SOLIDWORKS Tutorial - Drawings Tips and Tricks

[Music] so I think it's time that we should get started here be functional everybody's on time so we're gonna go ahead and get started so I am broadcasting to you from frigid Southeast Michigan I know everybody's coming from a lot of different parts of the country so I hope it's nicer where you're at but you know any day we're playing with SolidWorks is a good day so welcome I'm glad everybody's here today so we are going to get into tips and tricks on drawings my name is Darin I have been here for a long time and really have gotten to grow with this software it's part of me it's it's really been part of who I am and I'm trying to pass that down to my girls as well really I was just fortunate enough to find a job doing what I love so hopefully everybody else out there is as fortunate as I am there some of the things that I like to do with the software when I'm not working is really utilize you know anything I can to solve a problem so a lot of times I'll use my 3d printer to print a part to solve some sort of a need or to repurpose some parts I like to tinker around the yard and do a lot of DIY so those are some pretty important things as well lately I've been getting into more things trying to involve my girls once again and our tree house comes up quite a bit so that's all a fun project there but everything we do is vetted in SolidWorks and my current work in progress is now a complete first-floor remodel which of course had to be done in SolidWorks first otherwise we really didn't know how we wanted to layout the cabinets one of the things that all of these things have in common is though we have these beautiful 3d tools everything still seems to originate from a drawing anything tangible anything where we actually start cutting chips and going to production so no matter what I'm doing I'm still gonna lay it out in a 2d drawing because not just this tradition but it's the thing that that really allows us to depict those different views so it's a necessary thing and we're trying to go paperless and there's a lot of technologies for the ambitious to try those things but really vert about 80% of the people out there the 2d drawing is still the old standby it gets the job done and it's worked for decades so we're going to cover a lot of different things these are random smattering of things so there's really not the best flow to tips and tricks but it's a lot of things that I find interesting in the software and I hope you will too some of the things are hidden settings some of the things are really just more behavior how you treat things or how you create but really I want to open your eyes up to maybe a lot of the things that you aren't aware of because 25 years into the software it's been a lot of additions to it unless you're really really really reading those manuals closely you're gonna miss some of those things so never miss a chance to watch somebody show SolidWorks so we're going to begin with bills and materials now the Bill of Materials has some interesting behavior and there's some subtleties to it that that really can go unnoticed so I want to show you a little bit about what it can tell you about what is ballooned now there's another functionality that's real great deliverable not everybody in the company has SolidWorks available to them usually so we like to save off things like bills and materials here as Excel spreadsheets and there's some great functionality here to really demystify that for the downstream user now when working with bills and materials there's plenty of ways to tweak it and make it exactly what you like so we're talk a little bit about that as well and then you know the Alt key that really works in a lot of different places it's a whole presentation on its own and the Alt key itself is you know something that can then move features around pretty easily so let's just move over to SolidWorks here for a second get right into it so when we're looking at the Bill of Materials first of all these bill materials have these little borders next to them and when you hover over those you can see those no typically the border is very close you're going to see the bill materials typically you'll hover over it and this is the look you'll get and typically users will try to grab this upper corner and move things around truth be told you can use your Alt key next to your keyboard you can grab that bill materials anywhere so if it's a little bit tedious to grab that corner just use the Alt key and that'll take care of moving these kind of things any tables will work that way if you hit the triple arrows it pops out a little list of what these components are and you really get a nifty thumbnail overtop of those when you actually hover but you'll also see here is an indication of what parts actually have balloons and which ones don't it's really subtle once again but it does let you know very simply what those are now there's some interesting behavior with the bill materials where it has some bi-directional feedback to it so if you were to go ahead and say click on one of these components what it'll do is actually on-screen it highlights them I'm gonna try and zoom back a little bit and let's just see that subtlety again if I go ahead and pick a line item right here what it actually does is highlights those components you can actually see those right up here so there's great feedback for being able to identify a component maybe from the build materials that you might want to work with and then being able to see that out on screen here one that kind of got me earlier was this one here picked that part and actually will bidirectionally feedback here and it indicates that that one has a balloon if you take a real close look to it but the funny thing about that is there's a quantity of two and the other quantity is right over here so if you selected at the Bill of Materials it looks to see both of them highlight out on the screen so those are some great little details there now these thumbnails are actually accessible to people not using SolidWorks when you right-click any table say save as typically this is a way to take a customized stable table and save it as a template but if you simply save that as an Excel format old or new format will do I'm just gonna call this the webinar so we'll just call it web but we have Anna 50 button here called thumbnails and what that will do is it will save this excel spreadsheet exactly the way that their build materials looks but it will also include each of those thumbnails there okay so the drag-and-drop reorder is another thing that I really want to show you and then I want to talk about configurations there's two things here one of the things I want to talk about the configurations actually is there's a little bit of an issue with it now I want to show you exactly what the configuration problem happens to be typically when you're dealing with build materials you want to balloon consistent around the drawing will talk about balloons on the next slide here as well but for this particular one what I want to do is go ahead and do some some reordering as well so let's get a couple of files up here on screen when we go ahead and pull up this particular feature here I want to grab one of the recent documents that I've got here so let's just go ahead and say I will grab this one here whenever you're looking at balloons on screen the balloons themselves are driven by a bill of materials and what happens is is if you have multiple views maybe views that are a different configuration or a different body as we're seeing here what you're going to get are some details that are are gonna maybe be a mismatch here and I want to talk about that so two things first of all when you hover over that build materials and you roll that out which are going to notice here is that each one of these has a particular item number to those now the item numbers here happen to be built from the view in the upper right hand