From the course: Learning SOLIDWORKS Composer

Using the transform tools - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: Learning SOLIDWORKS Composer

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Using the transform tools

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- [Instructor] In this module, we're going to take a look at generating some explode views. Explode views can be very useful to help show internal items within your products, and can also help show the order of assembly. So I'm just going to navigate to my transform tab, and this is where I can see pretty much all of my motion or movement commands. We're going to learn a lot more of these later in the course, however, we'll take a look at a few of the move commands and some of the explode commands while generating some explode views. So the three move commands that I use most frequently will be the free drag, translate, and rotate. And all I'd have to do is click or select whichever component or actor I'd like. Let's start with the propeller here. And of course, I can either translate this, rotate it, or use free drag. So if I use free drag, this, again, I can just kind of click and drag and it will move anywhere in my 3D space. This option, I don't use too often as I don't have too much control over exactly where it's going, it's just moving somewhere off in 3D space. So I'll just undo this with control Z. But more often I'm using translate or rotate, so I'll just try rotate here. And as soon as I click rotate, I can see my triad appearing over top of my actor. So here I can click and drag on whichever axis of this triad I would like to rotate about. So let's try to grab this axis here, and click and drag, and now I can see my propeller rotating. Very similarly, I have the translate tab, so I can just click on translate and grab the actor I'd like to move, in this case the propeller. Again, I have my triad popping up, and click and drag to translate about whichever axis I'd like. So in this case, probably click and drag about my green y-axis, and move up to explode slightly. Then, just repeat these steps for whichever other geometry actors I'd like. Maybe I want to explode out my motor, so I'll just click the motor here and translate up. And then maybe also explode out a few of my screws. Now, it's important to note here to select my screws, of course I can just click on the screws in my workspace. I can also multi-select holding down the control key, or I can navigate to the assembly tree and grab my components through here as well. So let's try to find some of my screws and grab my four screws as required here. So again, I'm just holding down the control key here to multi-select, and once I've grabbed all four, I can click and drag, let's say down in this case, in that same y direction. Once I'm happy here, I can see a explode view of my motor and propeller, and maybe just to finish off, I can fine tune this view slightly, jump into my views tab, and create one more new view, and right click, rename, explode view.

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