From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Drawings

Smart dimensions - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Drawings

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Smart dimensions

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- [Instructor] Now that we're done talking about dimensions generally, let's focus in on the Smart Dimension feature. As I mentioned in the previous video, Smart Dimension lives in a few different locations. Typically you're either going to be on the View layout or Annotation tab when you're working in your drawing so you'll most likely find it right here. You can go ahead and click on Smart Dimension, you'll see that it changes the Property Manager on the left, and if you look at my cursor, I now have the Smart Dimension icon down in the bottom right. If I want to start adding dimensions, I simply start selecting entities inside of the sketch. So right now I'm going to select this corner right here and this corner in the bottom right of this view and you'll see that I automatically get a height dimension between those two items. And because I selected those two points, there's really not too many variations as I move around as to what that dimension can be. So I'm going to click again to add the dimension and if I want I can go up to the palate and make adjustments or make adjustments over here on the left. If I click on this line entity right here, it gives me the same effect as selecting those two points. I get the length across this line but you can see that it's got the whole line selected and it's parallel to it. If I click on a threaded hole that I've used Hole Wizard to create, it'll actually give me the dimension of that thread column, right there. If I zoom down to the bottom right, I can also add radius and distance between center point dimensions, so if I click on this outside radius I can have that dimension, click again to place it. I can also click two radii and now get the distance between their centers, which I've already got that dimension there. So I'm going to hit escape. If I zoom back out, I can also pick between hole centers. So if I choose this hole and this other hole here and then start moving around, I can get the dimension between them horizontally, the dimension between them vertically, the cord length dimension between the two. It gives me a lot of variability as I move around. So you see the Smart Dimension basically uses whatever entities you selected and tries to make a best guess as to what dimension you're trying to place. After all, there's only so many kinds of dimensions that we use inside of SOLIDWORKS, so typically you're probably going to have the Smart Dimension feature on and you're going to use that to add most of your dimensions unless you need an explicit variation.

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