Top 50 Obscure SOLIDWORKS Tips and Tricks

welcome to the webinar um it's top 50 obscure tips and tricks in solidworks or it's full title um top 50 obscure tips and tricks and solidworks 43 of which you already know but the other seven will make it worth your hour um like i said i don't i i don't expect anyone here to to learn 50 new tips and tricks today but but hopefully hopefully you'll be uh hopefully you'll learn some things um the presentation the powerpoint slides um they'll be blasted out to you at the end um so you can also there will be a i believe there will be a recording of the webinar um so let's uh let's jump into it so a little about myself my name is jim pelche i've been an applications expert at javelin for eight years um been using solidworks since 2001. so we're just going to jump right into it um let me do a stopwatch because i want to pace myself so i want to try and allocate about a minute for each for each one of my tips so i'm going to minimize this so that i can keep this open and solidworks open and my clock open all at the same time so first up what i want to do is i want to talk about uh showing the base planes of uh certain components within an assembly uh let's say i wanted to take i'm just going to make a quick copy of that that was a control drag that wasn't one of my uh it wasn't one of the 50 tricks i want to meet take two of these and meet them together so that the mid planes line up with one another but i don't want to have to go hunting through the tree over here so instead what i'm gonna do is i could i could do one of two different things one method i could use is i could use breadcrumbs so i could pick on an item and come up here to the part and i can see it's it's uh it's planes but unfortunately this really only seems to work for the first selection it doesn't really it's not usually all that great for the second you got to wait for the breadcrumbs and in earlier versions of solidworks you you didn't have that option an easier method especially if i'm doing this for multiple planes is to select both of these and what i'm going to do is i'm going to come up here to the eyeball drop down i'll turn on i have to make sure i have view planes turned on and i'm going to turn on hide show primary planes because i have both of these selected it's going to hide and show the primary planes for just those two items so let's say i wanted to to make those mate say this plane here and where's the other plane that other plane seems to be having a little bit of a little bit of issues letting me select that but i would be able to select both of those planes and apply a coincident major uh some kind of a mate to that um speaking of mate command let's let's turn those off uh what i want to do is um let's say i want to apply a mate but i want to use um [Music] the hide show faces functionality so what i can do is i can come up come in here and um rather if if let's say let's say i want to let's clear the selections here let's say i wanted to pick there's a there's a flat face on the inside of this all i have to do is i have to just have to hover my mouse over this face and tap the alt key so that i can select whatever's behind there that way i can say pick that face and this face and make them parallel it means i don't have to go using the select other face copy a feature and paste it as an assembly feature so you can see i have this hole here it's just a basic cut extrude nothing fancy about it i'm going to pick it i'm going to do a ctrl c to copy and i'll pick where i want it to go and i'll do a control v in order to paste it there are some dimensions some some other references to stuff in here i'm just going to delete them so i don't have any dangling sketch relations and you can see it's dropped in that hole you can see it here you can see it down here as well because it's dropped it in as an assembly feature and you can see it here in my tree so i can come in here and i can modify the features so that it only goes through certain components or any other any other functionality that would be available for assembly level features um bom sub assembly overrides so let's make a drawing of this so i'm going to go make drawing from assembly yep i'll just be size today and let's drop in an isometric view and i'm going to drop down a bill materials so my bom i have to use indented for this trick to work i'll drop it in you can see i have a sub assembly here so what i could do is i could change how this sub assembly is being displayed i hover over my uh my um the om here you can see i have this icon on the side i call it a bear claw because it kind of has these little little triangles in it i can expand that out and this gives me access to this additional column here when i'm in this column if i zoom in i can pick on this little minus sign and that collapses this individual sub assembly not all of the sub assemblies just the ones that i specify so i can have certain sub assemblies only shown as top level components or certain sub-assemblies where i expand them out um do they have other other ones in there oh yes there's other there's other tricks that i can do in here as well so what i can do is let's say i didn't want crank sub as being a top level component i wanted crankshaft crank iron and crank knob to be shown as top level components what i can do is i can right click on the little assembly icon here and i can say dissolve again this is specific to this subassembly if i had other subassemblies in here in this bill of material they would be unaffected by this i say dissolve and now crank arm crankshaft and crank knob are all top level components now the other way i can do this is i can if i switch back to this and i open up my sub assembly here i can also come in here and i can go to my configuration manager i can right click on the configuration and go to properties and in properties i can control it down here under bill of materials options so i can say show or hide or promote and that would also give me the ability to override my bill of materials although adjusting it here means that i'm setting it in this sub assembly so anywhere that i use this sub assembly it's gonna it's gonna repeat those same those same settings enable smart mates let's switch back to my top level and let's say i want to take these two components and meet them together one thing you there's no shortage of ways to do it but one method i could use i this is kind of a single-handed method i don't have to hold down control or anything like that in order to do it if i go to the move component command and i click on this smart mates what i would do is i double click on one of my selections you can see it kind of changes that transparent color and then i single click on another selection that gives me the ability to say let's make them coincident i say okay and it's applied a coincidence between those components uh create opposite hand version let's delete that um mirror components mirror components so you ever been doing this you set up a couple of different things you go next you say yep i want to i want to create an opposite hand version of a component so i could select this and i could i could come down here and say create opposite hand version and that'll create an opposite hand version a mirrored version of that of that other component when to do it for this one i want to do it for