25 SOLIDWORKS Tips & Tricks You Didn't Know You Had

foreign [Music] systems CAD live stream top 25 SolidWorks tips and tricks you didn't know you had my name is Taylor Hoff I'll be co-hosting today along with Jesse Putnam that's right Taylor we are very excited to show you our favorite SolidWorks tips to help you design better and faster it's going to be a new tip about every two and a half minutes yeah not too shabby huh and if you have any questions feel free to drop them in the chat window we have some people standing by to help us plus we'll share some of the comments throughout our live throughout the hour before we get started I'm just curious now where's everyone joining it from us today let's see here anyone type in chat let us know uh where you're coming from where you're watching this from today like they have people from all over the place I don't see anyone dropped in there yet but hey we'll keep going here we'll update you when we do see some chatting there well let's take a quick look at what's in store for today so like we mentioned we have 25 SolidWorks tips and tricks these are going to range from Quick shortcuts to improve your workflows to direct editing techniques that you might not know that you had and if you're worried you might miss something don't there's a PDF that you'll be able to download after this that's going to have an overview of every tip that we go over there we go chat with a little bit delayed there we're getting people all over the place Los Angeles Columbus Ohio Olympia Washington Berkeley California my home state looks like we're getting people from all over the place I'd like to see um so once we wrap up those tips we'll be giving away some great prizes at the end as well including some SolidWorks swag as well as our grand prize a 3D connection space Mouse Enterprise kit yep I've seen the 3D connection space Mouse before it is pretty cool it's actually really cool this thing is sweet yeah I think it's pretty fancy so be sure to stick around until the end for that well should we get started Jesse I think so let's do it uh we're gonna start off strong today and like all of our tips and tricks that we talk about today they're going to be applicable to all levels of SolidWorks no matter you have standard professional or premium you'll be able to make use of these tips and tricks now even if some of the tips aren't ones that you might use too often you know when you do find your use case for them they're going to be Big Time Savers and can really take your solidwork skills up a notch so let's get started with our first tip of the day using Mouse gestures and mouse gestures are a way to quickly grab commands using just some simple mouse movements it was just a flick of the mouse we can grab commands quickly without ever having to go to the command manager or drop down menus now we can see here on parts and assemblies I use these standard Mouse gestures for manipulating the viewport the graphics area in our SolidWorks window I can quickly go to all of my standard Earth graphic views you know top front back right so are these washers going to be the same for every environment no it wouldn't be too helpful if they were the same for every single environment would they and thankfully they aren't now we can customize these gestures per environment that's one of the great Parts about SolidWorks in general you know being able to make those customizations make it fit your workflow and so we have different gestures for parts different gestures for assemblies different gestures for drawings and even different gestures for sketching so you can really pick up the specific tools that we use most often the ones that fit our workflow and our application best to really make make the use make the most of them excuse me now from the customization menu we can pick things like the number of mouse gestures you see here on my mouse gesture wheel I have eight but we can use uh 12 for two or three depending on how many you want there you can add those commands pick the number of commands in there and when we want to add specific commands to that wheel all we need to do is search for the specific command click and drag and drop it on over to the wheel we want here you see I'm searching for the mate command here I'm going to drop that onto my assembly Mouse gesture wheel once it's in there we're going to hit OK and reform our Master wheel you see the assembly tool right there as soon as I just run over to it it opens up the Mate tool and we are good to go now like I said customization a big part of SolidWorks that's what makes part of it so powerful uh we'll talk more about those customizations as we kind of go through our presentation today and particularly when we get to our last tip of the day Jesse and I's personal favorite um talk more about that customization you know as you were going through that I noticed you're switching through your windows really quickly in all your open documents how did you do that yeah yes I was you know typically um when we want to switch between open documents and we can use our regular Mouse our regular window drop down to select from those different open documents but you know I find that kind of tedious it's not really the best way to do things in my opinion I like being quick and efficient in SolidWorks which is going to bring us to our next tip using control and tab to quickly switch between open documents we hit hold down control on our keyboards and press tab it's going to show us all of the open documents with a preview of each we can then continue to press tab to kind of tab through those awesome documents as I'm doing on the screen here now and navigate to the exact one we need now this is very useful when we're working on something like an assembly where we want to maybe modify a single component in that assembly we can control tab on over to it make our modifications and the control tab back on over to our assembly to see how those changes affect things at the assembly level so what if I have a lot of documents open do I just have to hit the tab until I get to the one I want or is there a better way to do that there's definitely a better way to do that you know if we do have a lot of documents open control and tab many times again TDS don't want to do that so thankfully when we press control and tab