From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Sketching

What you should know - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Sketching

Start my 1-month free trial

What you should know

“

- [Instructor] Before starting this course, there are a few things that you need to know. First off, I want to introduce you to my customized interface. So you may notice that I have features like intersection curve, sketch picture, split entities and face curve on my command ribbon and you don't. That's because I've customized it. If you right-click on the command ribbon and hit customize, then go to the shortcuts bar, you can then pick from the various toolbars and simply drag and drop an icon where you want it. So for example, if I want to add a sketch feature, I'm going to go ahead and add a sketch picture, and you can add multiples. I'm going to single-click down on this icon, drag it out to the command ribbon and you see the little cursor moving as I move it along, and then let go. And I've added that icon. If I've added it on mistake, you notice I have two sketch pictures here, I can simply click down on it, hold that left mouse button and drag it back into the window, and it'll get rid of it. Notice that that little red x came up. So I'm going to do that one more time, I'm going to drag the sketch icon out, the sketch picture icon out, let go, then I'm going to grab it and just drag it back in. You'll see that little red and white x and now I've edited that. So that's one thing that you'll want to be aware of. Another one is if there's a command or function that you're not sure where I got it. You can always search for it up here in the command search. If you click on this drop down right here and select commands, you can then type in and use this like Google. Spine Tools, for example, you might not know where that toolbar is, but here you'll see that it pops up right away and if I click on Spine Tools it makes that toolbar pop up. I can just x it to get rid of it. But if I wanted to know where that location was I can hit enter on that again, get my drop down list here of results. Then if I click on the eyeball that says show command location and then just let go of my mouse, SOLIDWORKS will actually navigate to the location of that. So it went to view, toolbars, and if I scroll down you can see right here the Spine Tools which I can turn on and turn off. So those are just a couple things that I do. One other thing that I want to mention is that I have some hotkeys that I use. If you right-click on the command ribbon, go back to customize and go to keyboard, you can see here the hotkeys or shortcuts that are listed on the screen. If you click on this shortcuts option a couple times it'll sort it by the ones that you're actually using. You'll notice down here that I've got some related to sketches and let's just find those really quick. So here I've got center line, which I use i for regular line, I use l. And I also have a hotkey for the d which will turn on my Smart Dimension. So if you notice that I've activated the Smart Dimension or just created a line by default, that's because I'm using hotkeys. And we'll make sure to show those on the screen so that you can follow along. So these are just a few things you should know. Outside of the interface issues that could be confusing, you should also have a decent handle on geometry, trigonometry and basic math principles to be able to do some of the sketch relations that are going to come up when using the various features like arcs, lines and making things parallel for example, or perpendicular, you're going to have to understand what that means to be able to leverage those features. So for this course, that's really all you need to know. And we're going to jump right in.

Contents