all of them but i don't have to keep coming up and down and or i don't want to have to keep coming up and down to do that in order to save myself some picks and clicks all i can do all i need to do is just hold down alt and when i pick these items that toggles the opposite hand version um setting for that particular component so as you can see i can quickly um i can quickly toggle as opposed to having to go up and down a whole bunch of times um component preview ah yes so let's say there is a component in here that i want to take a look at um i don't want to open it up in its own separate window i just want to be able to kind of see that on its own i can select it and i can go here to where it says component preview window this shows it in another pane so that i can kind of take a look at it maybe i can make a selection from it if i wanted to apply a concentric mate maybe it's not easy for me to pick that that hole in the component there but i can pick the i can pick it over here on the right and then i can pick whatever my other selection is here on the on the left another more useful thing that i can do with this is or whether i find it more useful is if i say synchronize the view orientation in both parts and both viewports so you can see as i rotate around as i rotate around in my assembly i can see the part moving kind of on its own over there so this allows me to easily i can use it for selections or things like that um populate custom properties using assembly visualization so i'm going to come up here under under evaluate under the evaluate tab and i'm going to go to assembly visualization and let's say i have a custom property on one of these components what i'm going to do is i'm going to come over here i'm going to say more and under this properties drop down i'm going to find my custom property let's say i've created one called description so now my column in here has the description custom property for all of these shown you'll notice i've only populated one of them this crank knob i have called it swivel i've created a custom property in there called swivel knob i can populate the rest of these very easily by coming in here and just double clicking where the description property is and [Music] type something in there and that writes it to the custom property there's another method that i can do using this or that's similar to this but it uses a bill of materials so let's jump back to my drawing and on my drawing let's collapse that i have my description column so i'm going to go here where it says on the yoke mail i'll double click under description this is asking me if i want to keep the link or break the link i want to keep the link because i want this to be linked to the custom property so when i say keep link i can type something in here hit enter and then just keep typing oops i'm going to say don't show again because i always want to keep the link and i can just it's all just keying things in and hitting enter keeping things in and hitting enter and i can quickly and easily populate custom properties for all of these components so if i open one on the mop and i go to the custom properties i can't get to that key uh because uh it drops it under configuration specific but you can see it's created a custom property called description and when i say it drops it under configuration specific i mean it didn't have a custom property in here called description so it had to create a new one so it created it under configuration specific and you can see it's populated that groupmates let's jump back to the assembly and in the assembly what i'm going to do let's turn off assembly visualization and i'll collapse my tree i'll show you a trick for doing that a little bit later i'm going to make these two perpendicular over to find the assembly so let's say you have an assembly that is over defined or has some some issues with it i expand out the mates folder and there's too many mates maybe use your imagination a little bit but let's say there's too many mates there's page after page after page after page of mates and i don't i i want to clean them up i there's a lot of good mates in here that i don't need to that i don't need to really pay attention to so what i'm going to do is i'm going to choose to group them together by right clicking on the meat folder um wait a minute there were the group mates under there where did i say it was right click your mate folder and say group mates by status so it is supposed to be there all right let's rebuild close try it again nope all right let's try the top level it might have changed where it's uh where it's put for this for 2020. tree display uh try viewmates and dependencies no that's not something different okay um fair enough but in in 2019 i can right click on it and say groupmates by status and it ends up looking like this so you can see i've got all my solved mates in one place all the errors in another and only over defined in another place okay um what's up next alt scroll wheel okay so this is kind of neat so let's say i want to take a section view in here oh let's get rid of that perpendicular me let's say i want to take a section view in here but i don't have to use the section view command i just want a highly localized section view so what i'm going to do is i'm going to hit the g key g for glass you're probably already familiar with the magnifying glass tool that allows me to zoom in and out in a localized area without it affecting the rest of my my view makes it freeze easy selections but another thing that not a lot of people are aware of that i can do with this is if i hold down alt while i'm using my scroll wheel it gives me a section view and as i scroll my scroll wheel while holding alt i can change what the depth of that is so i'm taking a look at a section view that's parallel to my to my screen it's planar parallel to my my viewing screen as you can see as i rotate around that it follows my screen and of course i can zoom in as well while i'm in here i can make selections um saved section views for use on drawing so speaking of section views let's say i get a section view that i really like i can come down here to the bottom and i can say save when i say save i'm going to choose drawing annotation view in here and then when i click save um i can choose how i want that displayed we'll use auto hatching i'll say okay and when i jump to my drawing when i go to my view palette we hit refresh and you'll be able to see that i have my section view so i have section view aaa but i also have a sec a view that has the section line in it so i drop in my section line and as soon as i have a drawing view that had that section line in the preview i can come over here and i can drag and drop in my section view a ink come on so don't add a new section i can drag in my section view a and you can see it drops in that that section view line uh control space for view select oh let's zoom in you can see i've got my my cross section line so you can see it is a it is a section view and it's the same section view that i created in my assembly let's rebuild and i'll turn off my section view control space to use view selector so when i hit my space bar you're probably aware that i can choose from different standard views but sometimes the default behavior from solidworks is to turn on this thing called view selector so what i can what