when we're holding on the control button we can move our mouse cursor over to whichever document we want make that click and it'll switch over to that open document all right sounds good all right on to our next tip you know it's not uncommon that we need to interrogate specific parts of our models or assemblies requiring us to zoom in or out to get the level of detail we need so we can see the exact details of our models right but once we're done we want to get back to the whole model again you know get the full model back on screen rolling the middle Mouse and wheel in and out can be cumbersome especially if we're really zoomed in now many people know about Zoom to fit it's a command that lives in our heads up display menu right pretty useful uh command bring us back to our full Graphics area showing our model but many people don't know about the built-in shortcuts to access it which brings us to our next tip tip three using the F key to quickly pull our models back into full view now this may seem like a pretty simple tip but let me tell you anytime that I can get away from moving my moving my mouse across the screen to grab a command or simply reduce the number of clicks or keystrokes I'm making I'm all for it by using the F key we can quickly Zoom back out or in with a single keystroke so that command can also be done with just your mouse too right it can you don't prefer using the keyboard to use that F key you can also quickly double click the middle Mouse button on your mouse which will do the same thing it'll access that Zoom to fit and bring our models back into view this is a great tip for those of us that are new to SolidWorks or those that have been using SolidWorks a long time I use it all the time sometimes I get a little Zoom happy I lost my model I can just double click my scroll wheel and there it is I'm good to go I'm sure we've all been there speaking of tips I use all the time tip number four is how to show planes quickly in your partner assembly documents now looking at this model here it still has a little bit of motion and what I want to do is restrict it I want to mate a face of this tire to my bottom of travel plane that I've already created so I'll bring up my mate property manager and then the first thing I'll do is once this manager is open I need to select a face on that tire now I need to select that plane I can easily show all my planes in a part or assembly by hitting the q key and then I can make that selection right there now what's really nice about this in an assembly is I can also move my cursor over any component in the graphics area then hit that Q command now also see that component's planes as well while that's going on so that's another added feature to that command you know that's a great command I use Q all the time to show those planes but Jesse what if I need to grab a plane that doesn't exist yet in our model that's okay and that brings us to our next tip tip number five using the control drag tool my plans are open I'll hold my control key and I can just drag my plane immediately creating a new one bringing up that property manager and then I can fully Define it this doesn't just work for planes take this rod end for instance this little component that's missing I can hold Ctrl drag that component in my assembly and immediately create a new one just like that then I can easily made it in there and we're good to go so the control creates new planes it'll add duplicate components also in Parts I can use it on features in my design tree like a fillet feature drag that right onto model Edge go ahead and give that a shot when you have some free time but I use that tip a lot but let's say that I have a specific selection I need to make and I'm having a really hard time picking that in SolidWorks that brings us to tip number six the filter toolbar going back to this same mate you can see I'm selecting a bunch of vertices but I'm looking for a face I'll hit F5 on my keyboard bring up this filter selection toolbar here I can specify to select only edges faces a lot of other options once that is selected I will only be able to click on whatever I selected which in this case is a face now you can close this toolbar Again by the same way you opened it hitting F5 but the problem is now I can't click on anything else because that selection filter hasn't been turned off not a big problem I can turn that filter toolbar back on and turn it off manually by clicking that button there at the bottom left or you can just hit F6 and that'll undo the selection filter giving you freedom to click on anything you want within your document I love this tip Jesse I'm sure we've all been in that situation where we have a filter active we're going to click what we want don't know what's going on definitely good to know how we can turn those off easily yep I've definitely made that mistake a couple times closing that toolbar and then I don't know why I can't click anything but you have that nice cursor feedback that'll give you a hint as to what's going on so moving on to our next tip tip number seven let's say you wanted to create this weldment part the first thing you need to do is create this 3D sketch now how's your 3D sketching Taylor I will say I am pretty good at 3D sketching I've done a lot of tubular chassis design in my career but well I wish I could say the same my 3D sketching could probably has some room for improvement but that model or that 3D sketch I could actually model as a solid body really quickly so I'm going to take advantage of that fact first I'm going to just create this model quickly I've got it now I will open a new 3D sketch with this 3D sketch open I need to select all of my model edges to make it a little easier we can just change our display to wireframe and then I'll use that selection filter Toolbar to filter for just model edges so I'll drag select all of my edges at this point I can hit the convert entities command that'll convert all of those model edges right into sketch entities and now I've already I've created that 3D sketch now best practice here is going to be removing that solid body we don't want any incorrect mass calculations down the road or anything like that so I can just right click it and use the delete keep bodies command to remove that but in the situation where I can model the sketch