corner if we go ahead and actually balloon the view that we have over here on the right or left scuse me you're going to see that that number doesn't match anything over here in fact these are all individual numbers if we go ahead and balloon this body right down here you'll also see that that's showing up as a number one now what would happen is if we were to balloon or bill materials these individual views we would have a completely unique list of what those balloons would be based on the bill materials purview but if you right-click in a view and go down to properties where you're going to see as the ability to link that bill of materials to the one that's already been generated so once we go ahead and link that what you'll go ahead and see is the change to now the individual and numerical that's there so now we're seeing it actually matches up with the plate that it indicates now same thing down here right-click inside the view and go to properties we'll go ahead and grab that link and once we say ok to that you'll see that that will pull up the unique description that we have in there now the issue that we've been having with this at least in this service pack and I'm not worried about telling you this because it's an important feature and I don't want you to miss out on it is that if you have multiple configurations on a viewer having trouble in service pack 2 here of actually setting that up so when do we get back to that service pack 3 should have that one fixed but you can have multiple configurations of an assembly and have all the balloons sequenced perfectly but pointing to one single bill materials so that's the thing that we wanted to to get to on that one alright let's move on so ballooning specifically there's some really neat functions when it comes to ballooning I did put the years that some of these were put in there some of them I don't know the years they've been in there as long or longer than I can remember but essentially when we're taking a look at these features a lot of people will say wow when was that put in there so I kind of like to know that because you really lose track of that at some point and you don't know what you don't know in most cases so with this one here what I want to do is show you a little bit about auto balloon how you can create and edit those it's actually quite an interesting process and then some quantity tags again something people are rarely overo aware of and then one of my favorite little features here this spline leader all those are pretty simple to do so we're going to work in a backwards order here let's go to the spline leader first if you simply select any of your balloons so we can window around those if you want to grab those you can cross selector you can control select those whatever happens to be when you grab your balloons you come over here to the property manager hit more options what will happen is a little tool here called the spline balloon now these balloons are going to create essentially a leader that looks like a style spline and when you select on each of these you have some individual controls over how that gets manipulated so these are great for patent drawings you know unique areas where you have to get to a part that's maybe a little bit difficult to point to and you have to cross or weave through a bunch of different areas little rate clicks on here do have some opportunities to go ahead and you know change the stack and and add some things to that but essentially what you're gonna get here is an opportunity to just grab that feature drag it around and make it look nice now if any one of these has a multiple quantity it's actually over the property manager as well it's a little quantity check mark there and if the component has multiples it's simply going to indicate that right there next to the balloon so again it's a really powerful thing really simple to do and it's gonna be associative so whatever matches up with our build materials over here it's gonna be exactly what shows on the associative balloon lives with it moves around with it okay let's hit some auto ballooning Auto ballooning shockingly enough has been around since SolidWorks 2004 area so that's really what we're looking at when it comes to how long some of these features have been around now they've been enhanced over the years of course but they originated you know a decade and a half ago for this particular feature I want to show you the workflow of this because out of ballooning is powerful if you know how to play with it so what I have here is a simple view it's an assembly now if you go ahead with just normal ballooning which again is easy in its own right you're just touching parts and placing balloons it's very error proof very simple to do but more trouble than it's worth when it comes to even how easy this is what you can do instead you can actually pick the view and hit auto balloon now I'm doing this after the fact so I want you to see that there's a mix of balloons being used here so some manual when you hit auto balloon that will then balloon the rest of the parts that are actually visible simply based on again visibility so there is a point where you might not get a balloon on a part because it happens to be interior or hidden now when we're putting these in place what we're going to get here is some sequencing that matches up with these numbers so it didn't rebuild the ones that were already ballooned it just simply put those in place now with that I have an opportunity if I'd like to take my balloons and add them to the magnetic lines but again they're balloons that were added in a multiple functionalities now if you pick that view and hit Auto balloon again what you're gonna see here is regular settings for auto balloon what you might not know is that if there's a bill materials attached to this there's much more capabilities here so we balloon to view that didn't have a bill materials which doesn't make sense anyway but if I go ahead and simply add a bill of materials to this view and we're just going to use the standard default be om that we get what that will then enable if I now pick the view and hit Auto balloon again is it gives us some edit ability to this now what it will do is a couple of things it will allow us to resequenced the existing balloons including the ones that we put in manually prior to Auto ballooning by simply changing the order you can see that their sequence works starting in a clockwise type of emotion or if we say follow assembly sequence then that's where we're going to go ahead and get the different numbers to show in that order now you could also simply go ahead and say replace balloons which will then Reba loon the entire thing for you regardless of how you started it or how you wanted to finish it this will take care of all parts that are visible and again deal with the build materials that we have listed here so it's a lot of different ways to do that now the drag-and-drop reorder is also very simple thing if I go ahead and take a look at say line item number one here and we expand out the build materials you'll notice that I can actually grab that row so we'll grab row number two and we'll drag it down put it somewhere else let's actually expand that out to do that sorry that's what we want to do so we're gonna grab these oh I think I can't do it because of my auto ballooning order my mind when we get into these kind of things as well in any event I'll show you one that's actually manually order because this one is controlled by auto ballooning now one thing that I want to show you other than that is if we go into auto balloon one more time here you can go ahead and do the same kind of things when it comes to the editing replacing the balloons and changing those but you can also change the number and it starts at and if it jumps by once or twos or fives but the other thing is you know being able to just replace those balloons once again and start over again and really control exactly where