From the course: Cert Prep: Certified SOLIDWORKS Professional

Sweeps and lofts - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: Cert Prep: Certified SOLIDWORKS Professional

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Sweeps and lofts

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- In this movie, we're going to be going over lofts and sweeps. To get started, let's look at this loft here. So I've basically just taken the top line and drawn a circle on it. Now anytime we think about a loft, we're going to be transitioning from one shape to another. So I need to have at least two sketches first, before I can start creating that shape. So I have my first sketch here, so I want to go create a new sketch up above this one. So there's no plane there, so that's the first thing I need to do is go ahead and create a new plane. So let's go up to Reference Geometry, click on Plane, and as my first reference, I'm just going to choose that top plane that's already there, which is preselected here. And then give it a value, so if I click on this, I can just move this up. And I'm going to choose 90 millimeters; click okay. Now I have a new plane up above that. Choose that plane, and go back to Sketch, and start a sketch. Now I'm just going to draw one more circle here. There's my circle, and then exit out of that sketch. So you can see I've got one big circle on the bottom, one small circle on the top, and I'm going to transition a shape from one to the other and that's going to be called a loft. So go over to loft, choose my profile, so Sketch2, and Sketch1, there it is. You can see those come together. Now keep in mind, see this little green dot here, make sure that that lines up the right way so you get a nice shape, 'cause what happens if you get that twisted around, you can get a weird shape because it's connecting those two dots together. So let's make sure that those are lined up, and then click on okay. So that's the basics for a lofted feature. Now they can get a lot more complicated than that. You can have multiple sketches and multiple transitions they're going to be going through, but on the exam, I don't see a lot of loft features. More are going to be extrudes and revolves but it is very important that you know this just in case they throw a curveball at us and add a loft or sweep to the exam. Now back to the sweep. The sweep is going to be one constant profile that's swept along that path. So you can see here I've got Sketch1 is just a circle and then I have Sketch2, which is kind of the sweeping line here. So to do a sweep it's pretty straight forward. Just click on Swept Boss or Base. For my profile I'm going to choose this one down here and for my path I'm going to choose this one right here. And just that easy, I've created that shape. Now if that's not what you want to create, you can just click on it and click delete. Now if I wanted to do it the other direction, I could start from this point here. And a quick way to do that is click on the endpoint itself, then hold down control and choose the line that's connected to that point and then click on a Reference Geometry, Plane. What that does is put a plane at the very end of that. Notice where it is: at that point, on that arc. There it is. Then I can draw or start a new sketch on there. So I'm going to draw a rectangle. You can connect it however you'd like. But there's my rectangle. And then go back to Features, exit out of that, and go to Swept Boss or Base. That's my profile; this is going to be my path. There it is. And just that quickly I was able to create a different type of sweep, all from the basic same sketch entities. So those are the profiles and paths that I need to create a shape. There are all types of other things I can do with this command. I can twist it along the path, I can add guide curves and all kinds of other things, but that's your basics you're going to need to know.

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