Building 3D Models in SOLIDWORKS with Extrusions, Navigation Tools, and Measurement Features

So, we have a sketch to build our 3D volume, but it still needs to be a 3D volume in space. We need to add thickness to it. We'll select that sketch with one click right here in the Feature Manager, and with that selected, we'll go to the Features tab, select Boss Extrude,  and just like before, we can click and drag to set our thickness, or we can set the thickness with our keypad right here in this menu here.

Let's set three inches, and then once we're happy with that, we can click this green check mark and close it out. Alright, so you can see that it's set what's called an isometric view of our 3D shape. Once we create a 3D shape,  it gives us an isometric view, which is, in other words, a three-quarter view that shows the exact length and depth and height to the shape that we have.

But we want to be able to move this around in space a little bit, so I'm going to show you how to do that now. First thing is, going back to system requirements to operate SOLIDWORKS,  you really ought to think about getting a 3D mouse. A 3D mouse has a left button, a right button,  which allows you to open up menus within side buttons that otherwise wouldn't be seen,  and it also has a scroll wheel.

Now, if you have a 3D mouse, you can move that scroll wheel forward or backward, and depending on where your cursor is in your graphics area, it'll move your shape in 3D space following that, alright? You can also press and hold your scroll wheel and move your mouse to move the 3D volume in space. If you have a scroll wheel, take a minute for yourself and experiment with that and get comfortable with moving your 3D model in space. This will be an important component of this course.

Now, if you don't have a 3D mouse right now, that is okay. The first thing I recommend you do is select a face on your shape and go up here to this icon that says normal to. It's this plane with an arrow pointing out of it.

Click it, and now you are normal to that face, which means you are facing that face directly. Now that you're facing that face directly, you can click outside of that shape and you can use your arrow keys left, right,  up, and down to move your volume that way. You can also hold down shift to move your entire shape in the up, down, left, or right directions by 90 degrees.

That's left and that's right,  up and down. You can click and hold control and then use the arrow keys to shift your model around in space. You can also click and hold the ALT key and select those arrows to, well, the left and right arrows to move it at angles in 3D space.

Now, as you can see,  this is the way to access or rather view different sides of your model. And while it will work,  again, a 3D mouse with a scroll wheel is definitely recommended. And I will continue to operate this course with my scroll wheel so you can move quickly and efficiently.

All right. Back to the bench. We've got this top of the bench created, but what we're missing is four legs.

Now, to create the sketch to create those volumes, we need a plane. Now, I could grab one of the planes over here, but you might remember from a previous lesson that all it takes for something to be a plane is it needs to be a completely flat surface. So I'm going to use the flat surface located underneath our tabletop.

I'm going to select that. And I'll know that I selected it because it's blue. It's also showing the dimensions that were established to create that face.

And with that selected, I'm going to go back up to the sketch tab and select the sketch button. All right. I have just entered a sketch that is going to live on this bottom surface of our tabletop.

If you were to picture this in your mind,  it's as if we're underneath the table looking up at the bottom surface. So let's go ahead and add four rectangles for legs. Okay.

Now, for this, I'm going to grab the corner rectangle. And for the corner rectangle, the first click of the mouse sets one corner and the second click sets its opposite corner. It wants us to create more rectangles, as you can see,  because our cursor is still within the corner rectangle icon.

I'll hit escape to get out of that. Okay. I'll just grab one of these corners and maybe move it right off the corner of that bench there.

And I'll grab this corner over here and move it over there. Let's not establish smart dimensions to this leg just yet. Let's just go ahead and create four more legs.

They're going to be different from each other. That's totally okay. But let's grab this corner and then click again to establish that leg.

Click this corner and then click again to create that leg. And click this corner and then click again to create that leg. Again, they're all different sizes and heights and widths.

That's all right. We'll click escape to get out of the rectangle command tool. And instead of closing and saving our sketch, let's go directly into Bossip Shrew.

We'll go to features, click Bossip Shrew. And you can see, since we have four closed entities, it's creating four 3D volumes,  all driven by the same depth dimension. Okay.

Let's make this 24 inches. All right. We'll go ahead and click the grid check.

That's okay. Great. We have a table, albeit a avant-garde one with different shaped legs.

That's completely okay. Now that we've created this table,  we can learn a few things about this 3D volume. And that's where we're going to get into the measurement tool and the evaluate tool.

So first, we have the measure tool. Let's go to right-click, tabs, bring back basic modeling tools. All right.

Let's find this one that says measure. Now that we've opened that up, we see a blank space because it's waiting for us to click what our model we're going to measure. We can click a vertex.

We can click a face. We can click this line if we like. For right now, let's just click a corner, rather a vertex.

Or just this corner right here. Okay. So it's telling us a little bit about what that point represents.

You can see it's created this little flag that shows its X, Y, and Z coordinates in 3D space. Great. Now if we click another corner, it's now measuring the relationship between these two points, in which case the distance, which we know is 12 inches.

That information is also populated over here in this blue space, vertex 1 and vertex 2. And underneath, we see the 12 inch distance. And we have a delta Z or a Z location in space. But since we have more than one vertex,  it can't give us an accurate Y or X. And that's okay.

We can highlight these and click the delete button. Or right click and click delete. And then if we go ahead and click the line itself,  we get some of that same information, like 12 inches.

And you can see it's calling that edge 1. I'm going to go ahead and right click and select delete. Now let's select an entire face to see what it does. I'm going to select this top face here.

Okay. We have a little bit of information about that face. We have the perimeter, which is 120 inches.

We also have the area, which is 576 inches squared. So that's useful information for us. Let's go ahead and right click and delete.

And that's a little bit about the measure tool. And we're going to be using this throughout the course to check our progress. Now that we've measured all the things we want to measure, let's go ahead and click this X to close out.

I'm using the scroll wheel to move my model around in space. Now let's check out mass properties. Right here to the right of the measure tool is mass properties.

We'll select that. And it should bring a menu onto your screen that looks something like this. Here we go.

What it's doing is it's calculating the mass properties of all the volumes, the solid volumes inside of our part file. So let me move this over here so we can see both at the same time. Great.

It recognizes part 4, the part that we're working on. Yours might say something else, but it's essentially the part that you're working on. And it's going to give you some information about that volume such as the density, the mass, and the volume, and the surface area of all the surfaces of that particular volume.

It will give you the center of mass and then other information if you decide to go further. Now some useful information would be, say, the volume and the surface area. Something like the density or the mass, not as relevant right now because we haven't established a material that this item is being made out of.

If it was a very dense material, like say concrete, then we might have a density rating that shows a very high number here. If it's a not so dense material, say like styrene, then that number would be smaller. It's giving it a number here because SOLIDWORKS has decided that there is a quote-unquote default material associated with all parts until an actual material is established.

What that default material is,  doesn't matter because eventually we'll want to assign our own materials. But for right now,  surface area, center of mass, and volume are all aspects of this part that are accurate and give us information about our piece.