From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2022 Essential Training

Creating your first 3D part - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2022 Essential Training

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Creating your first 3D part

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- Thank you for joining me for this SolidWorks quick start. In this chapter, I'm going to be showing you how to create assemblies, parts and drawings in a very quick four movies. We're not going to cover all the fine details but we will show you the essential tools you need to know to get up to speed quickly using the software. This section of the course is called the Quick Start Guide and I'm going to be showing you some of the basic steps for creating 3D solids inside of SolidWorks. To get started, let's go ahead and fire up a brand new part. Now I can either click on the home icon here at the top, or just click on New. And that gives me the option for a part, an assembly or a drawing. And I want to start with a part. So click on that and then click on OK. All right, now we're here and the first thing anything, that's going to be designed inside of SolidWorks needs to have is a sketch on a face or a plane. Now the planes are right over here. So you got the front plane, you got the top plane and you've got the right plane. And up here, we've got a couple different tool bars. So we've got the ribbon bar set up for sketch. We've got features, we've got sheet metal, evaluate. And again, these are modifiable. So I don't have to have these all turned on. In fact, if I don't want to see them, just go over here and turn off Sheet Metal. And now all you have is sketch, features and evaluate. We want to start with sketch though. So let's start to sketch. And SolidWorks knows that it has to draw a sketch on something. You can't just draw sketch in air. So it's going to say, hey, you've only got these three planes so why don't you choose one of these? So it doesn't really matter which plane you choose 'cause you can choose any one of them. But I like to recommend choosing something that's logical. If it's a top plane, that's going to be something that might be on the floor. If it's the front plane, it might be something you might put on a wall. If you choose the right plane, it might be another wall. So something like that, if you think about it spatially will make a lot of sense. And if you design parts in that same orientations, when you go to assemble them, they'll all kind of be in the right orientation when you bring 'em together. So let's go ahead and choose something like the top plane. Notice it highlights if I go over it. Click on that one and it spins around and now I'm in a sketch mode. Notice the icons changed over here on the right. So I'mma have the exit sketch as well as the cancel sketch icons. And then I've got these sketch tools turned on. So now what I can do is I can jump in and start using some of these tools. Now I know we haven't gone through and learned about each one of the tools, but if you've used any type of graphics program in the past, most of the time, this tools are pretty similar. We've got a line command, we've got a rectangle command, we've got a circle command. We've got a whole bunch of things up here we can create some nice shapes with. So let's just start with the basic line command. The line command is pretty straight forward. Click where you want to start and then click where you want to end, and that tool stays active. So if you want to make another line, just go ahead and click one more time and keep clicking as far as you want to go. When you're done, go ahead and click back to the original spot. The one requirement though is we do have one enclosed boundary. Notice that entire boundary turned a purple or a blue color there showing that, hey, we actually have a boundary. And if you hit Escape on the keyboard, it's going to turn that command off. So now I'm no longer in the line command. Now we can modify this by grabbing these little points and moving them around the screen. Just click with your left mouse button, move 'em around. I can choose the lines themselves as well. I can drag those around, so I can modify this on the screen. I can add things like dimensions. Go up here to the dimension tool, click where you want to start and then define where you want to dimension this part. So depending on where you place the dimension, it does change. So over here I can type in something like seven, and that will modify the part. So that dimension happens to be seven. Now of course we can define a lot more in this shape. And in fact, I want to make sure I'm tying my sketch into this origin here so it knows where it is in space. And we need a little bit more information for that. But right now we're focusing on the quick start. How do we create a shape? So here's my shape and that's all you need. So once you have an enclosed boundary, head over here to Features. Go over here to Extruded Boss/Base, click on that one and notice it spins it in 3D and it gives us this arrow. Grab that arrow and just drag it up. And there we have our first solid. You can define right over here on the left, the actual length. So if I type in something like four, it makes it four inches long. Click Okay and da, da. There it is. That's our first solid. So pretty straightforwards, right? So again, and to recap it's going to be choose a face or a plane. When you first start off, there is no faces, so you only have planes. You got these three planes right over here. They call those the three fundamental planes. So you're going to choose one of those, start drawing on it. And then we're going to create an enclosed boundary. And once we have an enclosed boundary, then we can extrude it. And now we have a 3D shape. Now that we have a shape though, we can then choose the individual faces of that part or we can choose those fundamental planes again. Your choice. So I'm going to choose that top surface there. And I've got this little popup window that shows up right here. And one of those things is called sketch. So it's another quick way to jump into a sketch and I'm going to choose something like a circle. Now I can draw on 3D if I want. Like, so I'm just going to put it right there. In fact, I can put multiple circles if I want to be really fancy. In fact, I can do a whole bunch of things at the same time. I can even create a rectangle. Pretty cool, right? Once you've got these shapes, now we have two options. We can either extrude them or we can cut 'em or we have a few other things but let's just focus on those two right now. So let's go ahead and try extrude, and that's going to do the same thing. Type in a value. Let's type two, and it's going to extrude those up. So now built onto my model. Now notice over here I've got the first feature and here's my second feature. If you want to roll back in time, you can grab this little thing called the history bar right here. Roll back to the beginning and you see nothing. Roll it forward, you can see the first feature, roll it forward a little more and you get one more feature, pretty cool. Inside of there are the sketches. So if you want to go in and change the shape of your part, go back to that sketch that defined it, modify it drag it out here or something like that, something wild, then exit out of that sketch and notice the part automatically updates, right? Did this part change? No, because that is a separate feature that uses a separate sketch. If you want to change that feature or that sketch, go ahead and change either the feature itself, which defines how long it is or the sketch, which shows what shape it is. So a couple different options there. Now, if you didn't like what you did here, you of course you can click on this and hit Delete on the keyboard, right? It's going to delete that feature, and then you still have that sketch. So if you want to get rid of that or you can just delete the sketch if you wanted, or you can use it for something else. How about we do an extrude cut this time? So I'm going to cut that into the part. Click OK and now I've cut a hole or a bunch holes. Pretty nice. So anyways, those are the basics for creating parts inside of SolidWorks. Again, to recap you choose a face or a plane, you draw a sketch. It generally needs to be an enclosed boundary and then either extrude it or if you already have a shape, you can cut into that shape and then just build one feature at a time to create your final shape.

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