Learn SOLIDWORKS - 60 Tips in 60 Minutes 2020

welcome to day three I'm very happy you guys are joining me my name is Steven Patrick Patrick and I'm from Fort Lauderdale Florida I work for a Tremec and you're here for 60 tips in 60 minutes this is one of my favorite presentations to give it's a very fast presentation I'm going to throw a lot of tips at you you're going to get more than 60 by the way okay but it's going to be a lot of tips coming at you I can't do that many tips and also include some context around it so they're really direct to the point just showcasing what these tips what these tricks are okay now there's a couple of reasons why something might wind up in this either it's a what's new enhancement that a lot of people might have missed or it's just genuinely a time-saving tip and trick and the third reason I include some things in here is because I find that people are accidentally doing some things or maybe thinking the the software is you know there's something weirds happening and I explain why so then you can use these things deliberately in the future after you take note of them okay so this is the breakdown of the presentation so you guys can know how we're breaking this up here this is more or less the order you know using SolidWorks than navigating around it sketching parts and assemblies so that's going to be the breakdown if you guys want shoot me an email hang out after talk about it with if you have any questions if you stopped me in the middle of the presentation I'm happy to do it but then I take no responsibility and going over on time okay so we'll get started so tip number one this is called the option search when you call us at tech support and we start to look through to tell you where some options are we don't have that stuff memorized we use this all of the time it's a really quick way to find your system options and your document properties and actually type them in there they dynamically up here so you don't need to commit to memory anymore where these options live in your system option from your document properties so let's take a look at this we hit the gear icon we go up to our search options and we just start typing and as you start typing these start to dynamically appear you can scroll through them and it takes you directly to your options so not just system options but document properties as well it's a great thing to keep in your bag of tricks to go through and say hey where is that option I remember I saw it you know a year ago two years ago yesterday where is it right so that's the options search repeat last command there is a way to access this through the Edit menu but if you just hit the enter key it'll go back and do the exact same thing that you just did so it's a quick way to add dimensions or use a sketch tool or a feature command right so here I'll add a smart dimension to this and instead of grabbing smart dimension again I'll just hit enter so hitting enter brings you right back into that last command that you were just doing it works not just for sketching but features as well here I'm doing a split line and I want to do it again I just hit enter I keep going back in there it's a quick way to reuse a command so that's the Enter key to repeat force rebuild this is a top-secret trick that we use when we're teaching classes or on tech support when someone says hey my models not working right something's not going right and then you guys you understand this right we come up to you or do something you're like how did you do that it was not working right for me now it's working perfectly for you this is that trick okay so remember this force rebuild it is a way to perform a rebuild of the entire feature tree from top to bottom okay so in doing that it fixes 99% of these weird funky things that might be going on with your models all right so ctrl Q now all I'm gonna showcase here is just the difference between the standard rebuild and the forest rebuild so the standard rebuild is that symbol that's there on the modify box it's up top in the toolbar and it only rebuilds geometry that is flagged for a rebuild okay so for example here if I use that rebuild only the features that have that symbol on it will be rebuilt so ctrl Q goes from top to bottom rebuilding everything and I promise you it fixes a lot of things that my be going on with your model reference planes the tip is not that reference planes exist the tip is two ways that you guys can quickly add reference planes one on the fly that's my favorite way to add reference planes my second favorite way is to add a mid plane very quickly so let's take a look at this so I want to add a reference plane I hold the control key and drag away but the trick is to make sure your mouse is on the edge of the plane when that crosshairs or that Pan symbol comes up then you're ready to go to add these reference planes okay so control drag add a reference plane it is a drag-and-drop kind of thing but you can always go in and key in the exact value that you want later okay so quickly adding reference planes now here's mid planes pre-selecting two faces and then going up to reference geometry and adding a plane will add a mid plane on the fly like that all right so it's a quick way to add mid planes that's how I do it all the time all right so there was two tricks there with the reference planes control drag to pull it away and then pre selecting the two faces and then adding a mid plane quickly like that next is recent files and the welcome screen again this isn't just that these things exist these are ways that you can use it to help take advantage of the software okay so you can browse through all your recent files by hitting the R key it's been extended from 16 in previous releases to up to a hundred now so you can have a hundred files in your recents you can scroll through find all sorts of files there but also there's options there's extended options for opening a file and I'll show you that right here so let's take a look at using reference using recent files I have a couple pinned on the top you can see I have those eight pinned so I can always get to them I'll call those my favorites and then below that I have just the recent files things that I've been working on rather recently you can hit the R key and here is the recent dialog box here where it lists the thumbnails of up to a hundred of those recent files you can pin it like that so it's showing up on the top and then here's those other options you hit that caret down in the lower right corner and then you can pick the mode you're opening it in a configuration and a display state so you don't have to open it up and then do things later right you can open deliberately the configuration the display state and the mode that you want to use when you're gonna open up that file so it could be a huge time-saving and then also this is just the Welcome screen here it's got a lot of things recent folder paths you know links to learn alerts from the RSS feed so there's a lot there consider using that reload I use this all the time maybe because I don't do any real work but I just do a lot of demonstrations so if I'm in there and I am just modeling and I need to reopen the park you know I'd close it I don't save it and then I reopen it to get back to where I was the reload command will do that for you automatically so if you're from the Adobe community is similar to the revert command in Adobe so let's take a look at that say for example I'm working on this product and I get super distracted and I do something very silly like that I've made a very