How to 10X your Productivity in SolidWorks

here are five of the ingredients that are used to 10x my modeling speed in solidworks and i'm going to reveal them all in this video [Music] welcome back i'm aryan if you're new to my channel i help engineers and creative minds to convert their idea into real solutions through learning solidworks with a very easy approach so subscribe to this channel if this might be something for you while the contrast among the comments i usually get on my channel is a lot i'm picking on those who believe that i move too fast in my videos and i don't explain things enough in detail because if there are some others who can't keep up with the pace then there must be a solution for those who cannot to bring them up to speed so i decided to break down my speed into teachable ingredients so you could practice on that and learn having said that my 14 15 years of experience working with the software cannot be ignored as an important factor here maybe even the most important factor but even without having years of experience the following feature i'm about to share with you are five of the ingredients i use and they can be learned practiced and mastered to increase your modeling speed three of these features are for modeling one of them is for assembly and one is a general technique that can be purchased we'll get to that so let's get started keep it symmetrical what do i mean this is the first tip whenever i'm going to create something from scratch and it's going to have some components more than one eventually i'm going to make an assembly out of it whether it's going to be something like mechanism or anything else i keep that in mind that all my components from the first to the last one that i design have to be made on the center of my coordinate system what do i mean by that so let me just simplify everything by creating a cube not even a perfect cube anything is symmetrical but it still has to be symmetric what do i mean so uh i'm gonna draw a rectangle and i'm gonna extrude this you have noticed my rectangle is under defined it means i can change its shape or position uh depending on what i select anyways this is the least amount of symmetry that anyone can have in their solidworks look i still have my cube it looks good no errors and it's fine but the issue is it's not on the center of my coordinate system therefore none of these three planes are cutting my cube or whatever geometry it is perfectly in half look even the right plane is not cutting it in half top plane it's not going to have a front plane sitting on one side and when your plane is sitting on one side of your component which is already flat it's like wearing two hats on top of each other it's a waste of resource later on if i'm going to mirror this component i don't have any plane in the middle so let's take care of this there are two steps that i have to do it might not look like that it's actually helping my speed but i guarantee you in the long run when you are working hours at the end you will see the benefit of this without a doubt if i draw a center line from corner to corner and right click on the center line and click on select midpoint i'm not doing anything my hands are here then i go and hold the ctrl key down and select the center of my coordinate system then in the property manager on the left i see some sketch relations that i can add into these two selected points and that would be coincident when the center point of of my center line which is connecting two corners of my rectangle together on the coordinate system this rectangle automatically becomes symmetric against that point which is the coordinate system so whatever i do the distances of all four corners against each other two by two are symmetric so this is the first step and when i rebuild my component and do that test once again select all these three planes the front plane is still sitting on one side but the other two are fixed two out of the three planes are cutting my component in half and that's what i mean by symmetry now let's just make it more drastic in terms of extrusion so we can see the difference better again three planes front plane is not cutting it in half and that can be fixed too the first extrusion that you do if it's going to be an extrusion if it's a revolve or anything else then you're 9 out of 10 right already but if it's an extrusion in terms of blind do it mid plane and now all three components are cutting my component in half if i'm going to uh work with cross sections i already have three perfect planes that cut my component in half if i'm going to mirror some feature that i'm creating on this side to the other side i have perfect plane for that in the center if i'm going to assemble this component later on with another component which i already created following this rule then i can place them symmetrically based on their plane and i have three planes to choose from so you would follow this small step and you will save a lot of time in the following steps that you have to take so ingredient number two is using mouse gestures a lot of people who have complained about my drawing speed have written comments like when did you click on that when did you select that feature when did you even select that edge sometimes i forget to mention that and i'm sorry for that because it's been years of practice and i don't even think about it sometimes so sometimes it slips my mind to mention that i'm doing it the fact of the matter is i don't really go or at least i don't often go into these toolbars unless i'm going to pick a tool that is not that regular all the tools that i work with regularly are set into my mouse gesture wheel that you see here i have eight of them for sketching here i have eight of four features there and i can reach any of them that i want like in a snap in a movement for example our drawing is still under defined and i'm going to apply some dimensions to it and for that instead of going to the toolbar and select smart dimension i will do it like this done now i have smart dimension i can assign any dimension i want what did i do i simply held right click on my mouse then i moved it upwards look once i pass this circle it picks that tool now if i want to draw a circle in the center of my rectangle done that's it i will do it like that and then if i want to dimension that again like this done you could work with all the tools you want so let me show you how you can customize your mouse dresser