SOLIDWORKS - Sketching Tips

hello this is Kelly McMillin from NGO engineer and today's topic is SolidWorks secret gems the first part that I'm gonna cover here is dealing with apart so sketching and then I'll move in to some things you may or may not have known about features these things may have been added throughout different releases or just might be things you forgot about throughout the time you've used SolidWorks so as I said the first thing I'm gonna cover is just in sketches I'm gonna do just a couple of quick things and the last couple of releases one of the things that was added it's called Mouse gestures and the way you activate Mouse gestures is to hold down your right mouse button and just move it around the screen and wherever your mouse is you'll get this wheel this is fully customizable just like any SolidWorks toolbar and by default these are the different commands available so if you were to hover over the upper part of this you'd get a dimension if you were to go down on this rectangle part here you would get a rectangle entity to the left you'd get a line to the right you get a circle so for this one I'm just gonna hover over the rectangle and it activates the rectangle command so it's just nice to have that right at your fingertips and then hover up and you'd get your smart dimension I'm just gonna type in some sort of random dimensions here and what I can do from here as well is activate the shortcut toolbar now if you're really slick you could add the shortcut toolbar to your mouse gestures but here to activate it I'm just gonna use the S key s for shortcut brings this up once again right at your mouse wherever that is and here I've added in even some things that are not sketch entities so have an extruded boss that I could add just from right here you're probably already familiar with the ability to drag an arrow if it's a blind extrusion you can use the scale here to have a more accurate representation of whatever it was that distance you're going to extrude so maybe 20 millimeters here and I can select the green check of course another functionality that's really nice a fairly common thing that you would have to do is move from the line command into a tangent arc so there's a quick way to do that without interrupting your design process by going and activating a different command in your tool bar etc etc first thing I want to do though is look at this at normal to or at on top view and a quick way to do that is by using the space bar the space bar brings up your common orientation views so we have normal to front back left right top bottom ISO trimetric and diametric the way to activate any of these is to just double click so double click on for this case normal to now you can leave that window up if you want if you just like to have it there there is a pushpin available so you can keep it up but it's nice to just use the space bar so that it shows up wherever your mouse happens to be so here I'm going to just start by using the line and just sketch something like this now to activate the art command directly off of a line so see I've started my next line that's connected to the previous one there's two ways I can do this one is to just tap the a key on the keyboard just tap it don't hold it down or anything and it's going to turn that into a tangent arc instead of a line the other way to do that is with that same line started just to hover over that start point and it also will turn that into a tangent arc I'm going to place the second point of my arc and then automatically it returns to the line command so you can continue with your design so that's a nice one to know about just so you don't have to come up here change your entity that type of thing and then of course using my mouse gestures I can go ahead and define this a little bit better one thing that I get a question about every so often is how do you dimension not to the center point of an arc because if I try to dimension from here let's say to here it automatically is going to snap to the center point now what if you wanted to dimension the overall distance that's very simple you don't have to add a point I see that sometimes people want to add a point at the quadrant here not necessary so using my mouse gestures or however you want to activate your smart dimension hold down shift so during the operation just hold down shift and then click the edge of the arc and then whatever you want to dimension to and then you can really shift once again that's a nice one now maybe I wanted to Center this item this piece of geometry on the existing extrusion that I already did so I can do a centerline let's say a line for construction and I'm gonna make that go through the center by using my midpoints that show up my automatic sketch relations a couple of options here to add a relation either you can hold down control and select the two items that you would like to make symmetric as well as what they should be symmetric about which is the center line and then you can choose symmetric or a quicker option is to just use your right-to-left selection and select all three of those and once again symmetric will appear it looks like I lost the tangent that's okay so I can hold down control select these two items and make those tangent another quick dimension here and that should take care of my full definition of my sketch and then of course my s key and I can't do an extrusion my spacebar once again and I can do isometric by simply double-clicking if I continue on with this model now I want to make a circle and this could be either an extrusion or hole but in this sketch I want to make a circle that's concentric with this outer edge here in order to do that I'll activate my circle and then rather than having to add a relation after the fact I can do it from the very beginning if I hover over that arc edge so here you see I'm just hovering I've not clicked I just hovered it wakes up the center point of that arc now what I can do is use that as the first click point for my circle which is the center in this case so click on the center point of that radius and it will also be the rate for the center of my new one so you see the coincident relationship between this edge Center and my new entity if I exit the sketch I can utilize one of the features called instant 3d so it is available in the future toolbar you'll have to activate it instant 3d now what'll happen if I click on this sketch I can choose this this arrow right here and I can grab that and drag it either up to add material or if I drag down and I'm using my scale to determine the distance here but if I go down into this other part then it's gonna be a cut so either add material or remove it so SolidWorks is pretty intelligent as far as that goes so maybe when we want to extrude that or do a cut extruded down 20 another quick thing that's pretty neat so spacebar double click on normal to let's say I wanted to I don't know I sketch let's say a slot the slot command and I wanted to do another one of those on this side over here so I'll sketch my centerline we know that in order to do a mirror I have to have a centerline and instead of clicking on all of these entities to get to mirror rather sorry about that to mirror over I can simply select everything in a window including the centerline when I choose mirror entities then it knows then that the centerline here is gonna be the center of my mirror and that whatever's over here is what I want to mirror so that's a nice one that I'm not sure everyone was necessarily aware of now in this case another nice one to know about is your middle mouse button let's say we zoomed way off in space I don't know where my part went well if you double-click your middle mouse button which is your scroll wheel if you double click that it's a zoom to fit so also the F key F for fit on your keyboard both of those will work for zoom to fit so that's a nice way of not having to come up here and find on your heads-up just play which one is zoom to fit this concludes the secret gems portion of a new sketch and in the next one I'm going to show you how to activate some of the cool features within some of the other options here so that was just sketching now we'll look at some of the features themselves you

Channel: GoEngineer

Views: 61,781

Keywords: solidworks, goengineer, 3D CAD, MCAD, engineering, design, development, product, technology, software, tips & tricks, help, tutorial, CAD, drafting, sketch, sketching, 2D, draft, 3DCAD, information, suggestions, tips, tricks

Id: Go0oXCyKTII

Length: 9min 42sec (582 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 23 2011