important line the sketch jump to then errors and now it doesn't look like a jug I don't even know what I was doing so I would close don't open and save well you can use the reload command this will automate that it will identify if changes have occurred right that's highlighted in red you're gonna lose that data well that's okay now I'm back to the last saved point another tip here no video for this but just pointing this out at the top that asterisk next to the part name means whatever is working on hasn't yet been saved to the disk so a lot of people ask that and I wanted to just point that out here so bonus tip 6b asterisk 7 the context menu now this is a great way to work in what we call this heads-up modeling environment right so you can minimize your mouse movement so you can really reduce your Mouse mileage we call it you want to focus on your design instead of going up to the command manager over to the feature tree right all over the screen windshield watching you want to be focused on your design so a great way to do that is to use the context menu however it can be frustrating because if you don't go directly to the context menu that window will disappear it is really passive-aggressive in that way it's like okay if you don't want to pay attention to me I'm just gonna be gone forever so here's how you can get it back so let's take a look first at the control of the context menu here right it's a great way to add mates like that on a fly on the fly but if I don't go directly to it it disappears okay so there I am I go away from it it's gone now how do I get it back well I've moved my mouse back to the area where it was and then I hit the control key and it brings it back for you so you can have access to that okay so control key brings back the context menu the D key similar basically a similar concept to modeling with the context menu except this has a lot more power to it okay the D key was added a few years ago and it came with breadcrumbs and using breadcrumbs words using breadcrumbs basically means you can model with the feature tree hidden because anything you click on can you can get directly into everything you'd want the features the sketches the mates if it's apart right it's all context-sensitive and it brings you directly to where you want to be so let's take a look at that so this is the D key and breadcrumbs combined here so I hit the D key and it brings these breadcrumbs right to my mouse pointer if I don't hit the D key what happens is the breadcrumbs are going to be up in the upper left corner which isn't a useful place for it to be okay so I can get access to everything right I click on that face and it brings up everything the sketch the feature all the Filat surround it here if I hit the D key it brings the breadcrumbs to my mouse pointer and now I have access to all of the mates in that part the body the feature everything right at my mouse pointer and that's using breadcrumbs which has been there for a few years now but hitting the D key to bring that to your mouse pointer so now you can truly model with the feature tree cleared and you can really minimize your mouse movement it's a great way to be working if you can do that it'll really speed up the way that you model okay I have a couple of selection tips here we have previous selection select other and select tangency previous select is my favorite of these because it's extremely powerful and I understand how frustrating it can be when you're going through picking a bunch of things and then you miss click or something and you can't get it back right so let's take a look at this this is select other imagine I was picking a thousand faces I don't know why I would do that but imagine and if i misclicked I got distracted what have you I would have to pick them all again but through the right-click menu I can hit the command for previous select great next I have select other this is a command that allows you to select through geometry or select things that are not shown deliberately right below your mouse pointer SolidWorks understands what's there okay and the last tip here is select tangency you can get that by right-clicking on an edge and it will select the D tangency there but my favorite is previous select and probably the most useful to me is select other but that's not that great looking of the tip we have selection filters here a pro tip a lot of power users will have their filters docked somewhere maybe the bottom of your screen so you can have easy access to this right you can turn the filters on or off by hitting f6 or f5 and they're very useful to control basically whatever you're selecting so let's take a look at that here I'll hit f6 turns on my filters see you can see that little funnel thing I get a lot of questions hey what's the symbol next to my mouse I can't pick anything f5 brings up the selection filters the toolbar so now you can actively pick faces edges bodies one two three of them four of them and here's that pro tip just move it down somewhere and it'll snap and become docked then to your interface okay so f6 turns them on and off f5 brings up the window the filter manager and then docking it was the next tip command search this is by far my favorite out of all 60 of these and I will just get right into it there's a lot that you can do with it up at the top I use this all the time I just start typing right so here I'm starting to type cos it filters through I can find a command by clicking the eyeglass this is not me moving my mouse that's not my arrow that's SolidWorks pointing out where the command is so that's useful so now I can learn or I could just enter a command up top and then launch it directly without knowing where it is so that's the only place I need to go to start looking for commands like here I have the combined command okay and the last thing I can do with this is I can drag and drop from the command manager on to Mike from the command search on to my command manager so I can customize on the fly if I know I'm going to be using this combined or this split tool or something pretty often consider searching for it and then dragging and dropping it and adding it to the command manager on the fly 11 shortcut bars these are context-sensitive shortcut bars that come up that are sensitive for sketches parts drawings and assemblies so let's take a look at these it's really great because the weight there's a lot of different ways that you can focus on the graphics area you're not looking around you're really focusing on your model directly on your model you're not digging through menus and that is not just an easier and better way to work it's much more efficient for us as users so I'm modeling entirely with the S key here just keep hitting the S key to get every command I'd want this is fully customizable for sketches parts assemblies and drawings definitely consider using the S key I'm sure I'm sure a lot of you guys already are but if you're not please consider using it customizing let's talk about customizing this so I'll share with you how to customize the heads-up toolbar and I'll also show you mouse gestures Mouse gestures are great because you can model very quickly which wiggling your mouse all right wiggle your mouse and just swipe over command you don't even see it so I like to do customizing of the heads-up display to get a couple of commands maybe normal to or measure right so I find that command customize dot and just drag and drop right so all I'm showing you here is how to customize your interface just drag and drop from the customize window all right so I'd