From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2022 Essential Training

Creating sketches - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2022 Essential Training

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Creating sketches

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- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to be diving in depth into creating sketches and some of the idiosyncrasies of how we can create them in SolidWorks. So we've already looked at this a few times now, as far as creating a sketch, we need a face or a plane. I'm going to go ahead and choose the front plane here. And then I'm going to go ahead and choose a sketch. This is one way we can easily do that by clicking on the in context Window that pops up, start a sketch. Okay, now the main requirement for a sketch is that we need to have an enclosed boundary, right? And we want to tie things into the origin. We want to fully define everything but those are not hard requirements. Those are good design practices. So we want to do that if we're actually designing something, but in this movie we're really looking at just how sketches are created. So let's go ahead and start with a circle. Here's my circle, I'm going to draw it over here. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw a rectangle right inside. Now you're saying, well it kind of looks like an enclosed boundary but then what SolidWorks is going to do, how's it going to know what to do here with these two things. Let's go ahead and take a at this feature. Go to features, go to extrude boss base. And what it does is if you have a enclosed boundary inside of another enclosed boundary it creates what's called an Island. And it just creates the material between the two enclosed boundaries. That's one option of how you can use a sketch to create a feature. Now let's go back and learn a little bit more about that sketch. So go back over here, twirl this down, look at the sketch itself and click on edit sketch. This time, I'm going to click normal to it again. So I'm looking straight down at that and I want to grab this rectangle and I want to make it just bigger than the circle, right? What's going to happen there, exit out and you can see exactly the same happened because when you're modifying a sketch it doesn't modify the feature. The feature is only going to take whatever's in the sketch and extruded a certain amount. Now, before I had the rectangle inside of the circle, it just said, hey, that's fine. Take the area between the circle and the rectangle and extrude it out. And if I made the rectangle bigger than the circle it's going to do the exact same thing. It's going to say, I'm just going to create this boundary between the two and extrude it out. Now, if you want to change the feature itself you come over here to editing the feature click to the first one here, edit feature and define how long this is or define how you're creating that feature. And we'll be jumping in and learning about these things and a little more, but you can do blind or you can say up to vertex or up to surface or mid plane and knows it switches the way that feature is created. But if you want to change the shape you need to change and edit the sketch. What if I added some more things to my sketch? How about a little oval or a slot? How about some type of multi-sided shape? Now it's going to happen, what happens if I exit out that sketch. Hey, look at that. I get those three shapes. So you can create as many shapes really, as you want all within one sketch. It doesn't have to be individual items. Head back over here, let's edit it one more time. Let's try putting a circle inside of this shape over here and maybe one over here and let's add additional one over here. What's going to happen here? Well, SolidWorks, it really doesn't care. It's going to take all that information and it's going to extrude it the exact value you tell it to do it. Same thing if I do something else, right? So if I go over here and I start sketch there I'm again, going to be drawing something. Now, of course, if I was falling good design practice I would want to tie everything into the origin make everything fully defined with dimensions and such. But again, those are not hard requirements but they are good design practices. This time, I'm going to go ahead and draw something in 3D notice. It's on that face, but I'm drawing kind of in 3D space or an isometric view of it and come over here. And this time I'm going to say extrude, cut. Cut through, sure. Let's go do that. Does it care? No. I can cut through multiple items at the same time. So I cut through that block and I cut through that one over there. Or you can choose when you go over here you can select the body. So here's my feature scope. I can say all bodies, or I can say selected bodies. So I only want to cut through that guy, click Okay. And notice this part over here does not have a whole cut through it, but this one does because I'm only selecting that body to do something with. Let's get a little more complicated. This time, let's choose a sketch. Start on that face there. And this time let's confuse SolidWorks. So you're saying, hey, let's make a circle here and let's make one more right there. So in this case, they're overlapping. So SolidWorks doesn't know like, well, should I cut this part here, or the center part here or this part over here. So it's confused. It doesn't know. And so when you go over here to features come over to extruded cut. It goes, well, I don't know what you want me to do. So I'm going to change my icon to this shape here. You can see it has like a little hole in it and it's going to allow me to select and what that's called is selected contours. So I can select, hey do we want that piece or that one over there? Or all of 'em or none of 'em or just the union of the two which is the thing that I want to actually cut. I'm going to say, I want to do that up to next, click Okay. And right there, I've only selected just the part that was common to both of those pieces. And I selected that cut. So you can see there's a whole bunch different ways that SolidWorks interprets sketches. And if it doesn't have enough information it's going to ask you for the right information. Or it might even just fail if you just give it like a line, or it might try to create a thin feature you don't ever know. I mean, so there's a lot of things going on there but just keep in mind the way that the interaction happens between a feature and a sketch. Now, the sketch it's always going to be a generally enclosed boundary or multiple enclosed boundaries that you need to have. And then that's going to define that shape. And then the extrude or the cut will define the length of how far that comes out. That's the basics for sketching in SolidWorks.

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