things are going to start order sequentially is a nice way to do that once again and it will start and whatever one you want to choose so even though we have 1 through 11 in this order if you say I want to start right here or right here for example I'll actually start at the one you click and then it will go ahead and sequence around from there so those are a couple things that I wanted to show you there auto balloons are going to control this a little bit more and inhibit some of the Edit ability over here this bill materials but we'll come back to that one and show you in a later example okay so let's just get into some basic dimensions and detailing a lot of little things on this one this is a symbol that I'm sure everybody has seen he may or may not have even turned it off I know a lot of people ignore it and I want to show you what it can do so we're gonna play a little bit with rapid dimension the dimension palette also one of my favorite little hidden tools there's some great tools on it but the ones that I rely on religiously are things like Auto align I want you to see what that looks like as well and then a tool called the format painter this thing here is actually in Microsoft applications it's a very similar thing that you might do in Excel or Word so it's a great way to maximize what you're working on and not have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to to manipulating or tweaking dimensional values so let's go back over to SolidWorks for a couple of different views here first thing I want to do is let's get another document open here for a second what I want to do on this one is just use a little auto ballooning now you may or may not take your dimensions directly from the park files of the assembly files you may just create a part this parametric and changes properly but when you get to the drawing you go ahead and read dimension the entire thing none of those are going to prohibit you from doing some of the things I'm about to show you now for the sake of time here what I'm going to do is simply insert model items and just bring those in from the part file one thing I implore if you do this method here is when you're going to bring in two dimensions and other annotations directly from the model turn this check mark off here this use dimension placement and sketch that thing is actually going to put the dimensions exactly where you put them when you sketched or when you made the feature and if you're not really controlled or clear with those that's just gonna carry over to being ugly here with that actually turned off what you'll end up with is a really clean layout and it will nest all the dimensions short inside large now there's a feature here that we've had in a long time in SolidWorks where if a dimension gets placed into a view you don't want it you can actually just pick and drag it using the shift key now if I try to drag it into a view and let go what it will do is just simply Auto allocate now if I try to drag it into a view it doesn't make sense it simply won't work so there's a dimension there we'll go ahead and deal with that guy a little bit later so I want to show you a little bit about rapid dimension rapid dimensions of tool where if you go ahead and simply start placing dimensions it's going to allow you to put those dimensions on one side or the other simply nesting or pushing other dimensions out of the way so if I grab an edge here and I want to go to the left or to the right just by hovering over each of those widgets it's actually pushing that out in order to give me the proper position it to be nested now in this particular case file so go ahead and grab an additional edge and maybe go vertical with this we get the same kind of look there I can go up or down and it will simply shove those dimensions out of the way in order to fit that in there nicely so it's a very cool tool it's clean for what it does the settings for this are actually under tools and options so if you go under tools and options and get into the document properties there's some arrow functionality that you're gonna get into this and it has to do a lot with the dimensions and details and things that you get with your annotations but the main thing is is if you're looking for something in here and I just want to show you this as a way to to again speed things up if you're looking for things like arrow settings you can just simply type things in and if you type it properly then it's going to go ahead and give you the wildcards for whatever those types of things happen to be so when you click on things like arrow placement or arrows follow text or some of these other ones where it's actually the standards of the size what that's going to do is give you an opportunity to go ahead and set what those arrows are going to look like for the detailing that you get now when we're looking at the different details that we have out here in the different views some of the settings will actually allow you to change the arrow sizes but they'll also allow you to actually fit those dimensions off of the part itself so right here this offset distance is how far off to the part that's going to go and then this six millimeters here is how far each subsequent dimension is going to shift from each other so those values right there are actually what's controlling how these little nests are happening when it's shifting to the left or to the right now when you have something that's round let's go ahead and grab a radius here I know this is a little redundant based on the geometry not too bad right there what I can do is grab these widgets in these corners and again it's going to shift it and shove it over into a corner that kind of makes sense so it really helps with the placement of any one of these items now I want to talk a little bit also about the actual dimension pallet tool when you're putting dimensions in and when you're moving these things around there's a lot of fine-tuning that can take place and one of my favorite tools to use for this is a little tool here that does auto alignment so if I have all of these dimensions selected this little pop-up that shows up is your dimension pallet and grab this corner you can drag it off to the side with the dimension palette selected you can simply hit auto arrange and what it will do is simply put those dimensions in a nice position you can also space them a little bit further equal spacing once again but it's a really easy way to go ahead and deal with those if you happen to be up here and you want to change something for example I want to change this dimensions properties the dimension palettes great for that too because you can quickly get to things like your tolerances so if I want to put a basic tolerance on this one or I want to put a bilateral so we got a plus and minus won't go too far on that one but that's going to give me a nice bilateral there now if I wanted to put that tolerance on multiple locations here's the trick if you want to do this and you want to put it in in multiple places and not have to do this this individual detail that's where the format painter comes in you grab the format painter and you pick a source document or a source property in this case a dimension and then the next one you click will simply apply that particular formatting to it so it's a copy of the settings and paste them on to others essentially so it's a really quick way to go ahead and deal with this now then of course once I have my dimensions all miss stacked as a result of this what I can do is select all of those and then using the dimension pallet we can just simply go ahead and auto arrange and it will again shove those into a position that's gonna work pretty nicely for the view that we've got here so again fine-tuning necessary maybe we'll just move that view out of the way so that works really well so that's a lot about what those auto alignment tools do you can really do some damage and add some dimensions and make a really really really big mess