measure I'll add a normal to there all right if I want to take something off its just a drag and drop to delete it from it all right now this is Mouse gestures this wheel that comes up comes up by right-clicking and moving on my mouse just a little bit I'm just wiggling my mouse that's all it was and then you'll see I start to accelerate I get a little bit faster with it I start swiping over the commands and I get really quickly into it I've not you know hunting around for a key on the keyboard I'm just using my mouse and swiping over something all right so that's mouse gestures next we have saved SolidWorks settings if you are going to do an install or an upgrade or you want to go somewhere else and work on a different machine or maybe you came here to SolidWorks world or 3d experience world and you wanted to take a certification you want to bring your settings with you so I'll show you how to do that right this is the copy settings wizard you can save and restore your settings to a file that you can share somewhere and Dropbox email it or keep it on a flash drive okay so here's how you save your settings go through you check what you want browse find the location where you want it to be and then that's where it is it could be a flash drive one Drive Dropbox 3d experience Drive doesn't matter as long as you can find it because you need it now once you're inside of SolidWorks you can click restore settings and now you browse out find the file here we go gonna go it's in my onedrive and I'll find it right there hit next finish now my interface has been customized to my liking right that's my settings I take that with me I make sure I know where it is so I can load that up browse open documents this menu shows you what is actually open it's a great way to go through your your parts the ctrl tab is the hotkey to do that so let's take a look at that there's two ways to get to it up at the top the window command it lists everything that's open right so that's what was there or control tab allows you to cycle through these so you can quickly get to your open files maybe you're going back and forth between things right and you don't want to tile the windows for example right you want your fullscreen solid or so window command a window menu drop-down lists them control tab is the shortcut to go ahead through them filtering the feature manager I can't tell you how many people had no idea me - for a little while years I didn't realize that there was a filter bar at the top of the feature manager so let's take a look at that all you need to do is click your mouse up there and start typing and if you're smart within a way you name your parts your features your sketches this can become a very useful tool to you so now I could start to filter through here and find these features right I don't have to go searching for them but it's really powerful here in an assembly mode because as I filter through the feature tree it also filters the graphics area so now it's basically hiding everything that isn't shown now in the feature tree so that's some added functionality there - the filtering command at the top of the feature tree flattened tree view this is one I just want to point out that it's there right I don't want you to be confused if you see a part that has this how someone got their setup this way you can choose to do this if you want it's a setting on the the tree display so what it does is it takes everything out of the nested format and lists everything at the same level so here's your regular tree right notice I have a lot of sweeps a lot of multiple features and multiple sketches if I right-click at the top go to tree display hit show flat and tree view it will then list everything at the same level okay so that's what I'm doing here tree display show flat tree view nothing has been nested or indented in there collapsing the tree you guys are probably working with very large assemblies right and your tree gets pretty messy you have a lot of sub assemblies and sub assemblies and sub assemblies and your tree gets very long well instead of scrolling all the way through it so I suggest using shift or the command for collapsing the tree to make it all nice and neat again so here we go I got an assembly a lot of parts a lot of sub assemblies listed here shift C is a shortcut to collapse the tree so check that out nice and neat shift C to collapse the tree or I could right-click and get it that way too so I want you guys to be aware that that's what that is collapse items right there folders in the tree if you guys are keen on organizing your feature tree I suggest using add to folder it's a good way to organize things like your hardware certain types of features all right so let's take a look at that I have a couple of parts here for for example these feet I click them all the hardware as well I right-click add to new folder so now I'm gonna start to organize my tree I can give it a name now it just becomes much more clean organ and a much better way for me to work so that is folders in the future tree now I got some what I call nuggets in the tree these are two things that I suggest taking a look at consider using them one is sensors and one is the design binder sensors and design binder these are things that will get listed in your feature tree so you can always access them and you'll always have available their properties like the mass or things like measurement or interference detection proximity things right so when it's there and active and in-your-face you're much more aware of that right or you can use it for things like simulation results if you always want to know what's the stress or the factor of safety so you don't have to go digging and searching for these things you can have it be listed in your tree and then the design binder is a way to add documents to your tree all right so let's take a look at both of these so to see them you have to go to hidden tree items you're right click on the top of the tree hide show tree items and now you can turn these on to show so now they're there I have the design binder this is what the design binder looks like I want to attach a document to it so now this PDF will live and reside inside of my SolidWorks file right there in my feature tree here I can go and find that document and it's linked physical document itself is linked now and it goes for the ride with your SolidWorks part alright next custom views these are good if you're going to really want to make marketing images or you always want to capture a particular view or you want to pre set up certain things that you want to have in a drawing in a 2d drawing so let's take a look at that so there's two things we can do we can save it just to this document or we can make it a global SolidWorks view so it's always available now how do I get to it well you have to have this orientation window open you get to that by hitting the spacebar and then you can hit that new named View button so now whatever orientation the zoom level and orientation has been saved now and then you can give it a name alright so I'm calling this front hinge notice in the lower left hand corner it has that name of that view now I can always get to these views right now it's only in this document but if I move my mouse over and then I hit that Save icon it now becomes a saved its view globally for all of my parts inside of SolidWorks rotating about an entity this is one that I like to point out it's very useful but this is one that I think some people accidentally find themselves doing so the way you do this is you middle mouse click