Create sketches - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

- Sketches are the foundation of just about everything inside of SolidWorks. So definitely spend the time to get good at sketching. And learn how to sketch effectively and efficiently. That's very important. Okay. Now let me show you how to start a sketch. Now, just like if you're going to start a sketch on a sheet of paper in your office, you know, you'd have to go get the piece of paper. You can put it on your desk, your pen out, and you're going to start drawing on that piece of paper, which happens to be on your desk. Now you can think about that desk, like a plane. And we have that in here as well. So we have what's called like the top plane. You could think about that, like your desk. And you can think of the front plane, like something like your wall and the right plane It might be like another wall, right? So first, whenever you want to start a sketch, you have to choose which one of those things you want to draw on. And it doesn't really matter which one you choose. But you know, if you're going to do something that, you know, would extruded up like a table, maybe like a leg, it might make sense to draw it like on the table or on the ground. So you can extrude it straight up. Whereas if it's going to be something that's coming out of the wall, you might choose the front plane or the right plane. Yeah, of course, when you start assembling things together, you can spin them around, do whatever you want, but defining it originally kind of in a logical fashion, just makes things a lot easier as we go through it. But to get started, we've got these three fundamental planes, right? We've got the front plane, the top plane, the right plane. And I need to choose one of those to start my sketch. So I can choose it multiple ways. Right here i can choose top plane. And I've got this little thing, a little icon that pops up says, sketch, that's one option, choose here. Or I can come up here to sketch. I can say, you know, I'd like to start a sketch right there. A couple of ways. So let's just go ahead and do that. So start a sketch and then notice as soon as I do that, my plane spins around. So I'm looking right down on top of it, which is called normal too. And now I can start drawing. And I've got a whole bunch of drawing tools and they're fun to play with. And they're happened to be right here. So I've got all your usual suspects, right? I got the line. I got the center line, I've got rectangle, circle. And if you've used any other drawing package, if you've used illustrator or Photoshop or, you know, paint, whatever, I mean, they all pretty much have the same controls. They allow you to draw lines. So they'd allow you to draw us splines or circles, rectangles and so on. And these tools all pretty much work exactly the same. Now, of course, I can tell you all the fine details and they do work slightly different from the other programs, but applying tools, is going to work pretty similar. You click where you want to start. You click where you want to end. That's about it pretty straight forward. If you want more details, I have a course called SolidWorks essential training, and that goes into each one of those tools in a lot more detail, when this course is kind of up and running, get going quick and more than likely you probably figured out the line tool on your own, okay, I'm going to click on that line. I'm going to hit delete. And now I'm going to go ahead and draw a rectangle. So here's my rectangle click on the origin and drag out a rectangle. So I'm going to click where I start and click where you want to end. And that's my rectangle. And I've got these little green boxes here, which are called relationships, and I've got a whole bunch of the things that happen here behind the scenes. But real reality here, I just got a basic rectangle. Now I do want to point out it's always good during practice to start your design attached to that origin or somehow related to that origin. Cause that origin is the only thing that is fixed in space. It's just the starting point for everything. And it notices or actually, you will notice that is you start attaching things, to things that aren't moving like the origin, the lines turn black. Notice these black lines here. And these others over here, blue. Well, the reason they're blue is because I can still move them around, right? Whereas one's attached over here, I can't move it around and we'll be jumping into that in a lot more depth as we go into relationships. And that's what the little green green boxes are here and that's going to be the next movie. But for right now, I just want to show you how easy is to create a sketch. So here's my sketch. And of course, I'm going to add dimensions and do a bunch of other things later, but right now let's just go ahead and go up to features, come over here to extruded boss or base. I'm going to drag that little arrow there and you can see there, it's pretty straight forward and easy to just go ahead and create a shape inside of solvers. So here's my feature right, below that is that sketch I just created. And that sketch happens to be on that top plane right there. It's using the origin as well. So it knows these little lines are showing you what's being used in that sketch, in that feature. So that those are all kind of helpful things to learn about. And see what's happening when you're creating sketches inside of SolidWorks. And if you want to go back and modify that sketch, of course we can click on that sketch. Here it is. And come up here and say, edit sketch, right? Here's my sketch. Grab it. You can move it around when you exit out, guess what? The blocks' smaller. So anything you want to do to that sketch. You can also do it here, right? So if I want to go back over here to the sketch and I say, hey, I'd love to have a nice little circle in the center. I'm going to click on the space bar, which I have set up to automatically make my view normal too Otherwise, you can just come up here and click on this one normal, or there's a view cube that pops up as well. If you hit the space bar. So mine just clips to normal too. If you have a default installation of solvers, you'll get to this view cube. I happen to hit the view cube just cause there's one extra step. And I pretty much always click on normal too. So just kind of bypass it, but you know, it's your choice. Anyways, if you wanted to change this, you can click on like a circle add a circle in the center and then exit out. And guess what? That feature now has a circle in the center of it because I modified the sketch and the feature automatically follows along. So anyways, that is the basics for creating sketches. Now I've only created this one sketch so far. So if I wanted to create another sketch I can either choose a front plane, top plane, right plane, which we've already started with. But now we got more options. We have the option of choosing a face, any face, as long as it's flat. So I can choose a flat face on my model like this one up here at the top and say, hey, let's start a sketch there. And how about a circle? Let's put a circle over there. No problem. Now I can draw on 3D if I want or I can click on normal and I can spin it around. So I'm looking straight down. It doesn't matter. Covert your features. Let's try cut. Extruded. Cut. Let's cut through our model click. Okay. And there it is. So you can start a sketch on either a face or a plane. When you're first getting started, it's got to be one of those three fundamental planes that I've shown you. It's best to tie back into the origin. And then once you've got a model being created, then you can choose any of the flat faces of that model to create sketches on. But you can still always go back and use any one of those fundamental planes. So your choice and that's the basics for setting up and creating sketches in SolidWorks.