• Core and cavity from a part — Indent as the cavity-forming step in a mould
• Shell, Draft & Rib — the other wall-thickness features

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