on top of an entity it gets highlighted in purple and then that's what you're rotating about so let's take a look at this so middle mouse click on it it's now purple and now I can rotate holding the middle mouse wheel and it's going to rotate about that entity so whatever I picked is going to determine the degrees of freedom and the range of motion so now I can start to preview certain motions I'm not just tumbling my model around now right I can rotate it about particular entities faces vertices faces edges ok cylindrical faces are very useful zoom to fit this is one that's very very useful and the shortcut for that is to hit the F key okay so you're zoomed in on something and you just want to zoom out or fit every to your screen there zoom to fit so let's take a look at that there's a couple of ways to do it you can hit F double click the middle mouse wheel and there's also a icon a command that you can pick so I'm zoomed in here pretty close that's the zoom to fit button up there and the heads-up display that sorry that was quick but it's up there on the heads-up display here I don't know where my model is okay well let me hit F and it'll bring everything right in there so it's a good way to know maybe you have something off in space you're rotating your model things are behaving weird hit the F key and see how it Orient's the model right it fits all of your geometry into the screen so F or double-click in the middle mouse wheel or hitting the command up on the command manager now normal to this isn't a tip that normal to exist this is a tip on a way to customize the way it's going to be normal to okay so the first thing is just some extended functionality here normal to once you're looking at it you hit normal to again it flips it around and you can do that all day but then the next tip here is how to do a custom orientation of your normal to the first face determines the normal and then the second face determines its orientation right so you're just basically rotating it around let's take a look at this so here's normal to click it once nothing new there but click it again and you can rotate to the backside the positive or negative sides just keep flipping it around now here is the custom orientation click one face click the second face that's going to be the up orientation now I hit normal - so that's my custom normal - orientation if you want to determine how you want this to look you can I'll click this face now and then I'll hit normal - that's gonna be my up orientation does that make sense cool zoom to selection this is a great way to especially if you have large assemblies to really zoom in on a particular area of your sub-assembly zoom is right in and fits whatever you clicked on to your screen so let's take a look at this I click on this one little tiny component I hit the zoom to selection it brings me right to it ok so consider using that especially if you have large assemblies it saves you a lot of time instead of playing that game of and moving your mouse as you zoom in you know we all know it okay rotate about scene floor this is something that gets saved with the document so sometimes you might open up someone else's document and it looks like this especially looks like that symbol there that Mouse symbol the rotate symbol with a line through it that means rotate about seam floor is been turned on it's a property of that file okay and it basically determines the way the model moves around it fixes the floor so you can't tumble it around and it becomes very difficult to navigate but it maintains stability in your model so it makes it look better if you're doing a presentation so let's take a look at this here I'll do the exact same mouse moving I just move it from left to right and it starts to tumble upside down okay that's nothing new now let's go to modify and I'll hit the rotate about scene floor option now this is turned on now I'll do the same motion but notice how that floor plane has been fixed it doesn't rotate or tumble upside down now it basically keeps it stable as hard as I try I'm not going to be able to flip that model upside down and it can become incredibly frustrating if you don't know that that exists and you don't know that someone else did that and if you hit saved then that becomes the way that this model is going to behave so pointing out here that that exists in ways to understand it and how to turn it back off the reference triad alright let's just go right to the video on this one basically we're going to focus on the reference triad and different ways that you can use the functionality of it to help rotate your model okay so if I just start clicking on those lines it basically goes normal to those planes so I can graphically click on them to go normal to those axes great but if I shift and click them it starts to rotate so now I'm rotating 90 degrees 90 degrees about this one okay and now 15 degrees if I hit the Alt key so the Alt key does it that way and if I want to change the direction I hold the control key so it's Control Alt or ctrl shift and click those things from the axis from the reference tried and it will change the direction around okay so there's some functionality there that you guys have now we're going to move on to sketching so sketch relations this is something that was added I believe in SolidWorks 2016 and it's a really easy way to add sketch relations using that shared or common vertex alright so you don't have to hold ctrl and pick multiple lines you can just click the shirt shared vertex and add it very quickly so it's a huge time-saver you just have to remember that it exists I find myself all the time for getting that just click the shared vertex right there and then the appropriate or the acceptable commands come up and I can quickly add that here a lot of tangent relationships the key here is to just remember that that exists because we get we get into our habits right and we've been working that way for years and years and years I I'm I do that too just want to explain these things to you guys that that that's there it's gonna save you a lot of time whenever I can remember it I'm pretty proud of myself that I remembered that I don't I don't know if you guys have that feeling window and lasso select so there's two ways that you can select components a box select which we call window select or the lasso tool lasso tool was released a few years ago but a tip about these two tools is that if you go from left to right or if you go from right to left or clockwise and counterclockwise it behaves differently and I find a lot of people don't realize that ok so when it's blue it's just left to right or clockwise it selects entities only within it entirely within it from right to left or counterclockwise selects anything that the box or the lasso tool touches let's take a look at this now the box our lasso select is a permanent tool that's on all the time so you have to toggle between one or the other all right so now I went from right to left and it picks every single thing that the box touches now how do I change it to lasso select I right click hit selection tools go to lasso select and now I start drawing a circle around that right that's pretty cool I could have done that with a box select right that's not too impressive but what is impressive is when you start to make these really complicated ones like I want to select everything but these two guys you can't do that with the box select so you can get a lot a lot of granularity there and the way you can deliberately pick things and realize that going from left to right