i can do is a lot of people especially when this first came out um it they turned it off because what used to happen is it used to give bring you to an isometric view um it'll maintain your view orientation nowadays but it still does a zoom to fit so some people still turn it off because they don't like it but if you like it once in a while you can keep it turned off when you have your spacebar but you can do control spacebar and just access the view selector and from there i can pick say this back pane here and it will rotate my view so i'm looking normal to that back pane use the drop down to can capture additional dimensions let's say i have multiple configurations of a part let's use this part i can right click on a dimension and i can say configure dimension but there's a lot of other dimensions within this sketch so what i can do is i can come up here under this drop down and i can say i also want to capture this angle dimension d3 or d5 so i say okay and now those are those are i have columns there as well that i can i can configure isolate component display options so i can come let's go back to my assembly and let's say i want to isolate that spider what i can do is i can come over here and i can say right click on it and there's an isolate when i isolate that you can see it hides everything else but it doesn't have to hide everything else because this is this is great if i just want to see this part within the context of the assembly while i'm in the assembly anyways but i can't see the rest of the assembly so i can come up here and i can say make it wireframe now i can see the rest of the assembly and wireframe or i can see the rest of the assembly as transparent or i can hide it which is the default behavior let's accidentally rotate about scene floor so as you can see if i take my center mouse button and drag it in a circle i'm rotating around the part but you can see my assembly does end up being upside down at some point what instead i'm going to do is i'm going to right click and i'm going to choose rotate about scene floor now i'm going to move my mouse in the exact same fashion let's zoom in a little bit moving my mouse in the exact same fashion but you can see that vertical always stays vertical so this may be this may be handy for some of you so that's right click rotate a bit scene floor clear view palette this one's kind of neat so if i go over to my drawing view or if i go over to my drawing and zoom fit i'll come over here my view palette refresh look how long that's taking what it's doing during that time is it's creating all of these thumbnail previews and it does that every time you open your drawing huge time drain if you have lots of drawing views in here or if you have a complex assembly or anything like that so but after i've dragged and dropped all of my drawing views in i don't need this view palette anymore so what i'd suggest doing is saying clear all and then you save your your drawing next time you open it up it doesn't have to populate this and your drawing opens in in less time move drawing views so you're probably aware that if i want to move a drawing view i have to hover over the edge of it in order to move it if i try and move from the from the center of it let's zoom in a bit if i try and move from the center of it prior to 2020 oh there we go so if i'm if i'm drawing a box it basically if i'm moving from a face it's going to move the box it looks like in 2020 i can drag on an edge which is kind of cool but and if let's say i don't want to drag off of an edge i can also hold down alt and i can drag a drawing view from anywhere on that drawing view whether it's a face or an edge as long as it's inside that drawing footprint obviously um 3d drawing view rotate view on the fly so this is an isometric view but let's say i want a slightly off isometric view i don't have to go back to my assembly to um to change my view orientation instead what i'm going to do is i'm going to come up here to where it says 3d drawing view in my head's up display and now i can rotate my view on my drawing when i'm done i pick ok and that's my new drawing view orientation i've just created a custom view orientation easily toggle between radius and dimension diameter dimensions of course i don't have a top view on here let's drop in the top view projected view and the smart dimension so let's say i wanted that to be a diameter dimension there's no need for me to go over here to the left hand side and go to leaders i can just right click on the dimension go to display options and then display as diameter or i can show parentheses or any of these other things just saves my mouse from having to to go all the way over to the side of the screen uh drag and drop commands under your command manager this might be tricky because i have a toolbar up top for zoom but i'm going to come up here and let's say actually let's go to a part let's say i want to on my sketch toolbar i want to add boss extrude i can come up here under my command search so i'd switch this to commands rather than solidworks help um i can find boss extrude if i just click on it that runs the command if i click on the creepy eyeball that will show me where it is but if i drag and drop it i can drag and drop it onto my toolbar and now i have it at my fingertips rather than having to hunt for it i can say it is here it should be here um save selection selection sets oh this one this one i like um i liked it when it came out so oh no wait a minute that's that's the other one okay so let's say i'm picking a bunch of parts this one's still pretty cool let's say i'm picking a bunch of parts and i say oh wait no i i've got to do something else but i don't want to deselect all of these parts or maybe these are frequently selected parts i can right click on the background and i can go to if i scroll down if i expand that out there is a save selection and scroll down a little bit oh there's a save selection up here so i can say new selection set and that saves it as a selection set so i can come up here under selection sets and i can go back to selecting those at any time previous selection so this is the one that i was previously talking about so you have has this ever happened to you you're picking a bunch of stuff and then you accidentally pick off of it you go oh no i've got to select all of those again well don't worry you can just right click in the background and say as long as you haven't picked anything else you can right click in the background and come up here to where it says previous selection and you can carry on as you were before so in this next one i'm going to change my design intent now let's go to this part here and let's edit the sketch so i come in here and let's say i decide that that 1.75 i wanted a diagonal dimension from there to there or shortest distance dimension i don't have to delete and recreate the dimension instead what i'm going to do is i'm going to find this little blue handle that's at the end and i can drag this to a new reference and now that that's 3.227 and now my design intent has changed so now when i change this number other things change as well zoom to fit using middle mouse button well that really says it all but let's demonstrate oh okay i'm in a sketch let's go back and rebuild go back here uh yeah sure i'll rebuild zoom in zoom to fit i just double i just double