Creating the First SOLIDWORKS Drawing with Custom Sheet Size and General Assembly Projection Views

Hello, in this video we're going to open the SOLIDWORKS drawing file for the first time and load in our general assembly. So starting from this screen, let's go to File, New,  and then we'll go to Drawing File. All right, now the first thing it's going to do is prompt us asking us what type of page layout we're looking for.

We have different sizes, A1, A2, A3, A4. We have different types of dimensioning systems like ANSI and ISO and others. We also have the ability to create custom templates which will appear at the bottom.

For this particular drawing, let's go to Custom Sheet Size. We'll just click this bubble here,  and for width let's type in 17 inches, and height we'll type in 11 inches. It's just going to give us a blank page meeting those dimensions.

Let's click OK. All right, now as you can see, we're in the middle of a particular tool. We know that because we can see the green check mark and the red X here.

This tool is the one that prompts us to bring in a file. If we go here to the left,  we have an option of picking an open document. If say we already had a file open, we could find it here and click it and drag it.

If not, we simply go to Browse and then find our General Assembly. There we go. It's currently loading all of our General Assembly components.

You can see as I move my cursor, there's a box that goes with it. This is where I will place my very first view. The information over here to the left helps us determine how that view is going to be composed, but for right now let's just click a spot on our drawing and watch it appear.

I'm using the scroll wheel to zoom in. We can see we have our playground here showing a view from the side. Now automatically I have the ability to project up to the side, down to the opposite side,  and even add an isometric projection in any one of the four corners.

For right now, let's just go ahead and click the green check mark. Now first things first, we've got some sketches here that we don't want to see. So let's click the eyeball, close that out, and also if this is our page, this view is actually quite small.

Let's make some changes to that view. So let's go ahead and click it and watch this menu appear. Let's go down here to scale.

Right now it's using a sheet scale of 1,100th. So this is currently at 1,100th of its actual size. Let's make the scale a little bit large.

Let's say 1,20th. See how that looks. All right, that's actually looking more appropriate.

It probably doesn't leave us a lot of space to add some other projections, so let's go ahead and maybe bring this to 1,30th. Okay, great. Now what I'm looking for actually isn't a side view but a front view.

If we go up here,  we can see our orientation menu or our standard views. It's showing a right side view or in this case what it considers a front view based on how it's oriented around the planes. But if we click these boxes, we can start to see it unfold in different directions.

There we go. That'd be a top view. This is technically a front view, although this is actually the view we want to see what it's considering the left view.

It's a little bit large, so I'm going to bring this down a bit. Let's make this say 35. Better yet, let's make this 40 and see how that looks.

Okay,  that looks pretty good. Let's close it out the green check mark. All right, now we can click this and drag it and place it anywhere on our page.

But I want to create a top view from this same elevation and a side view from this same elevation. If we go up here to the drawings tab and click projected view, we now can project a top view and a right view and a click of the mouse sets the view in its place. To close out this task, you can simply hit the escape key or this green check here.

Beautiful. Now each of these views can be moved manually,  but you can see that they stay aligned to the view from which they were created. So you can't move this one left to right without moving this first parent view left to right.

So this allows us to compose our page so it makes sense visually without breaking the alignment of any of these items. All right, next we're going to take a look at how to dimension some of these pieces and we're just going to put some basic simple dimensions on this playground. If we go to basic drawing tools, rather if we go to here we go sketch smart dimension,  click that button.

In this case, when we smart dimension items, we're not assigning a dimension to them because that's already been assigned in our design. All we're doing is communicating what that design is. Now when you smart dimension, I'm zooming in with my scroll wheel here,  you can grab an entire line and dimension that line and it'll dimension as far as that line goes.

I'll hit escape. You can also grab two lines and grab a dimension of the space between those two lines. You can grab two points and find the dimension between those two points.

If two points are not in alignment, as these ones are, you can dimension in one direction,  two directions, or even three directions. That might be a little bit complicated for this particular item, so let's go ahead and hit escape until we get rid of that. We can dimension from a point to a line.

Similar outcomes if you dimension two lines. For right now, let's get an overall footprint so we know how much space this is going to take. Let's go to the very far left-hand side, grab a point over here, or a line that represents the very edge of that playground, and scroll over here.

Grab a line that represents the very edge of the right side. Now it's asking us where do we want to place this dimension. Above, below,  right on top, which I would not recommend.

Let's place it above, probably right around here. Close it out with a green check mark. Beautiful.

Since we've already gotten started,  let's go ahead and save our work. I'll do a CTRL shift save. You can see that there are no other files appearing.

That's because it's trying to save this as a drawing file, and we don't have any other drawing files to overwrite. Let's save this as GA001, and we'll just call it underscore drawing. Make sure you're in the file where the rest of your playground files are located.

Here we go. Let's add a few more dimensions. Let's get the overall height of this playground.

Let's say grab maybe the very tippy top of this roof. Instead of getting the bottom, which goes underground, let's get something that represents where the floor would be. Let's grab the bottom of this bracket.

I'm zooming in close so I can accurately grab that bracket dimension. We'll just pull this out to the side. Close the tool with escape.

Now let's get the depth. Let's go for smart dimension again. You may already have smart dimension as one of your mouse gestures.

I do. I have it as an upward mouse gesture. I'm going to go ahead and continue to use that as we move through these drawings.

Just like before, let's grab the far left edge and connect it to the far right edge and pull it up. Zoom out, and here we go. Save your work.

We've officially brought in our design, our general assembly. We've given it a basic orthographic projection of a top view,  a front view, and a side view. We've added dimensions that show the general footprint and height of our piece.

Let's save our work one more time. We just compose our page a little bit better. See how we like it.

There we go. Thank you. In the next video, we're going to create a new page in our drawing and start to expand some of the design communications that we're featuring in this drawing file.