quicker than I'd be able to actually create it in that 3D sketching environment that convert any of these trick works really really well yeah it's definitely something I wish I knew when I was doing my tubular chassis design probably would have made things a lot easier I don't know and that was a possibility but now you know yeah thank you Jesse and that brings us to our next tip Dynamic mirror entities now let's say I wanted to create a little bit more sketch entities on this top of this 3D sketch I'll just create a new plane I'm going to start a sketch and I'm going to create a center line now I know everything I'm drawing is going to be symmetrical about this Center Line so I'll select my Dynamic mirror tool I have that in my shortcut menu but this lives under sketch tools as well once this is turned on anything I create or any sketch entity I create on one side of this line is going to immediately be reflected on the other side of that line so I'm essentially creating double the entities with half the clicks really good way to take advantage of symmetry in your sketches this seems like a great tool when we have a part or design we know is going to be symmetric really saves a lot of time by essentially having the number of sketches entities we need to create exactly and that is the idea behind it is just saving time where we can absolutely our next tip tip number nine talking about making use of the split line tool the split line tool allows us to break up existing faces on our models now this is useful when we want to select maybe a specific subset of geometry on our parts that may not be readily selectable given how our model was built up for example if we want to be able to just pick a specific part of a face on our model to apply changes to this could be the case when we're setting up simulations you know maybe you want to apply a fixture or a load to just a subset of a face or maybe we're changing appearances we just want a section of a face to have that change in appearance or if we need to modify local geometry with some direct editing tools now with the split line tool we can create something like a sketch that we have here on screen and we're going to grab that sketch tell SolidWorks which face we want to project it onto and we can see now we have two distinct faces there's once a single face we have that nice subsection of geometry here we have some other options in the split line tool we can either do an intersection that's where we take something like a plane or a face and tell SolidWorks which bodies we want to split up as that face or plane intersects those bodies so you can see these two semi-vertical members in our weldment here splitting it up with the intersection of the front plane and now we have two distinct faces on each one of those members now speaking of direct editing tools you know SolidWorks is best known for its parametric modeling capabilities most users don't know how much direct editing has improved over the years that is really true most users don't know about the direct editing tools that SolidWorks has available to us already now direct editing tools as I mentioned they have come a long way since SolidWorks was first introduced and that brings us to our next tip tip 10 making use of probably my favorite direct editing tool and that's going to be the delete face command like we said most people are used to those parametric techniques right creating revolves extrudes and cuts things like that but direct editing tools like delete face are used when you want to apply more of a what you see is what you get approach to creating our models so let's pause on this model for just a moment here Jesse we have those two pieces of that extrude kind of protruding into the inside of our weldman with those pieces going inside of the tubes here what would you do in this situation to fix that quickly thinking about it maybe just start a sketch and roughly start chopping away and remove as much material as I can that's right a possibility might be creating a circular sketch extrude cut getting rid of that material but that might be difficult here given the Contours of that curved weldman that curved tube so this is exactly where the delete face command comes in to hand or comes in handy so with the delete face tool we can grab that and all we need to do is tell SolidWorks which faces we'd like to have removed now with this option see here we're going to click those faces on the inside of that extrude grab all the ones on the inside of the top here again do the same thing down on the bottom and the method we'll be using here for the delete face command is going to be delete and Patch what that's going to do is SolidWorks will delete all of those faces for us but it'll be a bit a gap left behind but with the delete and Patch option it's going to patch that hole up fix up our geometry by extending any adjacent faces to create a nice clean feature on the inside you see the lines or anything it just simply remove that geometry now we have other options within the delete face tool we can do which is a simple delete which we'll just remove those faces you know that'll typically turn a solid body into a Surface body or we can also use the delete and fill option which will create a brand new Surface to patch up any holes created by deleted geometry so either way using the delete face command can get rid of that extraneous geometry with just a handful of clicks where it's using something like a cut extrude would be much more challenging yeah that's a pretty sweet tip right there I use the lead face a fair amount really cool one Speaking of cool tips that brings us to the next one tip number 11 project curve so I'm going to use this part as an example to explain it if you take a look all that this is really comprised of is a sweep it's made of a sketch profile and a 3D curve so let's focus on the three-dimensional curve here if I had to sketch this in a 3D sketching environment I don't know if I could do it at all if I could it would probably take a while but the benefit of the project curve is if you have a curve that has orthographic projections what I mean is I can fully Define this curve by just its front and Right View you can take advantage of that in the project curve command you'll see underneath it there's two sketches I'll delete this