From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2018 Essential Training

Creating your first 3D part - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2018 Essential Training

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Creating your first 3D part

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- [Narrator] 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 a 3D solid inside of SolidWorks. Now, I'm not going to have time to cover every single detail here. I just want to show you the basic workflow from creating a sketch, and then turning it into a 3D solid. So, to get started, let's go ahead and open up a brand new document. Now, you can choose either the little home button here at the top, or the new button. Either one of those will work. And let's go ahead and choose a part and click on OK. Once we're in the part environment, the first thing I need to look at is the available tools that I have. Now, I need to start every single part with a sketch. So, over here you can see I have features, but I can't create a feature before I have a sketch. So, if you click on the sketch toolbar, notice if I click on sketch to start a sketch, it gives me the option of a few different planes. Now, basically, think about it like a sheet of paper. If you want to start making a drawing, you need to have something to draw on. So, in the beginning, there's nothing really in SolidWorks. All you have is these three fundamental planes. So, you have the option of the front plane, the top plane, or the right plane. And you can see as I, kind of, mouse over these, they highlight. So, if I choose this first one here by clicking on it, notice it spins around so I'm looking directly at that, and now I'm creating a picture, or a drawing, or sketch on that plane. So I'm working on that front plane now. Notice, over here, I have a sketch one opened up. And now, I can start using some of the basic drawing tools. Now, if you've ever used any type of CAD application, or even drawing program, most of the tools are pretty similar. We've got lines, we've got rectangles, we've got slots, circles, arcs, polygons, splines, ellipses, text and so on. So, you have a whole bunch of different drawing tools and pretty much, they work very similar to many other drawing programs. To get started, let's go ahead and choose that line command. I'm going to click where I want to start. I'm going to click where I want to end, and notice the tool stays active, so I can just keep clicking as I go to create lines. Pretty straightforward and easy. When you're done, go ahead and close that sketch by going back to the beginning line segment. And notice it changes color and highlights it in gray. The key thing for creating any type of a solid is we have to have one enclosed boundary. Notice, this goes completely around, almost like thinking about creating like a swimming pool. Once you created an enclosed boundary, then SolidWorks knows how to fill that in to create a solid. Now, if you want to add other things to the center of this, that's just fine. Let's try out a circle. Add a circle, place it somewhere, and notice, we get a little bit of a shading action going on here. Now to turn that into a solid, we need to go over here to features. Click on features themselves, and we have a couple different options here. The first one is an extruded base or boss. That's just going to take this basic sketch right here and just drag it up out of the screen. Let's try that out. Click on the extruded boss or base. Click on that one, there. Notice it gives me this little highlighted section in yellow, and it gives me this nice little handle. Grab this thing and just pull it out, or push it back, either way. And that creates that solid for you. So, pretty straightforward and easy. I also have the option of going the opposite direction if I wanted to, or I can push that back in. And if you wanted to be highly technical, you can actually just type in the value. So, it's 4.0 and it goes out four inches. It's the other direction 1.0; it goes out one inch. And generally, that's how you're going to be creating parts in SolidWorks. You don't want to just pull them out to some obscure number. It's better to put in a real value. First off, we put in the values; second off, we click on OK, and now we've got a 3D solid file. So, that is the basic steps for going from a sketch, choosing a face or a plane, creating some type of geometry that's an enclosed boundary, and then pulling that out to being a 3D solid part.

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