From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2020 Essential Training

Understanding relationships - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2020 Essential Training

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Understanding relationships

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- [Male Voiceover] In this movie, we're going to be learning about sketch relationships. Now, we've already kind of covered how to create a sketch and how to modify a sketch, but let's go ahead and create a few lines and I'll show you what we're talking about. So I'm going to go ahead a choose the front plane, start a sketch, and I'm going to go ahead and start with the line command. Here's my line command, go ahead and grab that. I'm going to click once where I want to start and click again where I want to stop. All right, right here let's take a look at the screen. You can see we've got these little yellow lines and those are helper lines. They're saying "hey, if you want to make another line "and you want to make it at right angle "to the original line," I can come down here; and notice that little yellow box that pops up next to where my cursor is. And it's saying that if I were to click here, I would automatically add the relationship of perpendicular. So let's go ahead and try that out. So click there and notice it's added that relationship. Now over here, if I want to do that again, again it's going to add that perpendicular relationship. And if I just want to add lines not related to anything else at all, just click over here and I can just continue clicking, and clicking, and clicking, just adding lines. And notice as I start moving through the screen, I get these helper lines everywhere I go, and if I get close to something else, then I also get like a line that's blue that will say "hey, if you click over here, "it's also going to be aligned with this other point." So let's try clicking there, and then, when you're done creating lines, go ahead and hit Escape. Now notice over here, we've got this perpendicular relationship. If I hover over it, notice that two lines show up in pink or purple, highlighted, saying that "that relationship "is connected to these two other lines." Same thing down here, here's the two lines that are perpendicular to each other. Now if you don't like one of these relationships, you can just click on the box itself and hit Delete on your keyboard, and that's going to get rid of that. And now I can go ahead and just grab this line and move it around, and I have that ability to move things around and it's not perpendicular anymore, okay? But over here, this one is, I can move it around but it's always going to stay perpendicular. Now if you want to add a relationship that's not there, you can do it a couple different ways. One is I can choose the first line, hold down Control on my keyboard and select the second line, and as soon as I let go of the Control key, I get this little pop-up window here. So I can say "I'd like to make a line horizontal, "or vertical, or co-linear, or perpendicular. "Hey, that's the one I'm looking for, Perpendicular." Click on that and it automatically adds that relationship between these two lines. Now, we can also add things like dimensions. All right, so dimension might be a similar thing. Over here if I click on Smart Dimension, I could say "hey, I want a dimension from you, "down to you, and I want to make that 90 degrees." This is a 90 degree angle which is pretty much the same thing as perpendicular, so which one's better? Well if you need to modify this later and you want to use an angle, this might be great, but in general, adding relationships are going to be easier than creating dimensions. So I would recommend not using something like this and just going ahead and selecting the different lines by holding down Control, select both of those, and I can add it here or I can also come over here and say perpendicular and add that. How about over here, if I click on a line here, I could say "hey, I'd like to make that one horizontal." Over here if I want to make this line here vertical, click on that, and there's it vertical. So you can see I can easily add a whole bunch of relationships to create the shape I'm looking for. I can also drag, so if I want to drag a point and have it snap to another point. Notice as soon as I do that, these two points are now connected together and that's called a coincident relationship. If you want to delete something, just hit Delete on your keyboard and it's going to go away. If you don't like your relationship, click on the relationship itself and hit Delete, and it's going to go away. But you can easily add or remove relationships and I definitely recommend adding relationships versus adding a whole bunch of extra dimensions when you're drawing to keep them looking clean and nice. And we're going to be covering this a lot more as we go through the course, but that is the basics for using relationships and sketches inside of SolidWorks

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