command and show you how it was created again so I've got my front sketch and my right sketch defining that I'll then go to my curves drop down and select the project curve tool here I'll just select both sketches I get a really nice preview and then I just accept it and there we go and now I've created that three-dimensional curve that I'm not sure if I would have been able to do otherwise you know like I said I'm I'm pretty good at 3D sketching Jesse but I don't know if I'd be able to create that on the Fly I'd be really impressed complex splines in there or something that project curve definitely would fit the bill there and this is a great segue into the next tip combine common tip number 12. very similarly to the project curve if you have some sort of model geometry that you can describe or Define by its orthographic views let's say in this example a front view and a top view I can use the combine common command so I'll quickly show you how this part was created it looked pretty complicated but all it is is two sketches I'll extrude that first sketch out use just a mid plane Extrusion six inches and then accept it and now for the second sketch on the top plane I'll then do a through all Extrusion in both directions but the trick here is to make sure that merge result option is cleared I want two solid bodies in this part I do not want them to be a single solid body and because of this this is going to give us the combined common option I'll select both those solid bodies and my solid body folder click on the combine and you'll see that we have add subtract or combine combine I get a nice preview I've created that geometry and now I'll just accept it so from here you can go and make it as fancy as you want add some fillets things like that how do you feel about that part do you think you'd be able to create it without that combined common command you know that's something I could definitely model but it would take far more features than we it would just using this combined in common definitely a powerful tool now Jesse we've been talking a lot about tips related to parts but now it's time to focus on some assembly specific ones you know good idea I deal with complex assemblies often and you know sometimes I struggle with managing all the components and mates sometimes it can be very tedious you know especially when we have a lot of similar components or maybe many instances of a particular component where it seems like I'm essentially just you know adding the same mates over and over again thankfully we can simplify that process with our next trick tip 13 making use of mate references now we can kind of think of mate references like essentially predefined mates on this miter saw model here we see we have that motor with a little plug hole on top where something like this power cord would plug into and because of the way this is modeled and the way those components interact with each other you know that's always going to plug in the same way each and every time so we can set up some reference geometry with a mate reference to tell SolidWorks how we want each of these components to mate in this example I have the power cord model here I'm grabbing the faces that I want to have mated in our top level assembly selecting what type of mate I'd like to use in this case coincident for each one of those spaces as well as the alignment which will be anti-aligned for each one of these now that we've defined this mate reference we can go ahead and Define that same thing for the counterpart we're going to go over to the motor model here and Define how we want that power cord to mate on this model so again we're going to come up to our reference geometry grab our mate references we're going to tell us all it works which faces we'd like to select for that model and it doesn't just have to be faces it can be any geometry just like a regular mate could select those faces select the mate types are going to be coincident for each one here so it's coincident with those matching faces on the power plug and then select the alignment again going to be anti-align for each one but that geometry in there and we'll go ahead and hit that okay hit okay to accept that now when we create these mate references they actually live here at the part level so you see we have a full folder here full of our mate references containing what we just set up so SolidWorks now recognizes that and because it lives with the part at the part level that means if we ever use let's say a different type of power plug it's going to plug into that motor we can set up a new reference on the other power plug and again it's going to plug right into that motor like it should so with those two main references set up I can just grab my power cable and you see it just snaps into place there solidwork recognizes those references we set up we don't have to add those mates manually so something like this a power cable which will always plug in the same way will just snap into a place to see it added three coincident mates there for us automatically very quick and easy wow that seems really useful for something that you would use over and over like a component that you use in a lot of assemblies why not use the mate references there exactly that's exactly what it's built for you know things like electrical connectors ports valves maybe fluid things that's kind of the perfect candidates for using mate references things that will be used many times in our assembly the same way over and over again after defining that bait reference and like I said it now lives with that part it's defined in so when we add it to the assembly it just snaps into place yep it makes sense uh oftentimes again I'm working in complex assemblies um we need access components that maybe we can't necessarily see because it's either inside or behind another component so Jesse in that situation what you might do to try to find a hidden component I'd probably just fully expand my design tree and go through it one by one to try and find that component right yeah I mean certainly an option but not one that I think I'd want to do it sounds pretty tedious right so that brings us to our next tip tip 14 hiding components with the Tab Key by hitting tab on our keyboards whatever our cursor is floating over SolidWorks will instantly hide so you can see here on