Creating Custom Perspective Views and Managing Pages in SolidWorks Drawings for Better Presentations

In this video we're going to continue with our drawing first by creating a new page. So this is where we left off last time. Go ahead and save your work if you need to.

Now there are two ways to create a new page. The first is we can click this button down here which starts a new page. If we were using any kind of drawing template or drawing format all the artifacts or features of that template or format would also appear on this page.

We're just working with a blank document so this is how it's going to look to us. You can remove a page by going down to it, right clicking, and hitting delete. Another way to create a new page, which I often do in my own career,  is I right click on an existing page, I copy it, and I go down there again and I paste it.

It asks me if I want to paste it before the sheet, after the sheet, or move it to the very end. In this case these last two are the same thing. And it brings everything that was created on the page before it.

The reason I like to do things this way is oftentimes I will have views or callouts or aspects of that drawing that I want repeated anyway and instead of making them a second time I'd rather just copy and paste them. In this case we don't need to show these orthographics again so I'm going to click each one and hit delete. Beautiful.

Now what I want to do is bring in a really attractive perspective view of our playground, something to kind of get us excited. And the way we would do that first is we have to build the view in the General Assembly itself. If I go back to sheet one and I right click on any one of these views,  I have the ability to open the item that's being shown in that view.

In this case it's the General Assembly. Let's go ahead and open that up. All right, here we are.

Now if we hit our view cube, we have some basic views that are already available to us. This is the closest to what I'm looking for but it's not quite giving me enough wow factor. So let's add perspective to it and then create a custom view that you can place into our drawing.

First things first, if you were to go into options customize and then go to shortcut bars, there's a couple shortcut bars you'll need to add to your own interface. The first is this tool bar over here which is our appearances. So you can look for that here.

It's a particular icon that we're trying to locate. It's not render tools. Let's see what it's called.

Apply scene and the other one will be view settings. So let's go back into customize shortcut bars. Let's start by adding apply scene.

Click this and drag it up here. The other will be view settings. Click this icon and drag it up here as well.

Apply scene allows us to change the background of our scene which we'll be using in future videos. I'm going to leave mine at three point faded. This view setting allows us to create different viewed expressions of our general assembly.

You can see it gets more and more complex. The more complex the view gets, the more your system has to work. If you have a system that doesn't have necessarily a lot of processing power,  careful adding these on.

Listen to your laptop. If the fans start going crazy, there's a good chance you're probably working your system really hard. Just some food for thought.

The first thing we're going to go to is perspective view. You can see we are no longer in an isometric projection,  but we're seeing a perspective view which feels more realistic. And we still have our view cube.

We can see the perspective version of each of these settings. When we use our scroll wheel to find a view that works for us. If we want a more dynamic perspective, while we are in the perspective view setting,  we can go up here to search commands and go to modify perspective.

And we can change the perspective by changing the number in this box. The lower the number, the more drastic the perspective becomes. If you have experience photography, this also represents the focal length of the camera that represents our view setting that we're looking at.

I'm going to go back into modify perspective and find something a little between where we were and where we are now. I'm going to place it at two. All right, that feels nicely realistic to me.

And I actually like this particular view. Go ahead and find a view that's great for you. But this one seems to show a lot of what's going on in this playground.

So I'm going to go with this. Once you have your view set, you can go into this toolbar here, the view orientation. And this button here is new view.

It's now taking basically a record of what this exact view is,  both the perspective and the orientation of that view. And it's creating a new view that launches you to this exact viewpoint anytime you click that view. You have to name this view.

In this case, I'm going to call this perspective one. Close it out. Okay.

Now, if we move this anywhere or even toggle out a perspective view,  if we go back into the view settings,  you'll see that perspective one has been added as a custom view. And it brings us back into perspective, back into that orientation. Go ahead and save your work.

Now, as I said before in an earlier video,  anything you do in a part file or assembly file that is featured in your drawing automatically affects the drawing and what's available to you. Let's close this out and see how that changes our drawing. All right.

Now, our orthographics haven't changed because they're not linked to our perspective view in any way. But if we go to page two, go to this menu here,  we'll have to remind SolidWorks that we need to find our general assembly. I'm going to leave the general assembly open.

I'd like you to do that as well. Now that we've done that, we can go ahead and minimize it and maximize the drawing. There we go.

Now, if we go into the view palette, it should show up as an option. There we go. Now, every single view that is associated with this general assembly is featured in this view palette over the right-hand side.

That includes our new custom perspective view that we just created. Let's go back to sheet two. Take that perspective view one and click it and drag it onto our page.

Here we go. In some cases, the processing power is just a little much for SolidWorks,  and so it has a tough time showing what we dragged on. We just go ahead and delete the item and try again.

There we go. You should now have a teeny tiny perspective view right here on your page. Like before, let's make it bigger so it looks more appropriate for that page size.

I'm going to go to use custom scale and let's set this to 1 to 20. There we go. Go ahead and save your work.

Now, if you want to go back to that, you simply click on the view itself and then the drawing view toolkit appears here on the left-hand side. We went to scale and we set it to 120. There we go.

Again, save your work if you're satisfied with that. One more thing I'd like to do is I'd like to highlight this view. And let's leave this as a line drawing, although I have the option of going to the view palette and changing how this view is expressed.

I can also do that down here. Let's leave it as a line drawing. But if we go to view display, well, first we have to highlight the view itself.

We go to view display. We can leave all of our tangent edges visible. We can make them a lighter font or we can remove them completely.

If we remove them completely, you can see it adds a little bit of realism,  but also removes a lot of necessary information. So what I often like to do, click on the view again. Let's go to view display tangent edges with font.

There we go. We get a little bit more realism. We get a little bit more realism without losing any information,  say like the curvature of these fillets, for instance,  or where this leg actually terminates into the slide, things like that.

Go do that yourself and then save your work. And that's it for this video. In the next video, we're going to start diving into some of the auxiliary views available in drawing files.