click with my middle mouse button shift c collapses the feature tree okay let's expand these out so i've got this really lengthy feature tree that i have to come keep scrolling up and down through right i want to collapse stuff i don't want to have to collapse it manually that's a big waste of my time i don't want to necessarily have to scroll to the top in order to do this but the default solidworks hotkey for this is shift c and it just cleans up my feature tree custom properties list file custom properties um go into this drop down i see a lot of really handy things in here but i think that um i think i can come up with my own ideas for what would be handy to have in there so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to my system options that zoom toolbar is really getting annoying right now um and i'm gonna go to file locations and in here there is something for custom properties custom property files so i'm gonna browse to that folder so on my c drive under program data solidworks solidworks 2019 lang english and let's move this over you can see i have a file in here called properties.txt i open that up and voila there's my list so i can add something new to it and save it come back into solidworks okay and file properties go to my drop down pick something new and now i can populate it and i don't have to worry about giving this custom property the exact same name on all of my all my other files it's just handy and it's right here for me ctrl drag and drop a feature to copy i've only one to copy okay well i'm gonna hold down control and i'm going to drag that feature and i'm going to copy it there we'll delete the dangling dimensions and you can see i've made a copy of that feature um did i include that on the same slide yes i did so i can hold down shift and i can drag and drop in order to move it but one other really impressive thing is i go window tile horizontally or tile vertically i can take a feature from here and i can copy it to here so i can this this trick works across windows as well across multiple parts so let's drag and dropped in that same feature whole wizard favorites so let's say i go in here go to features go to whole wizard and let's say i specify a certain certain hole an m5 threaded hole nothing special maybe i can go through and i can customize a bunch of this stuff but let's say i'm making a threaded hole for a tripod that i want to have a camera mount on a camera mount is an m5 so what i'm going to do is i'm going to come up here and i'm going to say add a favorite so i'm going to call this camera thread hit okay and drop it into place voila um then when i go whole wizard again i don't have to specify an m5 i can come up here and i can say camera thread don't have to remember what kind of what kind of fastener that is and i can just drop in a new instance of it fill pattern i'm going to jump over and i'm gonna make a perforated sheet so i have this this um the sheet metal i guess it's not a sheet metal part but it's it's it's essentially a sheet and i have a hole that i've cut in it and what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna make a pattern of holes in order to make this a perforated sheet now i know you're thinking you're thinking whoa jim this is this is a certain amount of detail that we don't need and you're not wrong but i'm going to use fill pattern and i'm going to show you something so i'll fill boundary i'll put it there features let's use the cut extrude and let's set the spacing i think 20. yep keep in mind this is going to be adding 2100 holes into this when i pick okay you can see how long it's taking to rebuild i suppose i should have taken note of what the what the seconds was i suppose i can also take a look under evaluate but i don't need to tell you i don't need a stopwatch to tell you this is taking a painfully long time so what i'm going to do is i'm going to wait it out and keep talking but i'm going to show you a quicker way to to do this so a lot of people they'll make their sheet metal part like that and every time they rebuild they have to wait um 15 seconds it seemed like longer than that um what instead i'm going to do is i'm going to come over here i'm going to say edit feature because this all has a consistent thickness the geometry on each one of those holes is identical so i'm going to choose geometry pattern and then i'll pick okay and what you'll see now is that that took that takes a lot less time to to process so my rebuild time is substantially lower let's take a look 1.53 so that was 1 10 what it was before so that's a an important step or an important trick to know if you're using something like fill pattern in order to create thousands of instances direct editing i'm going to open up a parasolid file where did i put it there it is so i'm opening up a parasolid file but i'm going to edit it uh yeah we'll run import diagnostics on it there's nothing wrong with it i don't want to proceed with feature recognition i will proceed with feature recognition shortly but for the time being let's say i just want to make a quick change what i can do is i can right click and open up my under tabs i can open open up my direct editing tab mine's already open and i'm going to choose move face so let's say i picked this face and i don't know this face i can use this in order to stretch it i can key in maybe i want to make it 60 millimeters longer so now this piece is 60 millimeters longer another thing i can do um move face i can also use it to offset a face so if let's say i take that no yeah that and i want to offset it by two millimeters flip the direction i can change the diameter of that hole so i say okay um what else do we have yeah so another another method i could use if i wanted to change this oh i don't have it next in my oh there it is it's tip 33 so i've got i've got one out of order but that's okay i'll this one's quick enough to 32 is quick enough to show control drag a plane to offset it so let's say i want to offset my front plane i select it so i can see it then you can see i have this outline i'm going to hover my mouse over that outline and i'm going to do a control drag ctrl drag as you'll recall from a few minutes ago copies so control drag the plane activates the plane command and i can come in here and i can specify an offset or i can say i only needed that in order to launch the plane command i'm actually going to use a mid plane between that and that in order to get a mid plane in here um that's okay edit feature on an imported part this was the other thing that i was talking about uh let's say i wanted to change this feature i can right click on it and oh look at that there's an edit feature function keep in mind this is my imported part this was a pair of solid in fact let's go back to before any of this move face nonsense i can go in here and i can still use edit feature what does this do oh it does nothing because it's rolled back but i can go in here i can say edit feature and what this does is this uses the feature recognition um functionality in order to uh in order to reverse engineer that uh maybe let's delete some of these move face features and go in here uh right click edit feature okay it doesn't like that maybe maybe we'll use just the overall block uh edit feature um yeah sure we'll try recognizing features on the face and there we go now it's uh cut now it