this miter saw I'm trying to get to a gear on the inside of the head of the saw but it's hidden behind lots of components and all I'm doing is hovering my cursor over the components I want to hide and then hitting tab to very quickly hide those and when we want to bring them back we can just hover all those components with their location in 3D spaces hold down shift and press tab to unhide them a very nice tip or trick for very quickly hiding and showing components in an assembly now obviously we could go through the process of hiding and showing through our right click menu right clicking on components and going to that hide but using the Tab Key makes this process very simple and very quick and you know honestly my left hand is always by the left hand side of my keyboard when I'm modeling control tab or sorry tab there is right there very easy to click make use of you hit a lot of components pretty quickly there what happened or how would I unhide them do I have to kind of hope my cursor goes over where they were in the graphics area and then do shift tab or is there a better way to do that yeah that could be a bit of a challenge especially if we hit a lot of components you know I went a little overzealous and hiding components there for that one happens yeah it does uh so thankfully we don't manually have to select each one of those to unhide SolidWorks gives us a lot of options a lot of different ways we can do to make selections which brings us to our next tip tip 15 using the selection drop down menu the selection drop down menu selects different items like components in an assembly using a range of different parameters you can see lots of these different parameters here so for example all of those components that I hid here in the miter saw I brought some back but not all of them I can tell SolidWorks so just select the hidden components in our assembly if all works automatically picks up every component that's hidden and now with a single right click on one of those components I can hit show and it brings all of those back much easier than either going through our tree or like you mentioned Jesse having to go shift tab trying to find where those components exist in 3D space we have other options too for making selections so for example we're going to select just Toolbox parts maybe we want to break out all of our Hardware into a separate assembly so we can have a separate bill of materials just for Fasteners we can do that too grab all those very quickly SolidWorks even has an advanced select option with the advanced select option we get a little dialog that pops up here that allows us to combine that criteria so we can pick very specific parameters we want to grab our items by see if we can combine them here we go to and or statements in this case I'm going to try to grab all Fasteners that are not suppressed and so I specify that here I hit apply install it works again automatically picks those up no hunting in the tree no trying to figure out where my components are just a few clicks of our Mouse and we can grab all those components very easily you know that looks like a really useful tool but I am noticing that design tree is looking pretty large in that assembly um that brings us to our next tip tip number 16 folders using folders to organize your part or assembly design trees now I'm going to focus on the support Handle Sub assembly on this assembly here notice it has all these loose toolbox components living in there that's making my design tree huge we don't need that I'm going to select all those components actually I should have used the selection tool that Taylor just talked about yeah but here I'm just using a shift to select to select them all but that's okay with all these components selected I'll click add to new folder and now I can just organize all of them in this design tree they don't need to be there taking up all that space if I ever need to access them I can access that folder so really useful tool for organizing your design trees making them much shorter and easier to understand especially if you're collaborating on your assembly models now I use folders all the time I find not many SolidWorks users use them but once I discovered being able to organize things in our tribute folders I use them in Parts I use them in assemblies makes things a lot easier we want to organize those things in our tree it's super helpful and folders are an awesome tool for organization you know like I said I use them all the time but what if I want to go a step further what if I want to organize things into sub-assemblies now Jesse what do you think about that seems like that'd be pretty hard right you mean so something that's already in an assembly you want to reorganize that structure I don't know that seems like a lot of work you know at first glance it might but thankfully we can actually modify our assembly structure straight from the top level assembly with our next tip tip 17 being able to create and dissolve sub-assemblies from within our top level assembly for example we have these two halves of this power cord here you know the one app that plugs into the wall and the one hat that plugs into the motor right now they're at the top level assembly it makes sense to me to put these as a sub assembly so I can select both right click and select create new assembly and right off the bat it combines those two and we have a brand new sub assembly in our tree with those two components and select it here and we see our power cable assembly and let's do components in it instantly no having to create a new document no creating a or excuse me exiting the top level assembly and then creating a new document it's all done right here from the tree we can also dissolve existing sub-assemblies so for example we have this little clamp on the end of our power cable let's say I don't want the Fasteners in that assembly I just want to break this out put those at the top level I can right click that sub-assembly and click dissolve sub-assembly and now they all exists at the top level we can also modify sub-assemblies as well let's say I want those clamps in that power cable assembly all it takes is a simple click and drag I'm going to click and drag each one up from that top level drop them into our new sub assembly we just created and now we have a total of