and at the end of the day simply select all those dimensions hit your pallet and hit Auto align and everything goes back to good so for my money that's a really quick way to do it and that's a mix of imported dimensions from the model as well as manual reference dimensions so there's a lot going on with that a pretty great stuff though okay so dimensional detail if you came from an AutoCAD background or even board drafting these are the kind of things that you're really into making it look production level but also dealing with these details for clarity which are necessary so breaking a dimension is an important feature here I want to cover that quickly and then there's a little angle selection reference a lot of people still do this to this day by drawing in some sketch geometry so I want to talk about both of those features so let's just go ahead and pop back over to SolidWorks for a second okay so what we're gonna do on this one is let me jump back over to this view looking at this drawing first of all I want to show you this angle selector it's pretty wild when you don't have an edge to be able to put a proper dimension in you don't need it actually what I mean is is if I grab my smart dimension tool let's say I want to put an angle demesne right here in this area by grabbing the edge what it will do is typically give me the linear value and in this case is the true length of that line but as I start to move away from that I'm trying to put it in the vertical vertical or horizontal well instead of having a vertical edge here to reference to click what you can do is simply click the end line and by clicking the point right at the end of it you're going to get this reference selected that allows you to pick an edge as a reference and by picking the vertical edge it will automatically locate that feature based on the acute or the obtuse or the included angle but based on that vertical edge being an understood now once that's in place of course it's locked there you can move it outside if you wanted to there's also some nifty little switches where you can go ahead and flip the direction of that and you know go to some different orientations and other things so it's really an easy way to do things but you don't have to have that little extra bit of detail in order to go ahead and put in a dimension such as this breaking dimensions is one of the ones that I see a lot of people have in trouble with if you take a look at this dimension for example I'm going to take it and actually drag it across to all of these dimensions and where we're crossing all these dimensions they're actually showing one of the things I've noticed is that a lot of people will pick this dimension as the brief dimension and you can go ahead and do that if you want to by going ahead and selecting that what it's going to do is break that dimension which you can see now that there's a given gap between where that dimension overlaps all of the other lines and if you move it of course that line is going to break and it's going to change so wherever you drag that you can see it's changing quite dynamically now most of the time a user is going to do that the opposite way we're not going to use this line to be the brake line in fact we're going to go ahead and take this one and put it back where it was but we're gonna grab these two linear dimensions and let's go ahead and put those as the brake once you set those up again you're gonna see that now those witness or extension lines are going to be the ones that actually break as this dimension moves around but it's a way for you to still gain clarity when you really just can't get those dimensions to sit in their own clear area obviously we set this one up for that but that's the way that little feature works okay next thing I want to hit is something that was on that previous slide and it's called baseline and chain dimensions and it's gonna take a different file here - to get opened up so let me go ahead and grab just another document real fast here the chain and baseline dimensions are a different type of dimension much like an ordinate 90% of the time I think most of you rely on smart dimensions they're very smart but there are some dimensions that do require some behavior now up here in the corner we have some dimensions that are known as baseline dimensions and I'll show you how this gets created but what you'll mainly see here is if I grab one dimension they all move as a group and much like an ordinate dimension if you right-click on it and actually go down to this setting here you can add to the baseline which means anything else that I grabbed so I go ahead and grab maybe you know that edge will grab that edge it's going to go ahead and start jumping these dimensions in place and again shoving the other dimensions out of the way in order to accommodate for those those happen to be the same sets a little redundant now as a result of all of this what we have is again a full group of dimensions and if we needed to we could you know grab one of those dimensions using the dimension palette here again really simply Auto spacing these so grab this little foam wheel and move them in and out so it's really easy to deal with those now dimensions have been added also in a different form called a chain dimension that was added in Salix 2020 actually you right-click on these baseline dimensions you can actually convert this to a chain dimension and it will look completely different what a chain dimension typically is for as if you right-click let's go ahead and just get into some dimension tools here so if we go ahead and go to more dimensions and we actually grab the chain dimension what we're basically doing is picking a baseline like an organ in' but as soon as i go ahead and start picking edges what it will do is simply click and chain that dimension with every subsequent edge okay so jump-jump-jump you can even right-click on these dimensions let me get out of this tool well right-click on one of those chain dimensions we can do it overall dimension so that overall is going to give us any complete value and then of course if you go ahead and start deleting any of these values things are going to re-sequence and reorder but chain like a fill it in chamfer chain to a base dimension these are actually bilateral as well so we can switch them from one behavior to the other with a little right-click so pretty cool again one of them was added in salves 2013 long time ago and the other one was just this new release so chain dimension okay notes notes are powerful but for my money they have to be associative so I want to do a couple of things here first I want to show you how to to really make them detailed and good looking but also to go ahead and add other things like dimensional values and balloons and table values that actually update so using any note that we have anywhere let's just go ahead and double click this one down here if you double click a note you can take any section of data just by selecting it you can add different things to it like balloons so if we come over here to our properties manager then actually in this case let's go ahead and put in a will just say inspection I think is what I want there yeah that'll look good it'll put a little slot around that feature you could also go ahead and take any value like this a right here and if you wanted that one just to be in a balloon itself you could also go ahead and add a circular value around that but with any note or any balloon active you also have the opportunity to just pick on dimensions around the screen so by picking them and it will inject them directly into this note could be you know a big hole call-out in this particular case could even be a balloon number as it as it stands you can also go ahead and grab values from these templates as well so we can right click and insert a template field but that value is going to change if this number changes so I don't mind notes that are detailed but when they're hard-coded