has a cut extrude and an m4 hole so it's it's reversed engineered that now i have features that i can control granted it doesn't it doesn't have fully defined sketches the sketches are all under defined because it can't read my mind as to what my design intent was supposed to be but it still manages to create those features select tangency i will do nothing on this part but let's open something that has tangency um yep let's open this one because this one has a lot of tangency as you can as you can tell what i'm going to do is let's say i want to select all of these edges i'm going to right click and i'm going to say select tangency now i can select all of those edges without having to go through and pick each individual one select loop or select chain so if i right click and i can say select loop um you can see from my preview that's going to select kind of if when when this when this edge reaches its end it's going to turn right instead of left if i click the yellow arrow here it's going to reverse it oops i have to be careful when i'm selecting that select loop pick the yellow arrow and you can see it reverses it so now it's looking outward rather than inward and you can see the loop goes all the way around this is different from tangency because it doesn't care about sharp corners it works its way around the sharp corners it doesn't doesn't need to do anything else about that um oh there's also select chain select chain is more so if you're in a sketch so let's make a sketch and let's make some lines and just for good measure i'll throw a fill in on there i can right click and i can say select chain and that'll pick all of the all of the entities that share an end point this would not select if let's say i had a t intersection here that t intersection would break it break the break the chain that is so i'd say select chain and it goes up to where that where that t intersection is um alternate ways to sketch lines so no that's not a typo i'm going to sketch a line from the origin it'll be horizontal but i don't want it to be horizontal i don't want it to have a horizontal sketch relation on it and as you can see this is going to automatically add a horizontal sketch relation you can tell by the yellow box off the end the pencil icon there i don't want to go into my system options and disable the automatic adding of sketch relations because really this is the only line i want to i want to sketch that i don't want it to have the the horizontal sketch relation applied to so i'm just going to hold down the alt key and now you can see that when i click it what oh hold on a minute sorry it's control oh that's not a oh that's the wrong tap okay sorry about that um i'm going to draw a line this is an even cooler trick i'm going to draw this line let's say i want to draw a let's say i want to draw a horizontal line let's go online i'm going to go over here on the left and you see how i have for construction or infinite length or midpoint line or i've got horizontal or vertical or angle i can pick any one of these options but i don't want to move my mouse cursor over there let's say i want it to be horizontal i'm going to do alt h now when i draw a line you'll notice i can put it try and make it diagonal my mouse cursor is way up here but when i click it's a horizontal line what's causing that well let's try again make a line i'm going to tap the alt key this time and if you look closely over here you can see certain letters are underlined if you've ever done in any windows program if you go like alt f or alt e it'll drop down the file menu or the edit menu alt s is save etc etc this sort of follows that same logic so you can see that underlined letter is what i would press alt and apply so alt v would be vertical alt a is is angle um alt i is infinite length alt m is midpoint so if i go alt m now i'm sketching a midpoint line um do i have other ones in here oh works on more than just lines but that's that's pretty self-explanatory um alternate ways to add sketch relations so let's say i wanted this to be a horizontal line i pick on it i don't have to go over the left i'm going to do the same try the same trick i did before tap alt and you'll notice that horizontal vertical and fix all have letters that are underlined so i can do alt h and that applies a horizontal sketch relation control and shift tricks in sketching this is what i thought i was talking about before i'm going to draw a line but i don't want the horizontal sketch relation added so i'm going to hold down control and you can see that this won't apply that sketch relation it temporarily disables the automatic adding of sketch relations and as you can see when i go to sketch my next line when i don't hold down control it adds in that vertical sketch relation so it's back to normal it was just that one line that i temporarily disabled that for but it does say control and shift so here's what shift does pick my line i hold down shift and you can see oh this is a this is a metric sketch oops and i just opened my outlook because my keyboard is one of those keyboards let's switch this to millimeters then i'll go back in and i'll let out a sketch let's sketch a line and i'm going to hold down shift and you can see that it oh hold on oh it's still obeying the rules in inch anyways you can see it's snapping at 50.8 um 40 38.1 25.4 so it's snapping at certain certain increments and those increments are controlled in my settings um [Music] i guess i didn't write in here where i oh this is yeah maybe i should have had my whole powerpoint up for this rather than just the headers uh because again this is this is yet a different trick um so i'm going to sketch a couple of different things okay so i've got all of these lines and i want to move them so that this line here this point here lines up with the origin so i window select it and i go to move it and ah i had all of them selected but i'm only moving that one point um this the the problem is is that it it only does it only moves what it is that i'm dragging even if i've selected a lot of other things i could use the move entities command but that's launching a command i just want to drag and drop so what i can do is i can hold down shift and i can drag so you can see i can move it to a new location and it all moves together as one if i do control while i'm doing that control allows me to make a copy so ctrl drag copies it the limitation though that i found is that if you try to use shift drag i can't drag and drop that and have it automatically apply a sketch relation so it it moves close i can move it close and then maybe i can drag and drop it but control allows me to do it so if i hold down control and i move it you can see it'll automatically add a sketch relation but that'll make a copy of it that i then have to delete the original so instead what i'm going to do is this is a really obscure trick when i hold down control and i start dragging i'm actually going to release the control key while i'm in the middle of dragging it so i'm still dragging it but i'm not holding down control anymore so i get the ability to drag and drop it and apply the sketch relation but it doesn't make a duplicate copy tab key when dimensioning in a 3d sketch so you're probably familiar if anyone who's familiar with 3d sketches probably knows that i can hit the tab key while i'm sketching so i can sketch