four components in that sub-assembly all from without leaving this top level assembly now we want to go ahead and give this a name power cable assembly right never like those ambiguous sm1 sm2 I don't like that idea nope now it's important to note that when we do create an assembly like this it creates a virtual sub assembly which exists in our top level assembly but much like any other virtual part or virtual assembly we can save it out to its own file and edit it in its own window here as well definitely a great tool for making use of uh the components that already exist going to exist in an assembly when you want to go one step further with that organization yeah I'm really loving this assembly organization tips what's next on the docket for our assembly tips well let's see here our next tip as we all know well moving components around in our assembly clicking and dragging we've all done it right very easy to click and drag components to move them but what if we need more advanced functionality that's going to bring us to a tip 18 with our move command so why would I need a special command the regular click and drag seems to work so well um what what's the difference using the move command well if we want to go one step further than just a simple click and drag we can use the move command to either translate or rotate our components for example we can specify numeric values a Delta this case is specifying a 15 degree change in the rotation of that head of our miter saw I'm going to go back with a negative 15 degrees I can move it with those numerical values to get the exact change I want in either the rotation or translation of our components we can also specify by absolute XYZ 2 if we know the exact position we want and then we have advanced features like this Collision detection Collision detection is going to allow us to move our components through their Dynamic sweep their movement in our assembly and SolidWorks will tell us where those components are colliding and as you know Jesse by default SolidWorks is not calculated those collisions but when we need to have that information when we need to see when our components are interfering through motion as Collision detection is going to be a great tool for us we can even detect Dynamic clearance so let's say we want to find out the clearance between this piece of lumber and the saw blade as it's kind of going through its range of motion here we turn on Dynamic clearance tell SolidWorks which components we want to measure in between and then we get that Dynamic value showing up on screen showing us the exact value for that clearance as we move through our range of motion of our miter saw so click and drag is great I still use it all the time but when we do need to kind of Step Up that functionality the move tool great command I think you missed something in there yes I did Jesse I was just checking to make sure you're paying attention oh I am paying attention and that brings us to our next tip number 19 smart mates with the ALT key now inside this move command you'll see that icon that has a paper clip and a lightning bolt on it this is the Smart mates tool and what this does is allow us to quickly make simple mates like concentric and coincidence mates and circumnavigate that mate property manager now you don't have to be in the move command to realize these benefits if I hold the ALT key and then click on a selection like an edge Vertex or face of a part component it turns translucent I get that paper clip icon on my mouse letting me know the smart mates tool has been initiated then I can quickly drag it right into place what's really nice about this is you get really cool smart mating features this is called the pin and hole feature and I just applied both a concentric and coincident mate at the same time without even bringing up that mate property manager you know typically I'll use the regular mate command to grab my mates but situations like that where we can add two mates at once the Pinon hole that's something I use all the time it really speeds up our assemblies and I think that's a great segue into our next item I want to speed up some drawings how can I do that so drawings prints we all need them when we're documenting our designs right now Jesse how many times have you used the smart Dimension tool to detail your prints only to come to the realization that hey I'm repeating these Dimensions that I use to build our model in the first place all the time it's feel like I'm just doing double the work I created these dimensions in the part why do I have to recreate them in the drawing yeah we just saw that on screen all those Dimensions that exist in that model so I asked myself that question all the time or at least I used to why am I doing this duplicate work well thankfully SolidWorks has a tool called Model items we're a next tip making use of model items to bring in Dimensions that already exist in our part model by using the model items tool we see we can select the type of Dimensions we want to bring in one's marked for Dimension or Mark for drawing excuse me whole call outs hole positions annotations things like that and with a click of our model it brings all of those in we can even left click on each of those to move them around or right click them to Omit them when we're adding them to the tool now here we're going to organize our Dimensions but can you imagine how much more time that would have taken if we'd use the regular smart Dimension tool not off the top of my head but it definitely would have taken longer yeah and once we use those model the model items tool to bring in all of our model items right they are now attached to the parent view which they come in on I can reorganize these and get the drawing looking exactly how I want it now you just did something really interesting there I saw you move that view generally when I move views I need to zoom in and find some sort of area of open space because I don't want to click on a dimension an annotation some sort of model Edge to move the view so it's been kind of difficult for me to figure out how to easily move that without finding that open space for my cursor you know I've definitely learned that issue before too you know accidentally grabbing a dimension or a model Edge I just want to move the view around so typically we want