From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2021 Essential Training

Navigating in the 3D workspace - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2021 Essential Training

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Navigating in the 3D workspace

- [Instructor] In this movie we're going to focus on navigating in the 3D environment. So the first thing I want to do is open up a file. So I'm going to go up to the top of the screen, click on open. And notice I've got Desktop, Exercise Files, chapter one, and then I'm going to open file 1.2. Go ahead and click on Open. All right, so the basics. If I want to rotate this model around, you need to have a three button mouse. Now if you hold down the middle mouse button, or the scroll wheel, so you can actually push down on that scroll wheel. That'll allow you to rotate the model right and left, and up and down. Now if you actually scroll, that'll zoom in and zoom out. And then if you hold down Shift on your keyboard, what that'll do is also zoom in and zoom out. Or you can hold down Control and then push down that middle mouse button. And that'll pan your model back and forth or up and down. All right so those are your basics for just moving your model around. Again, push down on the middle mouse button, which should give you rotate. Zoom in, zoom out, just by scrolling or holding down Shift. And then Control will pan. All right? Now at the top of the screen, you've got zoom to fit. Click on that, it'll just bring the model 100% into the window. Now if your model is somewhere way out there, hit that button and you'll bring it in. And same thing if it's way out there or somewhere you can't find it. If you hit F on the keyboard, that'll also bring that or zoom to fit. And notice if you look on the little dropdown here, it says zoom to fit. And then it says a little F, that is the fit. Next one is going to be zoom to area. Click on that and go ahead and drag a little box around what you'd like to look at. Let go, and it's going to zoom in to that area. Now if you want to go back to the previous view, go ahead and click on this next icon here which is previous view. And it takes you back to where you were. The next one is section view. A section view is going to allow you to use a section plane to cut through your model to look at the inside of it. Now I can grab that and I can slide it up through the part. Or I can switch to a different plane. Like this one over here might be the top plane. And then I can just drag that through my model and see what's going on inside there. Same thing with the right plane, drag it through. Or you can even grab one of these and rotate it around. So bunch of things you can do there. When you're done, click on okay and it's going to cut that model in half. But this is just a visual representation. It's not the real model, right? I'm just looking at it sliced in half. But if you turn that feature off, your whole model comes back. Next one is going to be the view orientation. If you click on the dropdown, it gives you this heads up display called the view cube. And that has a whole bunch of options of how you might want to look at the model. Choose any one of those faces and it's going to spin around so you're looking directly at it. Now there's a whole bunch of other views you can choose directly from this menu here. But they're all pretty much the same views here, which you might find down here on the view cube. All right? Pick one of those. Next one is going to be be the display style. So at the top, you've got shaded with edges. Which is most of the time, the way I design inside of SolidWorks. But you can also turn those edges off. So you just have a shaded mode. which looks like this. Go a little further and say I want hidden lines removed. And a little further you're going to have hidden lines visible so you can see through there a little bit. Next one is going to be a wireframe mode. Which you can see everything inside there as full lines. And this is really helpful if you're trying to inspect a part and see what's going on inside, even see through it. You can see a lot of detail here. But it's a little hard to see what's really going on. So I prefer to maybe switch over this to get an x-ray view and then switch back over here to the shaded with edges for most of my modeling. The next one is the view pallet and it's going to allow you to turn on or turn off things you're going to see on the screen. So if you don't want to see sketches, you could turn them off over here. If you didn't want to see dimensions, you could turn them off over there. You get a whole bunch of different options in that menu. Next couple things here are the edit appearance. So you can change the color, the material, the look of a lot of different things inside of SolidWorks. And you can access to that here. And we'll get into that a little bit later. But I do want to point out where that is. And the next one's going to be scene. So notice the background here is what's called three point faded. You can switch to plain white. Notice the change to the background. You could come to like a rooftop mode and it's going to change that to a different color. So a bunch of different options there. Let me go ahead and switch back to three point faded. And then the last one up here is the view settings. So you can turn on things like real view graphics. Which is going to make things look a little prettier. Shaded mode. You can turn on the ambient occlusion. You can turn on perspective. You can turn on cartoon. You get all these options. but those are all going to slow down your modeling performance. So turn 'em on if you want to show it off. But I generally recommend turning all of these things off when you're not using them 'Cause they're just going to slow down your computer. So that's your heads up display. You now know how to rotate the model by holding down the middle mouse button. And then let's go ahead and look over here at the feature manager. The feature manager is pretty much where everything happens inside of a model. You can see here is my first feature. Then I've got this cut on the side. I've got these two holes here. And I got this little triangle on the top. Now this little bar here is called the history bar. And I can actually roll that back. Remember I told you earlier that this is a history based modeler. So I can grab that bar. I can roll this back to here. And notice we're starting with nothing. We've got these three planes, we've got an origin, but that's it. Now if I roll that forward, notice I've got a block. And that block has below it a sketch. So that sketch was extruded to create that block. Now let's go a little further by grabbing that history bar and moving it down one more feature. And then now we've added this little hole. This cut feature also has a sketch. So I chose this face here. I drew a sketch and I just cut that hole into the part. Go a little further. I've added a couple more. So I chose a different face. Drew a sketch which looks like this, and I cut it into the part a certain distance. And finally, we've got this little triangle on the top. Again I drew a sketch. And this time I extruded it up out of the part. So that's how you go through and build a part in SolidWorks. It's little individual blocks or a little individual features that all kind of start with a sketch, and then you're going to do something to it. You're going to cut it into your part. You're going to extrude it out of your part. You might revolve it. You might sweep it. And we're going to get into all these little things as we go through the course, but that's how a part is built inside of SolidWorks.

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