a line uh we'll start i guess it really doesn't matter where i start for my purposes i can go up hit tab go on an xy plane or zx plane or i can change the plane on which i'm sketching however if i'm using dimensions let's say i'm going from that point to this point before i place my dimension right now by default it's just going to go shortest distance point to point but before i place it if i hit tab now it looks like it's a it's an x-axis dimension hit tab again now it's a y-axis dimension hit tab again now it's a z-axis dimension so i can dimension um the distance between this point and a plane that would pass through the other point hold shift when selecting a circle with the dimension command okay so let's go back into a 2d sketch and let's let's sketch a circle and i'll throw a dimension on there so i dimension from the origin if i hold down shift i can dimension either to the nearest or farthest point on that circle as long as i'm holding shift when i select the circle and then i can place my dimension accordingly and it'll either go to the max or min or mid position i don't need to drop my dimension and then go to leaders and change it after the fact offset entities for unique slots so you're probably familiar with the slot sketcher up here so i can sketch straight slots i can sketch arc slots but let's say i want a slot that follows a slightly different profile so it goes straight then it has an arc then it has another straight section and then it has another arc for me to sketch this up as a slot is going to be hugely time consuming or let's say i have a spline um what i can do is i can use the offset entities command in order to create a slot now this used to be how you'd make slots before they had the slot sketcher way way way back in the day you choose bidirectional oh uh you'd have to make selections first so i'll pick some of these i can say cap ends cap ends as arcs and let's key in a smaller dimension in there let's go five i'll also do the arc slot at the same time construction geometry i'm going to make the original or base geometry construction lines turn them down i pick okay and now you can see i have irregularly shaped slots that i was able to very quickly and easily create enable on-screen numeric input on entity creation let's delete those and i'm going to make a line that's um 100 millimeters long so what do i do i eyeball it and then i drop in a dimension afterwards no no that's a big waste of my time instead what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to my system options and under sketch i'm going to turn on enable on-screen numeric input on entity creation and i'm also going to check the create dimension when only when value is entered i'm going to check both of them because if you only check if you only check the first one it's kind of useless but i'm going to check both of them and say okay and now what happens is when i sketch my line it asks me how long i want to make it so i say i want to make it 100 100 don't move my mouse and hit enter now it drops in a 100 millimeter long dimension i want this to be 40 e and 40 hit enter and now it's dropped a 40 in if i don't care what the length is i just click and it doesn't add a dimension and this is also why i say you have to if you key in a value don't move your mouse because as soon as i move my mouse now it's no longer an issue sketch expert for fixing over defined sketches let's make this line vertical even though it's already horizontal oh no it's broken my sketch it's over to find it so there's no solution found or it might say over defined i'm just going to click on the red text where it says no solution found or over defined and i can come up here and i can say diagnose or manual repair manual repair is boring it just shows me what's wrong with my sketch think diagnose shows me some solutions one solution is i could get rid of the vertical sketch relation the other option is i can get rid of the horizontal sketch relation so i can choose which one i want um choose accept and that fixes it um control the automatic sketch relations this is the one that i showed you just it better be yeah control automatic sketch relations this is where you hold down control when you're sketching it um shift to nearest increment that was the shift trick that i showed you uh delete the endpoints of a line okay so let's delete what i have here and i'm going to throw in some sketch stuff oh if you want to toggle that numeric input on and off after you have both check marks selected you can just right click and you can say there's a dimension with the number sign next to it you just click that so i've got that i'm also going to throw in a circle and a spline i'm going to use the split entities on for this part just because it's quicker to set up but um but it's not necessary in order to make this trick work so i have this uh i have these two lines up here these two straight lines they're collinear with one another but i'm going to delete the end point now what you're saying i know what you're saying you're saying you're thinking to yourself hey i've tried deleting the end point of a line i get this message that says it can't be deleted so what i'm going to do is i'm going to pick the end point where they meet and hit delete that deletes the end point and it makes it merges the two the two entities into a single entity that works with collinear lines it works for co-radial arcs so if i delete the endpoints here here and here turns it back into a circle with splines it's got to be tangent but when i delete it it keeps a control point there but it's it still merges it into into one spline and of course i can delete those control points or add them in as i see fit um hold shift during power trim makes it extend so i'm gonna drop a line in here and you know what i'll drop another line down here just so i can show the trick twice when i'm using my power trim command what i can do is if i hold down shift while i'm power trimming and i start out here in space and i go across instead of trimming the line up to next it will extend it up to next in the direction in which i've passed over the line s key well you've probably seen me do this a couple of times i can press the s key at any time and it gives me the shortcut menu so i don't have to keep going up to my toolbars in order to get access to commands i can customize this it's very context specific so if i'm in sketch mode or part mode or assembly mode or in a drawing i can get different commands at my fingertips here right click and say customize and this is the easiest way to get to customizing it and i just take commands and i drag and drop them oh also while i'm in here remember how i was saying that i can hold down shift in order to move a sketch entity as one if i have these shaded contours i can also select within the shaded contours and move that without having to hold shift but that works for closed sketches obviously i don't have uh i don't have shaded sketch contours on an open sketch so if i wanted to do it with these sketch entities i don't have a shaded region which to to move um right so i mentioned that my s key can access a bunch of frequently used commands but a lot of commands out of instinct i would go up and i go to my toolbar faster than i could faster than i can remember that i'm supposed to hit the s key so that went on for a couple of