wheel because there are different formats for it and we're gonna see how so right click on this empty area onto your bar go to customize then from the tabs above select mouse gesture and automatically you will see four wheels appear in front of your eyes these are the tools that you have for each mode when you're in the part mode not that i wasn't in the part mode when you are not working in an active sketch environment when you are looking at your component if you're drawing turning it rotating it that's what part means so you have these eight tools for example front view top view whatever and when you are in the sketching mode like where i was right now you have these sketching tools eight of them in the drawing when you're creating a 2d drawing you have these tools and in the assembly mode you have another wheel for that so first thing first you should decide how many gestures you want to have you could have as little as two vertical or horizontal which is too simple well you don't get enough of the tools that you need three is still too small for not enough for me twelve too many first of all you cannot memorize all the tools you need there are not that many tools that you have to use on a regular basis that's one and number two because of the number of the features that you are fitting onto that wheel hitting them becomes a little bit difficult for example if i'm going to work with a wheel that has 12 features my hand movements have to be much more accurate it happens a lot of times that i don't pick the right tool because i go two degrees to the right and it picks the wrong tool so the sweet spot for me that i have found after years is having eight and i have customized the two so for example i don't really work with mouse gesture other than in the sketching mode or in the drawing mode so i'm going to customize this wheel for you there is one empty here and there are all the commands that i want there let's just say i want to add extrusion to this wheel i will search for extrude i will see all sorts of features that have the word extruding them i want boss then i will just drag it put it onto this wheel similarly if i don't want to have one i will drag it place it in the center of the wheel it will go away and then i replace it with another one here that was that now when you have your mouse juicers ready set you need to practice to remember the place of each and every component for example i want to draw something random right now working only with my mouse structure so we go up we go all right actually it will turn it to affiliate which i will tell you in another video how i do so fast then we will close it here place a circle here now we will dimension it like this and maybe we want to dimension that maybe we want to dimension the distance from this edge to the other side of the circle and then we want to dimension the center we can do whatever we want oh by the way i want to have a rectangle no problem i will just draw a rectangle here and then i want to try another rectangle on this corner then open these two edges and then dimension it as as i like maybe seven and so on so forth you see how fast i can work without even going picking these tools up and it's all because i have it all on my mouse gesture something like this all right ingredient number three keyboard shortcuts there are tons of keyboard shortcuts that if you use them right they would help you increase your modeling speed for example i'm working on this component i just press f to bring it in a little bit fill the screen and it happens so that i would want to look at a certain corner so i would rotate my component zoom in check something it's fine then i'm going to draw something to draw something or anything i would want to look perpendicularly at my component and it's obvious that i could go back press spacebar on my keyboard find the right view that i want and then go there or i could just work with the shortcuts that is control one all the way to nine you could saved it or you could just use the one that you like or you could do what i do and that's holding shift on the keyboard and then working with the arrows because i find it the faster and easier way to just get to the angle you want perpendicularly and that's all i do i'm holding shift on the keyboard playing with the arrows each arrow would rotate it 90 degrees at a time and i can get faster to the angle i want and look at the view and take it from there also keyboard shortcuts don't limit here you can do much more to that there is a toolbar that you can have next to your mouse cursor and that is uh pressing s you could also customize this menu you could just like master share you could go to your keyboard shortcuts and uh change your this is called shortcut bar and that's what i showed you right now press s you could drop anything you don't want from this menu and fill it with the tools that you like so anytime you want something next to your mouse you could press s and have it there that's a very good way to bring the tools that you want to use usually regularly closer to your mouse cursor so you don't go find it in different menus because one tool could be in this tab one tool could be in this tab and you could just mix and match all of them in one place bring it with one keyboard shortcut and then you have it alright ingredient number four quick mating which is only used in the assembly mode so you all know that to assemble something in solidworks you need to work with mates and there are different types standard advanced mechanical and you can find each and every one of these tools under one of these tabs and obviously you can go through all these menus find the tool you want and a lot of times you have to do that but there is another way that allows you to just work much faster without even going to that menu you don't even need to go there so we have one stationary tube over here the yellow one that i cannot move and this one is completely floating i want to place this pink one into the yellow one the traditional way as i said going to mate and select the outer surface of this or the inner surface of that then it would happen it would just move into this and they become concentric or or i could just do this i could just place it there and click ok done it's concentric already let's go back ctrl z how did i do this whenever you hold the alt key on the keyboard in the assembly mode it kind of awakes solidworks and it tells it that you're about to mate