to move a view you know we have to move our cursor over the border of a view see it highlight move our cursor over and then click and drag finding that border can be difficult okay well not really difficult but more tedious than I'd like it to be thankfully our next tip will make that process much easier tip 21 making use of the ALT key to move our drawing views like we said trying to find the the right spot hovering over that border to move our views don't like it too much work for me I like things easy by holding down the ALT key we can click anywhere in a drawing view to move it doesn't matter if we're hovering over Dimension a model Edge or a face we can hold down alt click and drag a very quick way to move those views now it's definitely a smaller trick you know just holding on the ALT key to move our drawing views but of course we like nice organized drawings and you know this is definitely one a tip that I found I cannot live without makes our lives much easier when we want to have nice clean prints that's a really nice tip going on to our next tip tip number 22 settings for drawing leaders so I'm going to focus on this front view that you just added the model items and dimensions to I like it I don't love it I think it's missing something I don't like how all my Dimension and extension lines are all intersecting each other not a big deal though I'm just going to select all my detention or all my Dimensions go to my leaders Tab and then find the break lines option in that property manager what this is going to do is give us the ability to create breaks between those Dimension and extension lines just like you're seeing here on the screen now that value does live in the system options or I'm sorry in your document properties on how big of a gap you want also in this document properties you'll see an option called Break only around Dimension arrows make sure that option is cleared otherwise that break lines checkbox and the property manager might not do anything if it does it's only going to break them around those Dimension arrows so you're not going to really see those benefits so something to be aware of when you're using that Yeah clean drawings that's kind of key when documenting our our parts right in times we have a messing drawing no one likes looking at it I know more than a few machinists that would be very upset I gave them a dirty drawing with lots of Crossing leaders I do not want to upset my machinist I did not either speaking of things that upset machinists we're going to talk about editing Bill and material cells and this is tip number 23. so we've always had the ability to edit ourselves and our bill of materials here I'm looking at my description custom property and we can keep the link and I can change this custom property I'm just going to add A1 to the end of the shaft's description value and I kept the values linked so now I'll go up and open the part and I'll see that inside that part document if I bring up its custom properties that value has transferred over so that's working correctly this isn't new nothing special we've all been able to do this before we've also been able to break the link and input a manual value here so let me pause Taylor have you ever had any issues with bom sales being overridden yeah you know I've had other people go into my drawings modify bill of material cells and before 2023 you would never know they were changed it's gonna cause a lot of issues down the line with their production or assembly or Machining big hassle that's right before 2023. now in 2023 a great update notice what happens is I change this cell but broke the link that color has changed letting me know or whoever's looking at this drawing know that those values have been overridden I look at that parts custom properties I can see that value hasn't transferred over we're reading a manual input here I'm not actually looking at it and if I click on the top left icon of my bill of materials I can see which cells have those custom values and which ones do not you can right click restore all the original values or right click individual cells and restore original values and this color is defined in our system options so I'll go up to my system options I'll go to colors and then I can find how I can change my color that's going to let me know that those cells have been overridden in my bill of materials so this is a really nice addition new to 2023 we don't have to worry about incorrect or manually updated bill of materials anymore it's just that visibility on change cells in our bill of materials small change but huge at the same time tons of benefits can definitely save some trouble down the line absolutely yeah next tip I'm going to talk about tip number 24 Force rebuild so it's generally best practice to throw a rebuild on after you make some sort of change in your model here I'm going to change this Dimension from 2.5 to 2.75 now in this assembly it's been mirrored and I want to check that that Dimension has been changed on the mirrored component as well I'm going to click on your regular rebuild or rebuild all configurations doesn't matter it's either Ctrl b or Ctrl shift B but I'll use my regular rebuild command and I'm going to bring up my measure tool and just confirm that that Dimension has been changed so here I can see my normal distance 2.75 looks good I'll look at the mirrored component click on those two faces to get that dimension and I'll see my normal distance is still 2.5 so it didn't fully rebuild for me I'll go ahead and click rebuild again and now if I measure that it will reflect the actual value but I'm probably not the only person that has done a rebuild and afterward scene results that are not what I was expecting and the force rebuild command is a really cool thing to do or a good next step to do Force rebuild is going to rebuild every top level component in an assembly as well as its assembly features in a part document it's going to rebuild every feature in the feature manager design tree and a drawing it's going to rebuild any views that's created with Sketch geometry so for instance a detail view will rebuild because a sketch circle is used to create it as well as lines for Section views it'll rebuild things in the sheet format like the Border as well so Force rebuild is going to rebuild a lot more items than