years until i decided i'm going to block my old workflow by pressing f10 to hide all my toolbars and f9 to hide my feature tree well the hiding my feature tree wasn't really a result of um of that but so f9 and f10 for hiding those things and last but not least hide show components with the tab key so let's um uh let's exit out of my sketch yeah we'll just get the changes and i'll jump back to my my assembly and what i'll do is yep we'll say okay and i'm going to hover over a component i'll hit the tab key tab tab tab tab in order to hide a bunch of components so that i can i can see what's going on behind them if i want to show them again if i know where they are or where they were i can hold down my shift key and i can hit tab what's going on hold hold down shift and hit tab shift tab in order to show them again if i don't know where the components were i can hold down ctrl shift and tab yes i'm holding down tab i'm not tapping it like i normally would and you can see all of my components ghosted out so i just click on a component and that toggle that shows it again click on a component that shows it again and i can let go and now i can see my components as i mentioned this presentation will be available to you afterwards you'll be sent an email [Music] and it'll have a pdf with all of these slides hopefully the screen grabs i did are consistent with uh with what you saw um so yeah i guess i guess we're finished slightly early where's my timer a couple of minutes early about six or seven minutes early so i'll open the floor to some some questions uh thank you all very much for attending um so if you have your own tips and tricks i'm always eager to learn some so feel free to type them in the chat and i'll i'll try to demonstrate some of them let's see what we have um customize menu maybe search commands um a lot of questions about um a lot of questions about the presentation as i mentioned it'll be uh it'll be available um there'll be there will be um i believe there will be an email blast send a follow-up email yes so you'll get you'll be sent an email and we'll we'll include the powerpoint with that and i believe there will also be a recording of the of the session um what else mouse gestures yes so with most gestures you can see if i drag with my right mouse button i can activate different commands and these are customizable so what i can do with that is let's go to tools customize and i can go under mouse gestures so i can customize these so i can say all right when i'm in assembly mode maybe i want to be able to edit uh edit part so i can come in here and i can find edit component the german i don't know if it's part or component um there we go edit part so i can drag this and i can make it so that dragging to the right makes it edit the component um another thing you can have in here is ok and cancel um so you can drag these so that if you're editing a part or sketch you can drag left so you can kind of swipe left or right for ok or cancel we we kind of joked that that was solidworks tinder um can i start a sketch on a face but have the main axis not horizontal um i think for that i think for that what you'd need to do i i the way i kind of interpret that question is is that when you create a sketch how if you look at these arrows here the longer arrow is vertical and the shorter arrow is horizontal you're probably thinking how do i get that so that it's more like that and that's kind of the only method that i can think of is i hold down alt and i use the the side to side arrows in order to rotate my view normal to the screen um no but then vertical is horizontal all relationships are 90 degrees okay um [Music] now i'm a bit lost try and write sideways for instance oh i think i i see you mean for sketched text you mean so what i can do with sketched text is i can drop in a center line and say define that and then i can pick that and use sketched text type something in there and it'll type it kind of along a side view aside edge questions about tip 12 which was tip 12. save section views for use on a drawing okay um i can i can take a look at that um the the thing with that is you have when you're dragging it in you have to drag in one of these views that has the section line on it i can't just drag and drop in a section view if i had a front view i can't drag and drop section aaa on to front and have it attach it's got to be the one with the with the arrows at least that's that's kind of in my experience with that i don't know what um what set that up um how to break a relation between a line endpoint and a circle center um i believe for that um there would be there should be a sketch relation between them that i should just be able to oh i can't okay so in a case like that so let's say i have this this i have my my center point of my circle that's coincident with the end point of that line unfortunately there isn't uh i don't know at least anyways of a um of a trick for detaching that oh there is a mode though that you can detach it i don't recommend using it but um sketch settings detach segment on drag so if i turn this on i should be able to oh i can't even do that even that doesn't work ah but i can move my line and that detaches it but the end point interestingly enough i can't i can't do that so that was tools sketch settings detach segment on drag but again i don't recommend doing that because if let's say you've sketched up a rectangle you break your rectangle as soon as you try and move it um best way of hiding or deleting some parts features of an imported part um now let's let's take a look so if i go back to my imported part um let's say i want it it depends on what the type of feature is usually i recommend using something like delete face so let's say i wanted to remove this hole under direct editing there's a command in here called delete face if i use the delete and patch method option this has a couple of different flavors but if i use delete and patch that'll stretch the adjacent faces in order to fill in the gap with the trim tool you can detach so yes i could have used the trim tool and i could have used the trim tool in two different ways and actually come to think of it i guess i didn't really demonstrate the the other cool trick you can do with with power trim so with trim entities i could drag and trim my line or if i start my power trim on the line i can control where the end point is this also works if let's say i have a t intersection here i can use it in order to temporarily say temporarily in order to break that that t relationship although it looks like it's not working right now so i wonder if it's special for if i have a center rectangle let's try using yeah let's just try making a t intersection with my with my sketch lines so i go back under trim entities you can see i can make a t with that um can i email you later you might find my question interesting um what's your what's your question or did you ask it sooner because if i might find it interesting uh some other people might oh hold on a minute you're the one who was asking about that uh vertical horizontal thing [Music] um [Music] don't hug time here ask shortcut to exit a sketch um for that you can assign a hotkey for ok or or cancel so if i go into tools options or sorry tools customize and i go to keyboard [Music] sketch sketch and maybe search your discard oh i can't find a discard