they're manual they can be error-prone so I'm definitely more of a fan of injecting the dimensions through a selection so another one of those things that I rarely find people are aware of is dimensions can be set so that it will show you the changed dimensions when you move from one document to another there's a little bit of setup on this one so let me just go ahead and close when I got open here and I just want to show you where we're going the order of operations is critical here what I'm gonna do is I'm going to open up an assembly and the drawing for this assembly is currently not open that's really how this particular behavior works when you're working on an assembly or a part and you want to go ahead and make changes to it and then you open the drawing from this file is when you're gonna see this behavior under tools and options there's a color setting and the color setting is a system options under colors and it says you specify color for changed drawing dimensions on open now if you go up into your color settings you can go to dimensions drawing and change you're gonna see orange as the color we're going to have so I just want to give you a preview of the indication from the assembly or part if we double click and change a dimension here we'll go ahead and change this just down to 75 what we've got now is it change now we go ahead and right click and open up the drawing from this or say file open and open the drawing for this assembly well you'll focus on is the lower center view here what I want you to see under my cursor right in this area is that initially the preview of the drawing is going to open up with regular dimensions but then once it rebuilds you'll see those dimensions actually change color so that's an indicator of what those dimensions were and even more so if you hover over them it actually indicates exactly what those values were prior to this particular change so these happen to be reference dimensions those aren't even actual feature or sketch dimensions so they're different dimensions altogether it's just a value that updated as a result of a geometric change to this drawing view so great little feedback there you go into a pretty detailed drawing and you're gonna see exactly where those changes happen to have taken place all right drawing views there's a lot to go on here and I know we're coming up on 30 minutes here we're definitely gonna go over that for about 15 minutes or so but well worth it so two things that I love to do I like rotating views on a drawing and I also like to use this thing called a 3d drawing view there's some stipulations to how each of these work as well so let me go ahead and again set this up in a way that's going to show you as many things as I can here in a short period I'm going to go back to an old file here it's a big standby for me it works for a lot of situations so we're just gonna go ahead and grab just a coke lamp now the way that the drawing is built has a little bit to do with what's available here so what I want to do is just show you from scratch making and drawing from this powder assembly so with this we'll just drop it on a si sized piece of paper no muss no fuss and I love using the view palette still to this day I'm a seasoned user but it still tees you up with a great way to drop views then as you move your cursor off of that it's going to give you all these other views okay these are projected views that makes a difference what I have here now are views that are projected from a parent so if you move this view you change this view style the defaults for all of these is that all of the children views are going to go ahead and mimic what the parent does well there's a button up here at the top in fact two of them once called rotate view and the other is called 3d drawing of you and if you don't have these make sure your right click on your tools go to customize and find them in your commands all you have to do is find the command wherever it is might be down here and view and then you go ahead and grab that button and just drag it up to your toolbar and there it would be so get your rotate view get your 3d drawing view put them on your toolbar what this allows us to do is change the orientation of this view so if I change this view for example the front view which is the main view what you're gonna see is that as I rotate it all of the pertinent views are going to rotate around the sheet as well and they have to because they're projections that's the way to diedring is based but it allows us to go ahead and make a change to where maybe you have imported data that came in in a different orientation and that happens often especially when it comes from a completely different kernel or software but that allows us to go ahead and maybe manipulate what front view is and instead turn that into a side view what happens here though is you have some inability to do some of these things all based on how these views are projected and that comes into the 3d drawing view 3d drawing view is a pretty cool thing for me what it enables you to do is pick a view maybe this one here doesn't look quite like we want and it would enable you to actually on the drawing here go ahead and rotate that a little bit off of where it actually is now one of the problems in this one is that you'll see that I can only cancel this I can't accept it and that's because it's a projection from one of the originals if instead I went over here and I simply went to view layout brought in a model view and for this assembly I picked that view which is going to be the isometric view what I'm still going to get is the exact same orientation the difference is is now I have a view that if I hit 3d drawing view I can actually rotate slightly maybe tweak it a little bit maybe throw it over here and then say okay and it will actually stay that way not only that but while you're rotating that you can also save name views out of what you have so if I want to save this view as one that's important then I can go ahead and see that view back in the part file or the assembly file as well so that's the stipulation now when it comes to the 3d drawing views now there's one other thing that we can do though this is really fantastic and has to do a section views so let me just quickly snap a section through the center of this top view do that real fast and we'll throw that in place you may have accidentally located something that allows us to do a similar feature here with this isometric view excuse me the section of you see I just Freudian slip there you can right-click inside this view and there's an option called isometric section view it's a very quick way to be able to draw a plain view type of a section but get a really nifty look at what it's going to look like in this orientation on the cap color there is actually based on the sections hatching that we have and you can change that view to a different hatching that color kind of makes it look purple however it's not necessary for this type of view when you have this particular view you can actually with a section view use the same type of 3d drawing view and I can roll it to a position that maybe makes a little bit more sense whatever that happens to be and when I say okay to it it's going to go ahead and lock that view into place any one of these views could be shown an exploded state and it gives you some flexibility to maybe reposition those to maybe get the explode looking a little bit better when those parts maybe are overlapping each other so 3d drawing views have to be named views or in this case the section view in this case a named view not a projective view allows us to rotate so those are the little stipulations that allow us to use those two types of tools now model color and views I see a lot of ways to try and pull this off I'm going to show you four of them that I've come up with when you want to look at a drawing of course you can show the display state that you would inside of a part or assembly and