your typical rebuild which only rebuilds items that have that icon in front of them and their children so a great step if your rebuild isn't quite doing what you expected do a control Q on your keyboard that's the only way to access that command as well yeah control Q one I use all the time again left hand is always on the left side of the keyboard control Q right there force your build just make sure just like that there we go yeah make sure everything's up to date and we're good to go and this brings up our last tip our favorite tip this is tip number 25 the S key shortcut bar you know I actually saw someone mention this one in chat earlier all right all right all right yeah the IBS key brings up an environment dependent shortcut menu and it's one that both Jesse and I probably could not live without at this point yeah that's right and I like how you mentioned it Taylor it's fully customizable meaning we can set it up to house commands that we use the most we can really tailor it to fit our own specific applications and workflows just like the mouse gesture tip that you talked about at the beginning of the hour and like you said Jesse the S key shortcut menu is fully customizable brings up those commands right out of our mouse cursor so we can grab our commands with fewer clicks and also while barely moving our Mouse now that's one of the great things about SolidWorks the ability to customize the SolidWorks environment to fit how we like to work best our specific workflows our specific applications we can really customize that and the S key really highlights that another highlight of the Esky short of course excuse me shortcut menu is the search bar that was added in the 2022 release this all works this is a big one for me and I think it'd be an understatement for me to say that it's changed my life having that search bar there so I can type in and find any command at my fingertips is super helpful and what's another great added addition to it is if I want to add that command to my shortcuts in that s key I can just hit that plus icon and then it'll always be right there for me definitely very useful adding them on the Fly and part of what makes the S key shortcut many so powerful is that it's customizable per environment just like our Mouse gestures that means that we can set up commands for our own specific workflows for each environment you know Parts assemblies drawings and sketches we can have a specific set of commands for each grab those commands that we use most commonly that best fit our workflows it really helps speed things up you know nowadays I rarely grab commands from the command manager anymore and why would you now that they're right at your fingertips exactly now this is why the S key shortcut bar is our ultimate tip it's a huge Time Saver and you know at first glance it might not seem like a lot just having those commands at your cursor but I promise you that adding this to your workflow make it much more efficient and will save tons of time that will likely be your new best friend when working in SolidWorks you know that's right I know both you and I use the S key every single time we use SolidWorks I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone to figure out how to get this into your workflow I agree 100 Jesse all right well there's a lot of great tips there Taylor I actually saw a chat message someone was wondering how many times we said tip during this presentation uh probably more than 25 probably a lot yeah there were tons of great tips in there Jesse well we hope you discovered some new way or a couple new ways to improve your workflow and design better and faster Parts as always Hawk Ridge is here to set you up for Success so reach out to our team and see how we can help you even more but it's about that time prize time prize time let's do it so up first we're going to give away three SolidWorks Swag Bags these include an awesome tote bag portable power bank and a leather-bound notebook so I'm just going to start with our first winner here congratulations to Rajiv kondagary congratulations Rajiv I have this bag so I'm not giving you something that I wouldn't recommend myself I love it I have one as well Jesse and I use it all the time so congratulations Rajiv all right our next winner that's getting their SolidWorks swag bag is Marcus Willey congratulations Marcus way to go Marcus and our last winner of the SolidWorks swag bag Lucas Brown congratulations Lucas congratulations guys enjoy those prizes well that takes care of our Swag Bags Jesse now let's talk grand prize that's right the 3D connection space Mouse Enterprise kit you know this kit is awesome this great tools to have at your fingertips and working in SolidWorks gonna replace a lot of other Hardware I find most the times you don't even need a keyboard when you have this kit yeah this thing is sweet I mean not only does it have that really cool joystick to help you move around in your part and assembly environments it has all those shortcut keys you can program to direct SolidWorks functions so you can really speed things up with a mouse like this yeah smooth movement around your assemblies and using those commands on the Fly awesome all right so let's see who our lucky winner is for our 3D connection space Mouse Enterprise kit congratulation Marty onimis right Grand Prize winner right there I'm jealous I don't know about you I'm pretty jealous myself way to go Marty yeah congratulations and that's not all 100 other of you will also be receiving free training voucher which includes a learning path and two credits to take a SolidWorks certification so you can put these new trips tips and tricks to use to work for you look out in your email inboxes to see if you were one of the lucky winners all right well we want to thank you all for taking time out of your day to come watch this I hope you have something that you can take back with you to improve your design don't forget to download your own copy of the PDF after this just going to give you a brief overview of everything went over so thanks and we'll see you next time bye guys foreign [Music]

Channel: Hawk Ridge Systems

Views: 18,429

Keywords: solidworks, solidworks 3d cad, 3d cad, 3d modeling, 3d design

Id: UVsmAtwYHKU

Length: 48min 4sec (2884 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2023