two components together so the first component that you select and not just anywhere on that component the first surface or vertex that is either a edge or a point on that component will become the selection from the first component and wherever you drop it on the second component will become the second selection so if i would use this outer surface and this outer surface to make them concentric all i have to do is to hold alt select this outer surface drag it onto this outer surface you know what i mean and then i get the menu do i want to lock the rotation do i want to do something else did solidworks guess it right wrong if so i can change it or if i want to flip the direction i can if everything is fine then i can click ok but let's do it again this time i'm going to hold alt select this outer surface but instead of putting it on this one i would place it on this flat one here if i can go closer to make it tangential if it doesn't select it then it cannot take a smart guess on that so in this case concentric is the way to go and that's a good thing because i'm going to show you what to do if you want to select it differently if you want to make this too tangential this surface and this surface obviously alt did not help you there there is another way to do this hold ctrl this time select these two and then you get the menu of possible mates from the selection you have obviously lock is always an option whatever you select and you have three more options these could be tangential you could define a distance or limit distance between these two selected entities and i'm gonna make him tangential then i get another menu do i want to flip it or not but i just missed it so these two are now tangential and that was using control allow me to make another example with alt because it could be still not clear i want to place these two surfaces on top of each other this time i'm going to hold alt place this surface on this surface and then they could be cool incident they could be parallel whatever you want i'm just going to click ok and then immediately make these two concentric as well now look it's concentric and it's fit to one side and i have actually added two mates without even going to the mate menu that's the faster way of applying mates again there are some mates like some mechanical mates some advanced mates that doesn't make sense that don't work really with the alt key then you would just do it the traditional way but all keys can still be used for a lot of advancements for example a lot of advanced mates can be reached using the control key technique for example select the first one the second one i'm going to rotate it the third one and the fourth one and then the only possible mate i get is width which is one of the advanced mates that allows me to set this component in the center of the other one and it's symmetric the distance here and the distance here are equal so i did that using a ctrl key if the alt key doesn't give you what you want you could go for the control key and if the control key doesn't give you what you want do it the traditional way that's the sequence that you have to follow and the last one is a 3d connection space mouse that i have covered in the previous video and you can see there are different types that allow you to just maneuver much faster and smoother in your model that results in saving time instead of rotating with mouse and keyboard you just add all the shortcuts you want to the buttons and then you would get there much faster although it's something that needs to be purchased it's not a technique that you can adopt as i said three of them were for part one for assembly and one was the general technique and it was that so i hope it can help you i don't want to give you more than five because it could be overwhelming just practice with these and i guarantee you your modeling speed would go up if you're not already working with them adopting more than five things at a time would be too overwhelming and resulting for getting most of them that's why i'm giving you only five of the basic but important ingredients to improve your modeling speed hey you might ask why would i want to increase my modeling speed i have two answers for you one if you're working for yourself the reasons are obvious it's the time you save the time is money and it is not it's no wonder that it would help you to model faster even if you're doing it as a hobby it will help you to get there get your project done faster so it is obviously more beneficial and if you are an employee and you don't see the direct benefit of modeling your project faster if i i think they are still obvious but then you should think again because if you finish your task ahead of schedule you have more time for iterations you have more time for evaluating your model and all in all you will increase the quality of your work and it can be seen and sensed by your employer so obvious reasons important announcement for serious learners here because some of you might be in different stages of learning solidworks and are ready to do the work and learn it all the way through you are ready to learn it good enough to be a professional whether certified or uncertified so you don't need to come back to youtube and search for other stuff and ask for help if that describes you then go to the top right corner of the screen and click on that info button or the link in the description below they will both take you to my website where i explain more in detail for you what's gonna happen one hour free webinar as well as a mini course that i will give you for free are waiting for you there and all you have to do is go there and start your journey all right thank you very much for watching my video and if you're new don't forget to hit the subscribe button i'll see you soon with more useful stuff i'm out

Channel: SolidWorksTutorials With Aryan

Views: 44,716

Keywords: solidworks tutorials with ryan, solidworks for beginners, solidworks for beginners 2020, solidworks for beginners pdf, solidworks for beginners 2021, solidworks for beginners tutorial, assembly in solidworks for beginners, solidworks 2020 tutorial for beginners, light stand, 3d printing, light holder design solidworks, ryan, 3d print, light holder, stages of designing, 10x productivity in solidworks, 5 ingredients in solidworks, five SolidWorks Productivity tips

Id: SrApMBZ1NW8

Length: 21min 15sec (1275 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 24 2021