From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2016 Essential Training

Creating your first 3D part - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2016 Essential Training

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Creating your first 3D part

- This section of the course is called the Quick Start Guide. I'm going to be showing you a walkthrough of creating a part from a sketch. I'm not going to be covering every single thing I'm going to be doing because we'll be doing that later on in the course. The focus here is just to show you the steps required to go through and build a solid model. The first thing I want to do is click on the "New" icon here at the top and choose "part." Click on "okay" and the window opens up. Now the first thing I need to do is to create a sketch. You have to create a sketch on an individual face or plane. Now you can see there's nothing on the screen to start drawing on. So I need to choose one of the three fundamental planes to start with. Over here in the feature manager you can see I have a front plane a top plane, and a right plane. It doesn't really matter which one of these you choose but you do need to choose one of those to get started. Think of the front plane like something you might see directly in front of you. The top plane could be the floor, And a right plane could be a wall on your right or left. So depending on what type of part you're designing, you might choose one of those. If you click on the front plane, notice how you get this little pop up window that shows up here. The very first icon is "sketch." I also have that same exact icon right up here at the top. So the process is one, choose a plane to draw on and then start a sketch. As soon as I click on sketch, notice that plane spins around so I'm looking straight at it like a sheet of paper and now I have the drawing tools available to me to start making a drawing. A couple requirements: Number one is I need to have an enclosed shape. Is a circle an enclosed shape? Yes. Is a square? Yes. Is a line? No. So I need to have a circle or a rectangle or a slot Any one of these shapes I can take and turn that into a 3D shape. In fact, I can take all three of them at the same time and turn them into three individual pieces. However, let's go ahead and delete those for right now. So I'm going to click and drag, select all those, and click on delete. Let's go back to the line tool. So with my line tool, again I'm going to be looking normal to the sketch plane I'm looking at. By the way, I just got to that window by clicking on the space bar on my keyboard. And start with the line tool. Now, an individual line like this, I can't extrude into a 3D shape. But if I continue that shape around I can enclose that boundary and now I have a shape that can be converted into a 3D shape. Think about that as almost like a perimeter. It has to be one enclosed perimeter. Now I can turn it into a 3D part. Click on "features," go up to "extruded bass/boss" I'm going to take this 2D shape and I'm just going to drag that into 3D. I can drag it the other direction, if I wanted to, as well. And I can actually type in the hard value here of how far I'd like to extrude it. So if I click on four inches, click on the green check mark up here or over here. Now I've created my very first 3D part. You can see the process is fairly simple. Select a face or plane, draw a sketch, and then extrude it out. Those are the steps. It's very straightforward and easy to do. Now there's a lot more complexity as we start getting into more advanced drawing tools and defining exact sizes and shapes but those are the basics for creating a simple 3D cad file.

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