or from right to left will act differently when you use these tools now disabling Auto Relations imagine you're sketching and you have a lot of stuff going on this can get incredibly annoying when you have all these dashed lines all these witness lines everything coming up in your face obviously all that information is great but how do you turn them off so you can model cleanly hold the control key and the second you release the control key Auto relationships are back on so let's take a look at that here I got some geometry now I have these Auto relations coming up all these dashed lines everything right as long as I hold the ctrl key like I am right now no matter how hard I try I can't add those relations nothing is snapping it's a clean way for me to model the second I let go of the control key then the things start snapping and it gets back to normal ok so consider holding the control key to disable auto relations on the fly power trim known as the SolidWorks weed whacker this is one of my favorite tools I highly recommend using it anything you your mouse crosses over will be trimmed and deleted but the tip here is how you can undo power trim because this is a really powerful tool and you start modeling quickly you can delete things accidentally so how do you undo it without okay obviously control Z but how do you undo it using the cool slick way to do it so let's take a look at that term entities power trim I hold my mouse anything I cross over it gets deleted right like that but if I want to undo something all I have to do is trace back over those red squares that show up and I can undo the power trim on the fly like that so all you have to do cross over that red square undoes it and a side tip here power trim can also power extend as long as you start on top of an entity okay so it's not always trimming as long as you start on top of an entity click and drag it then becomes power extend okay so there's another tip 31 dimensioning to tangen sees the shortcut here is to leverage the shift key to add dimensions to tangency z-- all right there is a way to do it inside of a menu going to the properties but this is the slick cool way to do it and it's much more quicker to model graphically so here's a regular dimension here's how I can do it in the menu here I changed the leader line options and I start clicking min/max Center and I can change these around through the menu but that's just changing it after it's already been added how do I add these tangent relationships while I'm doing it on the fly so you hold the shift key to do it right here's just a regular dimension now I'll hold shift and I'll pick both of these and it adds a tangent dimension and I'll do this again except this time I won't hold shift and it'll be a center I'll hold shift here and now it's a tangent right so when you're holding the shift key whatever you pick is the tangent dimension it could be one it could be both or none then you're back to normal right so to mention the tangency on the fly create a sketch on a model edge this one was a question that was asked of me how can you do this and all you have to do is pick a edge hit the sketch button and your sketching on a plane perpendicular to that line that you clicked on right so all it takes is this click on the edge hit sketch now you have a plane there and you're sketching you blinked you missed it right I can get out of that sketch and now I have a reference plane all right so I have that edge hit sketch I have a reference plane there so it's also a quick way to add a reference plane you can always edit it later but you see normal or perpendicular to that model edge and coincident to the end point closest to which you picked fully defining your sketches sometimes I you know this is a great command for when you really want to be lazy you can add a hundred dimensions in a second and your boss doesn't need to know so let's take a look at this now I don't know this is not but it's there and it's extremely powerful so fully defining your sketches you can do this by selected entities right these three things calculate now I have the dimensions necessary to fully to find that sketch or I can do every entity and this is what I mean by I don't know if this is a good thing right because it becomes a mess I don't know if that's how I would have actually de mentioned it but now it's fully defined and it looks like I just did a lot of work right so if you want to quickly add a lot of dimensions fully defined sketch is the way to go changing your skin type the tip here is you can hit the a key instead of moving your mouse from the center of the graphics area up to the top to change from a corner rectangle to a Centerpoint rectangle you can just hit the a key and start cycling through all these things so you don't have to go up to the top and take your focus away from the center of the screen okay and you can also auto transition to an arc between a line and arc and it's a quick way to add tangent arcs so let's take a look at that all I'm showing you here is that the a key cycles through all those different commands right rectangles slots there's a lot of different types of these entities that can be added so hitting the a key just cycles through them right now I'm drawing a line I hit the a key here it turns into an arc so that's a good way to Auto transition into an arc and there's even slicker ways to do that but the tip here is it's the a key to do that horizontal and vertical relationships here what I'm showing you is how to tell if it's going to be horizontal or vertical right it's a little bit more insight because if you're looking at your model all skewed at a weird angle or a weird plane you might not know are these two points should they be horizontal or should they be vertical right and it highlights whichever is the closer of the two so then you get some more information and you can interpret that and then pick the right one okay so should these two points be horizontal or vertical if I want to line them up well it's telling me it should probably be vertical because that's what is closest to that's kind of what I wanted if I wanted them to be lined up the other way I could have taken that interpreted that signal and then click the right one okay also the one that's highlighted and bold over in the left hand side of the screen same thing it's the one that is closest to right so that's all I'm showing you here so you can understand what SolidWorks is telling you and make informed decisions creating a single line I love sharing this one because if you just have the line tool on it's going to create multiple lines until you do things like double click or hit the Escape key right so you can click drag and release to add one line at a time so let's show that single line click click click that's your default line tool same line tool but I'll click and hold and release I can draw one at a time so click and release one at a time and it still adds relationships too if I click and snap it right on top of there I'm adding those relationships on the fly so a single line can be added by clicking dragging and releasing kind of like a like a rubber band style arc dimensions here's a tip to add a arc length dimension with a smart dimension it involves you picking the arc and its two end points and with those three things you can add this art dimension it's not just the diameter of it right it's the arc length so 1 2 3 with a smart dimension tool there's my true arc dimension right so one that's just like the radius of it but I click here with the control key and I don't stop I keep