that's gonna be shaded with edges or without and then wireframe shaded or hidden lines removed so what we get in this case here is some opportunity to actually show full-on color there's a few different ways that I want to depict this for you so let's go back into SolidWorks again for a second and I want to pull up one of those original drawings that I had just a couple minutes ago there's some interesting ways to add color to parts and the first one is a very simple way it's just simply turning on the color settings that happen to be there but it's an on or off situation so once we have this file open let me just go back to my just a coke lamp and I will show you this one right away so what we have is a drawing and if you go to tools and options this is a document setting so we'd actually go physically to the document properties very important there and then we're going to go to the document properties here simply called detailing and right down here we have this one called use model color and hidden lines removed hidden lines visible drawings and then even with speed pack but just by saying use model color what it will do is take the drawing from just this monochrome to the actual color that each of those files are so we're still in wireframe what we're showing each and every color as depicted by the parts color itself it's a pretty awesome feature there now if we want to do this a little bit more piecemeal I don't want to make my entire assembly mostly gray so I can have one blue part highlighted so there's other ways of doing this a little bit more individually now two ways that I want to show you this are gonna be one well it's really an old-school method I use layers to get it done so we're going back to a different view here with these exploded components another one is something called component line fun so we're gonna make a lot of these parts here look a little different first one here if I right-click on a component you go down to component line fund now usually you can find that on the right-click menu here it's right up here on the top and what it will do is give you a quick opportunity to change the types of edges to anything you'd like them to be so instead of solid we can go ahead and make these dashed or dotted thickness can be changed and now you've got a part that's completely different than the rest of the parts graphically visible what you can also do is change the layer of a particular part now in this drawing here and in SolidWorks in general I don't really have a lot of use for layers but if I have a deliverable that's based on layers or if I have this particular need to use it to pull this little technique off this is the kind of thing that I would do right now these parts are sitting on the dimensions layer it happens to be black at this time but if you pick a different layer and same move that will actually change the color of the part as well and you can get a twofer on that you can actually pick the part and go down and change its component line font and have different color as well as different visible edges in the way that this part gets used so pretty interesting and methods right there last way is display states now each one of these views you could show on a 2d drawing as a display state the display state is generally based on its shaded view and if we look at this one shaded again you can see all the individual colors that happen to be there now this is a shaded view but if we go into the display state of this particular file so let's take our assembly and let's open that up real quick here what we'll actually see is that if I want to go ahead and add a display state or change the color of this or or even go ahead and you know make a part transparent for example what that would inevitably give me here is something that's going to be a display state so if we're back in the actual drawing file what that file looking like in the 3d part or assembly is what that file is going to look like here in the 2d drawing so this is just changing the display state that was active but in a partner in assembly you can right click and add multiple display States and even go ahead and switch between those depending on what we might be trying to do here so we only have one display state on this one so that's the way that's going to show so that's four different methods of trying to get parts showing as different colors in Model View displays this one here's a pretty quick one we'll just do this one fast custom detailed view shapes that's way back in 2001 plus been doing that forever and then one that we added three four releases ago now is mirroring views mirroring is something that we try to do a lot in different part and assembly functionalities really I think the easiest way is to just do it right here at the drawing so let's do both of those I find it interesting that a lot of customers are still somewhat unaware of some of the basic features here when we do things like detail views detail view is real simple because it drops you into circle tool and it lets you just make a quick detailed view and that's great but did you know that you can actually pre sketch something and use that for your detailed view it doesn't matter what the shape is it just has to be a sketch entity that's bounding an area so we'll go the full smash here and use a spline tool for this one just by drawing a spline ahead of time bounding an area the way that you might want to and this is gonna be a little elaborate what we do is we take that sketch and have it selected and then we select our detailed view tool what it will do is it will utilize that shape in order to go ahead and create this exact detail view so just for the sake of clarity let me move that off they're a little bit now I want to show you this a little bit more let's go ahead and just say connected that's gonna make them look visible and you can see that this outside thing has a body or a shape to it so for clarity let me just go ahead make that shaded so again it's very easy to see and there's other settings that allow you to say maybe no outline or maybe full outline but that full outline might be you know having some other little jagged things on there the jagged doesn't work and shaded if you're in wireframe or hidden lines then you can actually turn on jagged and where those parts break it's actually going to show with either a high or a low intensity jag here that looks a lot better than it did when was first released so those are great but those are different ways to make these custom shapes now it shows over here is a circle but if you right-click on that you have to edit that sketch that's going to go ahead and actually bring that spline tool back up for you so custom shapes they're pretty easy to do when it comes to mirroring these parts here are pretty much axisymmetric so they don't really make sense so I want to pull up a file from a few years ago where we were making prosthetics for foreign arms which is the quintessential left hand right hand situation so when you're looking at files like this this is a fully detailed drawing and if we needed to make the opposite hand what we don't want to have to do is spend the time making it completely duplicate drawing it just happens to be the opposite so again I've mentioned a lot of different methods where we try to mirror parts and assemblies and maybe bring dimensions over or not or keep the Association there's just a lot of different dances that we would do there the easiest possible way to make left hand and right hand it's very simple pick the view simply hit mirror and then choose whether you want it mirrored vertical or horizontal left hand or right hand all the annotations go with it and all you have now is a 2d drawing in the exact opposite direction but based on the original files so theoretically with this one here you could go ahead and take this drawing save it as a copy called mirror and then just simply trigger this mirror on that drawing and now you've got two