okay usually i do a rebuild in order to um in order to apply the changes but i don't think there's really a hotkey to exit while discarding the changes um the solidworks have a redo command um you've probably you're probably very familiar with in solidworks how there's edit undo and edit can't redo can't redo works in sketch mode only so if let's say i delete a line i can go to edit undo in order to undo that but i can go edit redo in order to re re-delete that so redo does work but it only works in sketch mode as far as i've seen any way to link the custom property tab properties to a drawing sheet template um [Music] property tab customer well the property tab custom properties are mapped to the custom properties so if i go on my drawing they should map just like any other custom property so if i drop in a note i can go over here where it says link to property and i can come up here and i can link it to it'll be model found here because it'll be probably the part file or the assembly file rather than the drawing file and i can go to my custom properties drop-down and find my custom property in here something new and say okay and it'll drop in whatever the something new custom property is evaluated to on my assembly um is there a way to rotate the view about only one axis yes i usually use my arrow keys so if i jump back to a part or an assembly that's it in my sketch if i hold down shift and use the arrow keys i can rotate my view by 90 degree increments as opposed to just using the using the arrow keys which would be 15 degree increments and you can customize what those increments are but um best way of hiding some parts answered that one shortcut exit sketch talked about that sort of um change the vertical line spacing in a text sketch feature oh i know what you mean um let's go back into that sketch and i'll edit my sketch to text double click on something new type something out here and i want to change the line spacing so i'm going to go under document font and let's click on font and let's see if there's a setting in here i don't think yeah it doesn't look like there is if there was it would probably be in here but i don't see it so it doesn't appear that there is a way to change that um favorite um shortcut for a keyboard shortcut to extrude a sketch so ctrl shift e or ctrl shift c for cut or boss extrude so yeah keyboard shortcuts they're great i used to use o for circle i've kind of shied away from keyboard shortcuts myself just because oftentimes when i'm delivering demos or presentations i kind of want to make sure that i have kind of the default settings but back when i used to use it as a as a regular solidworks user i would have o as a as a circle because o kind of looks like a circle um make part of a spline straight as vertical or horizontal splines you can't you can't make them true vertical or horizontal unless they're two point splines in which case you pick the two end points and you make them vertical or horizontal uh to one another um section view with zonal sections so yeah if i take let's get out of my sketch i take a section view i can come to i can say there's section one here's section two section two let's pick a different plane i can move up and you can see i've got that um so i can i can set up a sort of a compound section view if that's what your if that's what you're referring to um so pick which edge becomes the local x-axis um oh can you redo the whole wizard favorites when i try it on this doesn't work on my machine with that one uh it does depend on which ver which version and service pack of solidworks you're using um i know there was a bug in uh i want to say 20 i want to say 2019 sp4 where the whole wizard favorites didn't work um so that might that might be why it doesn't work on your machine um webinars using apr to automate processes with macros um there might be i couldn't tell you off the top of my head whether there are processes or whether there are webinars for macros i would well imagine there would be but this is not one of them unfortunately question can i access okay let's go back down to the bottom i missed which button you clicked in order to do a section view based on where your mouse is pointed instead of applying a section view okay uh let's cancel out of this when i press the g key g for glass then if i hold down alt and i use my scroll wheel that that does the section view the localized section view i trust that's what you were asking about a webinar for rendering visualize um [Music] okay i'll put that forth as a suggestion um modify vertical line spacing by placing it in a new entity yeah so i could for my sketched text example here um if i wanted to change the the spacing in between it i could create a second a second center line in there and that would allow me to to control the the spacing in between it um but there like i say there's no there's no way to do it just from the individual command recording will help practice yep that's great um their way to do midpoint patterns so a single hole would spread out in four directions i can do it in two directions if i pick the same selection so if i let's say i i'll do it with a component pattern if i do a linear component pattern i can pick direction one and direction two as being the same selection i just have to make sure one other hey pick direction one and direction two is the same selection oh it's not letting me do that okay well i can pick parallel edges that'll work too i just have to make sure one of them is pointing in the opposite direction components to pattern i pick this and i can say let's add and we'll increase the pattern so i can do this as either a uh as either um one direction or two uh but the thing to keep out keep in mind with this is you want to turn off or turn on pattern seed only otherwise when you go in direction two you're going to get copies from your direction one which if you've got the same the same number here as on there i've seen i've seen errors resulting from that um i would love to view a webinar about custom properties and possibly macros okay i'll uh i'll put that one uh fourth as a suggestion as well okay um so okay so i think that's i think that's all oh wait no there's more over here um got that for symmetry can we select directly one of the three bass planes or axes to with a right click um [Music] it wouldn't be a right click but this is this goes back to one of the early tricks that i showed you where i can come up here to the eyeball and i can say turn on plane display and also hide show primary planes if i have one of my one of my components selected then i can come in here and i can pick my front plane or my right plane or my top plane um gotta run okay glad you guys liked it um [Music] all right so stefan i will reach out to you about that about that sketching question that you had oh in sketch mode can we use planes perpendicular to the view to mirror entities you can't use a plane unfortunately when you're in a sketch you can do it with a 3d sketch but with a 2d sketch now okay um so yeah i guess that uh that concludes the webinar uh thank you thank you all very much for attending um and yeah take care you

Channel: Javelin Technologies Inc. | A TriMech Company

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Id: 9QGpwvQV6gk

Length: 73min 40sec (4420 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 26 2020