going now I got that perfect all right close model clothes sketch to model here's another tip if you want to be lazy and what sometimes that's modeling smarter right the easiest way is probably the best way so you don't have to draw or finish your profiles you can use model edges to close the profile for a sketch to be used for a feature so let's take a look at this again just imagine I wasn't being so lazy when I did this right it's two lines I could have just continued it but then I wouldn't have the tip to show you so it says hey do you want to close with model edges the arrow is pointing outward because I have geometry down there no I want it to go this way and that is going to be the contour or the shape for my extrusion so you can close you're open profiles as long as they line up with your model geometry sketch expert consider using this tool especially if you are running into some issues with your sketching you add a extra relationship you add too many dimensions it becomes over to fine over constrained things are conflicting unsolvable here's how you can diagnose that with an automated tool to help walk you through the process right so here I have an over define thing I click on it in the bottom it launches sketch expert and then diagnosing it gives me options it says I can delete the tangent relationship then it'll look like this I can do that it'll look like this I can do this it'll look like that which one do you want when I get the appropriate one that I want I can hit accept or I can look at all of the ones that are causing the conflict and I can delete one of them and I can fix that too so a sketch expert is a tool that brings you directly to an interface that presents you with options that could fix your sketch issues by automatically showing you what it looks like or presenting you with a list of the things that are causing problems so that then you can manually delete them so consider using the sketch expert if you're having issues with your sketch the by add I love adding angle dimensions this way you don't need to add construction geometry to add angle dimensions so let me show you how to do that alright and the tip on how to make this work is you click the line you want the angle to and then it's endpoint and then you pick these lines that represent the construction geometry right so here's what I want to add I want that angle okay that's what I'm gonna add but this time without that construction geometry so here's the line here's the point and now the by add I pick what would be the construction geometry and I'm doing that all without any additional sketch geometry okay and it works in drawings too okay so I have to buy it up here in a drawing and now I can use that line to add my angle dimension right so it's the actual model edge or the sketch geometry and then the end point and then you can use the buy ad all right spin box increments first tip is that that thing on the left hand side at the bottom of the modify is actually a thumb wheel I was shocked when I heard that too I don't I didn't really think it looked like a thumb wheel but hey it does and then the other one is a slider the difference there is you know the one on the right is a slider because it has a fixed minimum and a fixed maximum typically for things like angles but the dimensions you could be positive or negative and it's spinning all over the place there but the real tip here is you can change the speed to 1/10 or 10x by using the alt or ctrl key or you can also you can also add your own custom increments if you want to okay so say you want to increment it at 2.5 or 8 right or 12 for example so let's see first how to add custom values and then how you can change the speeds okay so custom spin box increments I'm in the modified the dimension dialog box here I'm adding a couple I click that button that's the spin box increment button right there at the top of the modified dialog box I'll show that again here so here I'm incrementing it I can add 1 to it and now that becomes the spin box increments and now I'll start using keyboard shortcuts here to change the speed so alt or ctrl 1 is 10x and one is 1/10 so this is just your standard default behavior now I hold the Alt key it becomes 1/10 and I that hold the control key and now it's 10x okay so you got a lot of keyboard shortcuts there to multiply it or reduce it or you can add these custom values to all right so again custom values then alt and ctrl key to help change the on the fly single command per pic I want to point out that this is a way that you can choose to work if you want to it's a system option that allows you to sketch just one circle or one line at a time using single command per pic okay it's a system option or you can double click on it and then it acts like default right so here's single command per pic right one circle I go up I got to add another circle right single command per pick or I could double click the command and I'm sketching like default so the tip here is that this exists it's a system option that I'm just informing you that exists if this is how you want to work some people like it but personally I'm an out-of-the-box kind of guy so all right single command / pick Pierce versus coincident here I just want to point out what's the difference okay coincident is more general and Pierce is one unique point one unique place it's the point where an entity passes through the plane coincident is where the projection of it and infinite projection passes through the plane okay so that's the difference coincident is the projection infinite projection onto a plane and I'll show you what I mean by infinite and Pierce is that one unique spot so here is convert entities I'll take that edge and I'll convert it onto the plane and that's its projection right so it's coincident with that plane so now I'm just showcasing that that point is on that plane now here I'm going to pierce it and it's only that one particular point where the plane and that edge intersects does that make sense right so the coincident is the infinite projection as long as it lines up with the projection you can move it along the direction Pierce is that one particular point okay here's another system option that you guys can choose to work with I don't know if I recommend it or not I'm sure there's a good use for it but I'm basically just pointing out that this exists as a system option that you can choose to work so it allows you to override the dimensions when you drag an entity so that circle it looks like it's defined but if I just start dragging it I can actually override it so I want you guys to be aware that have that exists and that's what that option means is so you can see how this could really mess right so you guys need to be aware that this exists and if you have a good reason for why you might want to use this please share it with me later right so just be aware that this is there derive sketch this is a way to copy your sketch but not just a copy it's linking it okay derive sketch basically copies a sketch puts it on another plane but you can't edit it you can only locate it so if you make changes to the parent sketch the changes update right so it's a good way to not just a copy but it's a linked copy or a derived copy all right so let's take a look at this here I have this manifold I have this sketch for that flange I want to put it on that face so I say derive sketch and I put it on that face all I can do with the derived sketch is located okay I look at all of my sketch tools they're all grayed out because it's a derived sketch okay but that