associative duplicate models without having to reinvent anything so mirror view is a real powerful tool to get that done you don't need a model to track then you can go ahead and just take care of it here at the production level really great stuff okay markup markup was added in Salix 2019 but it didn't really become available to the user with a mouse or in drawings here and tells works 2020 so that's really why I wanted to bring that up to make you aware of it if you're on a drawing and you need to make a markup what's gonna happen as a folder will get created over here in the property manager simply click markup can't have a view selected but go ahead and grab your markup tool choose your ink of choice and then even the thickness of that and all you have to do is draw directly on the screen exactly where you want that markup to be so each one of these is an individual markup it'll create a feature it'll create a feature in the folder and if you hover over that you'll actually see a thumbnail of what that looks like everything is depicted specifically about about what you see when you create the markup so if we change the color and we zoom in a little bit of course it's gonna go ahead and have everything to do with exactly what it looks like right now so if I go ahead and add that it's gonna add that markup and again my thumbnail is gonna look that way right clicks allow you to actually export those as image files or you can go ahead and edit the mark-up if you need to orient is there because of 3d parts and assemblies which this type of markup is also supported in in SolidWorks 2019 and 2020 so great little tool there you might not be aware of it cuz it's fairly new but up until SolidWorks 2019 it was only available using touchscreen computers or Wacom tablets so Mouse support is what we've got there so some interesting drawing options if you go to tools and options you can turn on uppercase for all these three types the notes the tables and any type of dimensions it is retroactive if you pick a dimension on the actual drawing you can pick another property manager and if you have tables or notes that are previously created or in your design library you can also trigger those retro actively by going to tools and options and setting it for your templates you're going to make them uppercase from this point on so that you don't have to worry about that custom drawing scales were made available in salary 2020 as well really what this comes down to is that when your drawing is up a particular standard you're gonna have a list down here that's customized now right now this drawing happens to be a millimeters gram second so it's metric but if I switch this over to a different type of standard in this particular case what I want to do is go to this file and we want to make it an ANSI file what we're now gonna get is the list based on the text file that I have edited so if I look at this now what you're gonna see is now one hundred and seventy seven to one a one to five thousand one to seventy five hundred those definitely do not exist by default those are ones that I've actually added and they were added based on the SolidWorks install directory file much like the whole call-out txt file I'm gonna browse to this one manually just so you can see this and I know we're going a little bit long today but we're gonna keep going here anyway if you go ahead to your default location that's C Drive Program Files going to your solid work specific it could be Sowers Corp I change the year because of multiple versions but underneath that folder you're going to go into SolidWorks this is localized for the language so that's why we go to the language folder often and then English is the only language that I installed so we have a file down here that if you just hit the D button it will get you down there it's called drawing scales dot txt now if I take a look at that what you're gonna notice is there's my additions at the seventy five to one and those are all added based on that standard they didn't show because on ISO or any Modifieds they're not gonna be there now I have two recommendations if you're going to go ahead and change this file first of all don't overwrite it here because when you update your service packs alex is going to rio ver a tit you also can't save here you have to save it to the desktop and copy it back in here but just like anything else if you go to tools and options go to file locations you can put this in a network location so everybody else can look at it so under file locations if we simply go down to this is going to be your whole call out I'm sorry this is going to be a drawing scale so if you look under drawing scale standards it's gonna simply simply show you where that points put it in a network folder and point to it there and it won't get overwritten when your service packs get updated and it does give you the ability to grab this list and make it exactly what you need it to be get rid of some of these other here they might not use add ones that you use constantly really really good productivity function all right detailing mode last couple of things I want to talk about detailing mode was added in salvers 2020 and it allows you to open up really large assembly drawings very very quickly with assemblies like these really what you end up getting is a really long load time and nine times out of ten we want to do things like saving PDFs or DWG files or just basic annotations so those are the kind of things that when you're using SolidWorks opening up the entire drawing isn't necessarily or the entire assembly and resident memory isn't necessarily important now if I go ahead and open up this drawing here what I want to do is expand this out and use the new detailing mode open when I actually open this file this is a 5500 part assembly and if I was to send this drawing to somebody else they actually wouldn't even need the parts or assemblies and it's different than the detached drawing mode that you might be used to or if you've tried but essentially with this file here what I get in about 10 seconds is all 5500 parts all of the different sheets loaded and the ability to manipulate and add annotations to things now there's a list of things that you do have to have it fully resolved for like creating section views and adding build materials but other than that as we work the line art is here so if I want to come into any of these views and I want to start adding dimensions as necessary all that type of stuff of course is 100% supported so we're adding different things to to the drawing just based on what we're clicking the important part here is that you can do everything that you do in typical drawings for annotation purposes except for adding new views and adding those things so you got to revise it a fully resolved at once and then you're going to get those types of behaviors but at this point again the most that a lot of users do with big files is they open them up just so that they can export those and I can export it or save it without actually resolving and that's going to take me right to the low-hanging fruit which is typically things like DWG s and D X FS or PNG files or PDFs so opening up a drawing real quickly you'd be able to go ahead and generate a PDF again very important to be able to knock that out fast opening up a 5500 part drawing resolved it takes a few minutes and it just is what it is especially if you're working across the network what it did here is it quickly went ahead and generated this file and if you take a look at all the different views you can even see a little flub I did there on my revision cloud so it quickly makes it the lineart is there so the drawing views are stunningly crisp and it's a very very good productivity tool for ownable being large assembly drawings very quickly so keep that in mind it's file open and it is opening them up in detailed mode alright last thing here will give you a quick bonus alternate position view one of my all-time