From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2020 Essential Training

Surface tools - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2020 Essential Training

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Surface tools

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- [Instructor] SolidWorks has a great set of tools for working with surfaces. Now, I'm not going to be covering everything in the surfacing package, but I just want to give you a little teaser of some of the tools that are available. I actually have an entire course on SolidWorks surfacing if you're interested. But for right now, let's go ahead and turn on the Surfacing toolbar It is right up here under the regular tabs. Right click on any one of those and make sure you've got the Surfaces toolbar turned on and inside of there you can see we've got a whole bunch of new tools. So, the first tool I want to look at is this Extruded Surface. So Extrude Surface. I'm going to go ahead and choose a sketch. So I'm going to this sketch right here and notice that I can just click on this and drag it out. Right, just a straight extrude, very similar to a regular extrude, but instead of actually creating a solid we only have a thin surface. So that's just a example of a very straight simple extrude. You can go in both directions. You can even taper it if you wanted to or add some degrees to it and you can do some interesting things here with surfaces when you create them. But I'm going to go ahead and turn that one off. Make that zero. You can draft it and you can also go in a secondary direction if you'd like to as well. So, bunch of things you can do with creating a straight surface which is a surface extrude. Actually, let's go ahead and delete that one out. The next tool we're going to be looking at is the Swept Surface. So that one's going to allow me to take a profile and a path very similar to a regular sweep. For my profile, I can choose something like this line right here and for my path, I could choose something like this line right here. Go ahead and click on the Okay button and it's going to go ahead and take that shape there and it's going to sweep it along that other path. So pretty cool. You can create some pretty complex geometry very quickly using that tool. All right, how 'about a revolve? Now right over here is Revolve Surface. I'm going to go ahead and choose a sketch. Right, so this sketch over here is the one I want to do and right there is the sketch, sketch number three and my Axis of Rotation. So I'm going to choose this line right down here, click Okay, and it's going to revolve around creating a bowl shape. Now of course, if you go back to that feature right over here instead of that line, of course, you could go on there, hit Delete, and revolve it around this line. Right, you can choose if you want to go blind or up to, vertex up to surface, off set from surface, or mid-plane, bunch of options there and we can also choose how many degrees we'd like to go around. So in this case here, I'm going all the way around 360 degrees, but of course you can choose how many you'd like to go around. Go ahead and click on the green check mark and there are our surfaces. So, you can see there's a whole bunch of different surfacing tools up here. I don't have time to go through all of them, but many of the tools in surfaces work very very similar to the regular features inside of SolidWorks. So if you look at the Loft tool or the Sweep tool, they're going to be almost identical, but instead of creating a solid you'll end up with a surface.

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