From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2020 Essential Training

Creating your first 3D part - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2020 Essential Training

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Creating your first 3D part

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- [Instructor] This section of the course is called the quick start guide. And I'm going to be showing you some of the basic steps for creating 3D solids inside of SolidWorks. To get started, let's go ahead and fire up a brand new part. Now I can either click on the home icon here at the top, or just click on new, and that gives me the option for a part, an assembly, or a drawing, and I want to start with a part, so click on that and then click on okay. All right, now we're here and the first thing anything that's going to be designed inside of SolidWorks needs to have is a sketch on a face or a plane. Now, the planes are right over here. So you got the front plane, you got the top plane, and you've got the right plane. And up here we've got a couple different toolbars, so we've got the ribbon bar set up for sketch, or we got features, we got sheet metal, evaluate, and again, these are modifiable, so I don't have to have these all turned on. In fact, if I don't want to see them, just go over here and turn off sheet metal, and then all you have is sketch, features, and evaluate. We want to start with sketch though, so let's start a sketch. And SolidWorks knows that it has to draw a sketch on some thing, you can't just draw a sketch in air, so it's going to say hey, you've only got these three planes, so why don't you choose one of these? So, it doesn't really matter which plane you choose, 'cause you can choose any one of them, but I like to recommend choosing something that's logical. If it's the top plane, that's going to be something that might be on the floor. If it's the front plane, it might be something you might put on a wall. If you choose the right plane, it might be another wall. So, something like that if you think about it spatially, will make a lot of sense. And if you design parts in that same orientation, when you go to assemble them, they'll all kind of be in the right orientation when you bring them together. So let's go ahead and choose something like the top plane. Notice it highlights if I go over it, click on that one, and it spins around and now I'm in a sketch mode. Notice the icons change over here on the right, so I'm going to have the exit sketch, as well as the cancel sketch icons, and then I've got these sketch tools turned on. So now what I can do is I can jump in and start using some of these tools. Now I know we haven't gone through and learned about each one of the tools, but if you've used any type of graphics program in the past, most of the time those tools are pretty similar. We've got a line command, we got a rectangle command, we got a circle command, we've got a whole bunch of things up here that we can create some nice shapes with. So let's just start with the basic line command. The line command is pretty straightforward, click where you want to start, and then click where you want to end. And that tool stays active, so if you want to make another line, just go ahead and click one more time, and keep clicking as far as you want to go. When you're done, go ahead and click back to the original spot. The one requirement though is we do have one enclosed boundary. Notice that entire boundary turned a purple or a blue color there, showing that hey, we actually have a boundary. And if you hit Escape on the keyboard, it's going to turn that command off. So now I'm no longer in the line command. Now we can modify this by grabbing these little points and moving them around the screen. So just click with your left-mouse button, move 'em around. I can choose the lines themselves as well, I can drag those around. So I can modify this on the screen. I can add things like dimensions. Go up here to the dimension tool, click where you want to start, and then define where you want to dimension this part, so depending on where you place the dimension, it does change. So over here, I could type in something like seven, and that will modify the part, so that dimension happens to be seven. Now of course we can define a lot more in this shape. And in fact, I want to make sure I'm tying my sketch into this origin here so it knows where it is in space, and we need a little bit more information for that, but right now we're focusing on the quick start, how do we create a shape? So here's my shape, and that's all you need. So once you have an enclosed boundary, head over here to features. Go over here to extruded boss or base, click on that one, and notice it spins it in 3D and it gives us this arrow. Grab that arrow and just drag it up, and there we have our first solid. You can define, right over here on the left, the actual length. So if I type in something like four, it makes it four inches long. Click okay and ta-da, there it is. That's our first solid. So pretty straightforward and easy, right? So, again, to recap, it's going to be choose a face or a plane. When you first start off, there is no faces, so you only have planes. You got these three planes right over here, they call those the three fundamental planes. So you're going to choose one of those, start drawing on it, and then we're going to create an enclosed boundary, and once we have an enclosed boundary, then we can extrude it, and now we have a 3D shape. Now that we have a shape though, we can then choose the individual faces of that part, or we can choose those fundamental planes again, your choice. So I'm going to choose that top surface there, and I've got this little pop up window that shows up right here, and one of those things is called sketch, so it's another quick way to jump into a sketch. And I'm going to choose something like a circle. Now I can draw in 3D if I want, like so I'm just going to put it right there. In fact, I can put multiple circles if I want to be really fancy. And in fact, I can do a whole bunch of things at the same time, I can even create a rectangle. Pretty cool right? Once you got these shapes, now we have two options. We can either extrude 'em, or we can cut 'em, or we have a few other things, but let's just focus on those two right now. So, let's go ahead and try extrude. And that's going to do the same thing. Type in a value, let's type two, and it's going to extrude those up, so now we've built onto my model. And notice over here, I've got the first feature, and here's my second feature, and if you want to roll back in time, you can grab this little thing called the history bar right here. Roll it back to the beginning, and you see nothing, roll it forward and you see the first feature, roll it forward a little more, and you get one more feature, pretty cool. Inside of there are the sketches, so if you want to go in and change the shape of your part, go back to that sketch to defined it, modify it, drag it out here something like that, something wild, then exit out of that sketch, and notice the part automatically updates. Right, did this part change? No, because that is a separate feature that uses a separate sketch. If you want to change that feature or that sketch, go ahead and change it either the feature itself, which defines how long it is, or the sketch, which shows what shape it is. So couple different options there. Now if you didn't like what you did here, of course you can click on this and hit Delete on the keyboard, right? It's going to delete that feature and then you still have that sketch, so if you want to get rid of that, or you could just delete the sketch if you wanted, or you can use it for something else. How about we do an extrude cut this time? So I'm going to cut that into the part. Click okay, and now I've cut a hole, or a bunch of holes, pretty nice. So anyways, those are the basics for creating parts inside of SolidWorks. Again, to recap, you choose a face or a plane, you draw a sketch, it generally needs to be an enclosed boundary, and then either extrude it, or if you already have a shape, you can cut into that shape, and then just build one feature at a time to create your final shape.

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