From the course: SOLIDWORKS: 3D Printed Product Enclosure

Use fillets to make the case more visually appealing - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS: 3D Printed Product Enclosure

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Use fillets to make the case more visually appealing

- [Instructor] Now we have our enclosure assembly set up with the top and bottom halves of the enclosure, and then the PCB inside them. And we can see the very basics of how this assembly will work. But if you look at the model, you can see it looks quite angular and blocky, and it's just not very visually appealing. And if we held this model in our hands, it probably wouldn't be very comfortable with these sharp edges and corners. So we're going to round these off using the fillet tool. from within your assembly, let's open the enclosure parent parts, and you can do this just by left clicking on it in the parent's tree and pressing open part. So now if we make changes to the single parent part, those changes will be pulled through to both of those new child parts. But the only features that will pull through are features that we add before the split feature in the design tree. To add features before the split feature, we need to drag the rollback bar up above that feature. So this is the rollback bar, the blue bar at the bottom of the design tree. If you hover your mouse over it, you should see that your cursor changes to this small hand symbol, so just left click and drag that bar up above the split feature, and then release it. And you can now see that the split is removed from the model. So that feature is effectively turned off, and any new features that we add will be added at this point in the model. So let's add our fillets now. Select the fillet tool, so go to the features tab and click on fillet. Make sure that you're on a constant size fillet which should be the first option here. And then let's just set the size as five millimeters. So now we can just select these four outer edges, just left click to select them. And if you select the wrong one by mistake something like this, you can just left click to unselect it. You can also right click on it here and press Delete. So let's select those four outer edges. And when they're selected, just press okay. Now we can grab the rollback bar again, just by left clicking and dragging it, and then move all the way down to the bottom. So now the split feature is back in the model. So then if we use Ctrl and Tab to get back to our assembly, we can see that those fillets are now also on the two new child parts. If you can't see them there, you might just need to rebuild your assembly by clicking this rebuild button at the top and you can also press Ctrl B. So if I just quickly go back to the parent parts by pressing Ctrl-Tab, you don't have to follow along with this bit. It's just for your information. If we were to drag that fillet feature below the split feature. Firstly, you can see the fillet is only applied to one of the bodies. But now if I Ctrl-Tab back to the assembly again, you can see those fillets haven't pulled through to the to new parts. So your fillet feature needs to be before the split feature in the design tree. So if I go back to the parent part again and then drag that fillet feature up and then go back to the assembly again. You can now see that the fillets have pulled through. So let's Ctrl-Tab back to that enclosure parent part again. And let's just add another fillet feature to round off these other corners. So drag the rollback bar above the split feature again, but below that new fillet feature. And this time, let's select the fillet tool again. And let's set the size as 2.5 millimeters. And let's just add a fillet to this top edge and this bottom edge and press okay. And now you can drag the rollback bar back down to the bottom. Then finally one last thing that we're going to do. If we look at a cross section view, we can see that in these corners, we don't have the uniform wall thickness anymore. It's actually a little bit thinner in the corner there. So all we need to do to fix this is grab the shell feature by left clicking and dragging and move it down below the fillet features and then just release it. So now you can see that the shell feature is taking information from those fillet features. So now we've got a constant wall thickness around there, and then you can close the cross section tool. So now if I Ctrl-Tab back to the assembly, you can see all of those fillets are pulled through. And if I hide the top part, you can see we've got a nice uniform wall thickness around there. So then I can just reshare that top part and then save the assembly by pressing Ctrl S.

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