doesn't matter because all the changes I might want to do are going to be in that parent copy so say for example here I want to delete those two holes I delete those holes the derived sketch updated so it's that linked copy that's always gonna be there right so I'm copying pasting it on to another plane but it's a linked copy resetting on dragging this is one that happens to a lot of people accidentally say you're moving your model around if you accidentally right-click it goes back to where it was before so here's one I just want to point out that it happens accidentally so I'm moving my stuff around and I just right click goes back to normal okay so you're moving your sketched geometry around and removing stuff around right-click brings it back to where it was there you go that happens accidentally pointing out that SolidWorks isn't you know this possessed piece of software just accidentally hit the right mouse button performance evaluation definitely recommend taking a look at this this is a good way to understand if you're having performance issues with your model and where that might be if performance is something that's important to you you're running into performance issues it's slowing you down here's the first place you should go to look to see what could be causing that so it's a good way to understand the root cause of performance issues if you're having them alright so this is things like you can start to see rebuild times so say for example something takes a long time to rebuild that would be the first place I would look to understand the implications it has on the performance of your model and then for assemblies you can learn a lot right you can get into the mates you can run Diagnostics it's a lot more robust set of tools there in performance evaluation so let's take a look at that evaluate performance evaluation here it is this is just basically telling me the time in seconds and the percentage of the total rebuild time for that feature so I use this tool to identify any performance issues features that might be causing performance issues with my model all right so that's the tip use performance evaluation open it up take a look at what is taking a long time to rebuild in your model and now with that information you can consider using the feature freeze this is an option that needs to be turned on but now you can drag the rollback bar from the top down and it locks everything up so it no longer rebuilds that also means you can't edit it but if something's taking a long time to rebuild you can freeze it and then you can get some performance back in your model all right so that's one way we would use performance evaluation and then extend that lesson we learned use the feature freeze bar to help save us some time all right so let's take a look at that so dragging this down from the top the padlock symbol means it's frozen I can't edit it but that also means it's not participating in the rebuild so my model is gonna be feel a lot more lightweight and it will perform better see I could take a look at this and my performance percentage and times are a lot better than they were quick up to surface this is a great way to add an extruded boss up to surface without actually going into the menus so let's take a look at this I have that I open the command and I just double-click on the face just double click right on the face and it's an up to surface you don't have to go digging through menus so as long as you know that that's there that functionality exists you launch the command double-click your extruding up to surface quick up to surface dynamically loading feature works you don't have to go actively launching the feature works command and step through the wizard or pick features that you want to actually recognize you can do this on the fly dynamically so you have an imported model and all you have to do is hit the edit feature button on the context bar the tip is click on a feature the chamfer a hole a boss hit edit feature it'll load up feature works to recognize that particular feature that you just clicked so let's take a look at this here I have this imported part that's a fill it I hit edit feature it recognizes the fill it here's a chamfer edit feature it recognizes the chamfer here's a whole edit feature so I'm doing this on the fly so obviously one part you know three features okay not too impressive but imagine you how to large part with a lot of stuff on it and you wanted to change a fill it you wanted to change a hole or something so you can dynamically load this on the fly the tip there is click on it and then hit edit feature and with that you can dynamically load feature works and start working on your imported models split lines tip here is that this exists and it's a good way to help split up your geometry into multiple faces it's very very useful for simulation tools and it's also useful so that you can add things like decals or appearances to particular faces or maybe you're needing to do surface modeling and you want to split faces up this is the tool to do that so basically it just the tip is that it exists I have these two lines it's that easy it takes a sketch you project that sketch onto one face and then it splits it up based on that sketch very simple very easy with those two lines using the split line command I'm able to take one face and split it up into those so very very useful for simulation and a lot of other aspects of the tool as well so split lines breaking up your faces with me we already talked about this earlier where I showed you how you can quickly add it yes so now I want to I want to show you in detail a little bit more about the with me all right instead of just pre selecting them like I was showing you earlier so we click these four faces with meit centers it right it's been added to the context menu recently and it's centered to the geometry between those four faces sorry I was I was doing a midplane earlier this is the with me right so it's the centering mate and check this out this is my favorite mate when I'm putting things I'm lining them up I like to use this one because it's very quick very easy it's all graphical I don't need to go through digging for planes and centre lines and things like that Center is everything but there's also a lot more extended capabilities there in there so when I am adding this mate you can basically add limits to it too so you can have limit with meat so you can Center it and say it can move ten millimeters this way through this range or a particular percentage so take a look at this this has been a great mate for many many years and it's been added the capabilities have been extended so definitely check that one out hiding and showing components this is a great way to on-the-fly hide components so I hit the tab key to hide them or show them using the shift tab okay so tab or shift tab is how you can do this here's tab just mouse over it no clicking necessary whatever is directly under my mouse gets hidden now you do need to remember where that part was so you can go back to it and hit shift tab because it's got to be directly under your mouse right shift tab gets right back into it right tab to hide and then shift tab to show hidden components now remember it's got to be directly under your mouse but if you want to show all hidden components you can control shift tab and on the fly it'll show you all of the hidden components so let's take a look at that here's what it's going to look like on the Left I have the hidden components on the right it's showing me in this blue transparent way so shift control