favorite features ever it allows you to depict movement of parts and assemblies on a 2d drawing and I said parts this time and I'm not kidding on that one what it really is is it's overlaying a configuration on top of an existing view now it's always worked for assemblies because moving is a big deal with our dynamic assembly motion but now we can do it with parts so that we can show the cast and the machine parts overlaid with each other so let me show you that real quickly and then we'll go ahead and wrap this particular presentation up so one more time let me just make a really quick drawing here because I want everybody to see this well use our just a co clamp and artistic o clamp is just a real simple you know part for for showing how a movement takes place I think everybody's aware of exactly the functionality of a clamp like this so we go ahead and have a drawing that's made of these different views what we're gonna do is just do a quick overlay and for years people would try to do this putting in say two views and the lining the origins and then you got one view on top of each other and you can't do anything to edit the view so this is where this works you pick your view and only if you layout tab you're gonna have alternate position view and if you don't go up to your command search and type in alternate position view and then go ahead and just drag that over to your toolbars okay just like that when you pick it what it will do is either say do you want to choose an existing configuration if you've already made one or do you want to make a new one we're gonna make a new one here it'll then open up this assembly in the orientation of the view that you've selected so what we get now is the front view and all dynamic assembly motion of functionality turns on so collision detection and everything else is going to be right there so I have my options turn on collision and then as soon as I hit there we are at the bottom once I say okay what it will do is then create the overlay by changing all the parts that have moved to phantom representation now you can even change this view to a shaded view if you want it's gonna have a nice little overlay there and do a quick little control cue to kind of clean that up a touch but what that gives us is the full overlay of one view to the next and it's not dumb geometry by the way I want to be very clear with that although my graphics aren't really happy with what we've got going on right now so let's see what I can do with that but it's not dumb geometry to the respect where if I go ahead and take a look at these views side by side and I move this view you'll see that over in the drawing that view updates so the overlay that we're getting there is actually showing the update not quite sure why it's shaded right now but my video there we go a little refresh so what you're seeing here basically is that update now over in the 2d drawing we can use our dimensions whether we're using annotations or whatever over there we can actually go ahead and start adding dimensions to that so if we're on our 2d drawing and we grab our dimensional tools it is reference dimensions but they are associative so you can pick on the edges of this part you can put those dimensions in wherever it makes since and then with those dimensions as you start to change things again associativity is king so when I start to move things around the 14 degrees now becomes 4 degrees and so on and so forth so it's a fantastic way to show movement in parts now that's said I'm sorry I move in an assembly as that said there's another Freudian slip I want to show you really quickly movement in parts and the reason this is important is because we need to be able to overlay configurations of things and that's really the the main thing that we're trying to get to with this particular file so we're showing that movement but we're showing change which is going to be a part that's maybe a machined version versus its cast representation on top of that as well excuse me one second let me open that one more time look at that guy resolved ok so once we have this file open we're really doing the exact same thing we're just choosing an existing configuration of a particular part file so with this pump housing over here we have its machined iteration and iteration is king iterating is an important thing because the ability to change quickly is really how you keep up you don't have to make things perfect you just have to change them quick by picking this view you'll notice that the view layout tool has alternate position view available which it would not have done before and we can change this to the other configuration which is casting and they'll give us that perfect overlay right on top of it now again if I go ahead and start switching this up with my shaded view we're gonna see the difference between the cast and the machine version and those edges are usable so I can easily come in here and start grabbing on edges and simply putting in associative dimensions to each of those so it's an important thing to be able to do because of course we're trying to show change and that change has to be dimensioned here on the 2d drawing so important stuff those are associative configurations and dimensions change and everything will update all right so we've gotten a taste of what it's like to hear me talk at a very fast rate and I do appreciate you hanging around a little bit extra here and we said 30 minutes but went about 45 or so we've covered a lot of different things again tips and tricks is interesting because you can go to 10 different Tips & Tricks presentations frankly by the same person and you're gonna see 10 completely different presentations if you have requests I definitely welcome those kind of things whether it's afro form for a full presentation for a video or for just our webinar like this kind of a thing here so if you're looking for something interesting let us know and we'll get back to you and we'll maybe use that as inspiration for an actual meeting so we covered a lot with Bill materials and ballooning dimensions and detailing is a really open-ended subject but putting them on there and the quickest way possible using things like the dimension palette the rapid dimension as well as you know being able to edit things quickly and add different formats from one to the other with the format painter a lot of ways to manipulate drawing views and the new markup functionality for communication is there and then detailing mode this one's your one you're going to want to look at if you're using assemblies that are even a reasonable size you can send those out to Detailers they don't have to have the files they will simply rehand shake with the file once you open it fully resolved really cool stuff so thank you once again please follow us on some of our social media sites we're gonna be posting this video up on YouTube here within the the next couple of days so we'll get that out there but you'll be notified of presentations like this as well as content that's going up constantly by all of our IES around the world so follow us on YouTube go engineer is our site I am on Twitter individually as at goeth Darren and you can also just follow us completely through those social media sites Facebook Twitter and LinkedIn so again I really appreciate your time I hope it was worth it come back and we'll come back again and see us in our next presentation let us know if there's anything that you'd like to see so wherever you happen to be have a great day and we'll talk to you again soon thank you for attending [Music]

Channel: GoEngineer

Views: 94,409

Keywords: goengineer, engineering, MCAD, mechanical engineering, product design, product development, solidworks, swx, darin, grosser, @GowithDarin, 3dprinting, 3dprinted, additive, manufacturing, problem, solver, computer aided development, software, mirroring

Id: 50dKqlQthTg

Length: 51min 52sec (3112 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 05 2020