shift tab that's all it is control shift tab it shows everything so you can on-the-fly look at what's hidden and then you can start to hold shift tab to show it again okay so there's some tab to hide shift tab to show control shift tab to dynamically on the flash show everything that's been hidden rotate components just like the left mouse button moves components around the graphical area as long as it's allowed to not made it in place you can right mouse button on top of something and start to rotate it all right so showing you a quick way to do that here's left mouse something we all know but the right mouse button on the fly as long as I right click and hold and drag over top of it I can rotate my components so I can easily start to pre position them or move them around right left-click drags right-click rotates assembly visualization definitely take a look at this tool to help you visualize graphically properties of your components right you can color code them on based on properties right did you is it a built part purchase part who made it what's it made out of I like to do graphics triangles it's it's more of a performance thing a lot of the work that we have to do is uninvestigated so assembly visualization is a great way to color code your model and look at it graphically let's take a look at it it's under the evaluate tool hit assembly visualization and I hit that color bar then it color codes everything blue is the bottom red is the top and I'm filtering based on total weight if I want to change that I hit the carrot and then and now I'm looking at graphics triangles so everything that's red is going to be super performance intensive and imagine doing this for who made the part what it's made out of other properties of the model okay it's a good way to color code it and understand your model open top level assembly this is one of my favorites it's one of the four filters down in the lower right hand corner of the open dialog box and it immediately opens whatever the top assembly is in your dialogue box now I know it makes sense that the you can filter for assemblies and then just pick the biggest one right you'd think that'd be the top level assembly but that's not always the case most of the time it is yes but you could have stuff embedded in there just think virtual parts for example that might make a sub assembly be larger so this takes all of that guessing out of the equation with one click you can get directly into your top-level assembly I use this all the time because I don't know which is the top level assembly in here I have one button to press and it immediately brings me right to it that's all the assemblies but this is the top level assembly right so you have these quick filters down in the lower right corner of the open dialog box for parts assemblies drawings and the fourth one is open top level assembly all right show you that one more time lower right corner I'm gonna filter for assemblies I get these four or five and the top level assembly brings me directly to without thinking anything of it very quickly the correct top level assembly that I probably want to open control drag to copy you can hold the control key and drag in the graphics area or on the feature tree to create copies of your components in an assembly very quickly making copies just control drag works from the tree works from the graphics area I need two more of these screws control drag away to add multiple copies I need a couple more just like that I just added seven of those very very quickly all right control drag to copy components now you have components that are transparent how do you pick them right so let as parent geometry is not selectable you have to hold the shift key to be able to pick it right so here's how we can do that now I have that bed of this transparent those arms are transparent no matter how hard I try to pick that up right it won't let me unless I hold the shift key right holding the shift key allows me to pick the transparent geometry like that here no matter how hard I try I can't pick the bed as long as I hold the shift key now I can pick transparent geometry so there's a lot of functionality that's there with the control key with the shift key with the tab right so a good way to be modeling is probably one hand on your mouse on the left hand on the keyboard right you got the s key in there you got control shift tab the spacebar all these commands there at your fingertips and the point is to just introduce you to them all now isolating and display safe isolating is a quick way to hide a component show a component and hide everything else so whatever you pick you isolate it that's the only thing that's shown but if you start doing that multiple times you can capture that and what's called a display state okay a display state saves things like colors or transparencies you know hide items shown items things like that so consider using display States as a way to capture that graphical information so you can quickly change between them so here are these components I want to isolate that I right-click on it I hit isolate now that's just the top portion of it I hit save that's saving a display State so now I can quickly get back to that instead of having to go into that all the time right and where do display States live up at the top there that carrot shows me where my display states are so now I can quickly get back to those okay and lastly editing sketch plane on the fly how many times do you dynamically guard or deliberately go in there hit edit sketch plane you move it to a different play and then you get errors or it's off to the side right if you hold the shift key and drag it from the tree you can place it directly where you want and you don't get it off in space and stuff right so let's take a look at this here I clicked on the sketch edit sketch plane if I wanted to reposition it this is the way we teach you how to do it this is the more straightforward way I want to put it on that base face I click right there hit OK and it will at it'll relocate that sketch but it's going to be off to the side or I'll get a rebuild error like that okay now if I want to do it dynamically here's the tip hold the shift key and drag it ok the second you press shift you'll see it's no longer that crosshair but now I'm changing the plane so I can place it exactly where I want it and it's gonna start snapping to that plane so hold shift drag it on top of the face that you want you could locate it there any other face drop it right there you're not getting any rebuild errors and obviously you can go in and rida mention it and do whatever you need to to actually locate it properly but you can do that on the fly and save yourself some of those rebuild errors and lastly if you have any questions email me I have multiple versions of this up on my youtube channel I love connecting with you guys on LinkedIn here's my information email me reach out to me I get emails every day about this people see this stuff asking questions I'm more than happy to connect with you guys and I love interacting with the community so thank you all for for joining me for this I hope you learned something at least one thing good thank you

Channel: Stephen Petrock

Views: 34,640

Keywords: SOLIDWORKS, Tips, Tricks, Tips and Tricks, Learn SOLIDWORKS, Learn, Engineering, CAD, CAE, 3D Design, 3D, 3D printing, Design, Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Design, SOLIDWORKS Tutorial, SOLIDWORKS Training

Id: BUcxT0UoanQ

Length: 63min 10sec (3790 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 28 2020