Discover the rich dimension of SOLIDWORKS drawing file as we delve into its functionality and usage. Learn how to incorporate design details, dimensions, custom views, annotations, and much more, to clearly communicate your design ideas.
Key Insights
- The SOLIDWORKS drawing file enables the user to add specific design information like title blocks, annotations, custom views, and legends. These components help in thorough understanding of the design, and cater to a range of complexities, from simple one-page documents to multi-page detailed blueprints.
- Every aspect of the drawing view is active and can be adjusted as per user requirements. The drawing file represents the real-time version of the design and any changes made in the design are automatically reflected in the drawing, including in all relative images, menus, and bill of materials.
- The SOLIDWORKS layout in a drawing file includes a feature manager, command manager, and additional information like appearances tab and views palette tab. This layout is familiar and user-friendly, allowing users to navigate easily and implement sophisticated design features in an understandable way.
This lesson is a preview from our SOLIDWORKS Certification Course Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in this course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
In this lesson, we're going to dive into the SOLIDWORKS drawing file for the very first time. First, I'm going to show you some examples of some SOLIDWORKS drawings that have been converted to PDFs. What we can see here is a custom credenza that is available with configurable storage options.
In this drawing file, we've got a title block at the bottom which gives basic information about this design. We've got annotations or callouts that give specific information about moments or features of that design. We've got a scope description at the top giving a general idea of what that design is.
We've got symbols that dictate certain aspects of the design finish or other design features that we want to communicate, and we also have legends that we feature to explain what these symbols mean. SOLIDWORKS documents can be one page or multiple pages, and you have the option of creating, in this case, orthographic views. Here we have a top view or plan view, front view or front elevation, side view or side elevation, and a section view over here showing what's happening in the middle of this credenza.
We have the option to include exploded views if we want to show how assembled parts come together or maybe views that show certain configurations or conditions. In this case, with this storage configuration, with the doors open so we can see how far they come out, the doors open so we can see what those limits are, and so on and so forth. Some drawings are a little more simple and might just be one-page documents.
Here we have an exploded view showing how the item comes together, and we have basic orthographic projections. We also have callouts and dimensions. You can customize the dimensions to be in decimals or in fractions.
It's up to you. Some drawing files are quite simple. You just show separate views of what that item could be.
Some drawing files are very complex, and inside there is a lot of rich information that explains not just the design itself, but also the history of how that design changed over time. Here we have an exploded view showing all the components required to create this case. We have a bill of materials that correlates to all the balloons that point to each one of these specific items, descriptions of what those things are, quantities of each that are required to make this entire design.
We've got a lot of rich information in our title block at the bottom such as tolerances for our dimensions, the type of projection that we're using, a description of the piece, the revision number or revision letter that we're on. We have another menu bar here at the top left-hand corner showing a revision history, how this design changed over time, who changed it, when it was changed, and what letters associated with that revision change. So it's basically up to you to decide how you're going to communicate the information of your design and what tools within the drawing file are appropriate to get that communication across.
Let's take a look at a drawing file for the first time. Here is a drawing file showing basic views of the playground that we just designed. We've got a top view, a front view, and a side view, some basic relevant dimensions, right, expressing maybe the footprint, the height, things we need to know.
This particular document has multiple pages and I click down here to these tabs and go from page to page. Here I'm seeing section views showing the second floor of our playground and also a central cutaway vertically of what that playground looks like. Here is an isometric view of our playground and from that we took a detail so we can get a closer look at what some of those attachment brackets look like.
There is even an annotation connected to that attachment bracket explaining a bit about what that bracket is made of. Here in this drawing we've also included a sub-assembly so we can get a breakdown of the parts required to make just one of these sub-assemblies. Like we saw before with the complicated case that we just recently viewed, we've got the item in an isometric projection, we've got balloons pointing to each of the items required, we have an accompanying bill of materials showing that for each of those items what the name is and how many are required to make the sub-assembly, and to the right of that sub-assembly we have each of the unique components laid out and dimensioned for us.
Now in a drawing view every single aspect in our drawing view is active. We can click it, drag it, move it around, we can adjust the conditions. If I say click on this view here a menu opens up with tools and features relevant to that specific type of item and depending on what we're selecting that menu changes.
Also one thing about drawings is they always represent the real-time latest and greatest version of our design. If for whatever reason we changed the design of this sub-assembly here, these frame pieces, that change would be shown in this image and any other relative images that feature that change, including any other menus, bill of materials, or cut lists that are associated with that sub-assembly as well. We will always get the latest and greatest version of our designs shown in our drawing so long as we rebuild, which is this button up here.
That includes any other assemblies that feature that change as well. We'd see that here in the general assembly. So a drawing file is an active living representation of the latest version of your design.
Each view has its own toolkit of tools and features that allow you to customize how that view is expressed and then once you create your drawing composed in just the way that you want it with all the information laid out in just the way that you so desire, you can export as a PDF or other file type depending on what you need. Now, just like in a part or an assembly file, in a drawing file we have a general SOLIDWORKS layout that we're used to. We've got our feature manager here on the left hand side.
In this case, it's showing the drawing pages and details about what is included in each of those pages and views. We've got our command manager here at the top, which we can customize by adding or removing tabs. It gives us an automatic drawing tab, which features tools that are unique to a drawing file, which we will be using in our career with SOLIDWORKS.
And on the right hand side, we have extra information. We have our appearances tab, which we recognize. We also have this view palettes tab, which shows each of our views that we have available that we can simply click and drag and create more projections as we like.
Here we go. I'm going to highlight this and delete it, and so on and so forth. We have menu bars, toolbars, basically the type of layout that we're used to in both a part file and assembly file.
That's also featured here in a drawing file, so the user interface will roughly be the same. It shouldn't be anything new to get used to. All right, that's it for this video.
In the next video, we're going to open a drawing file for the first time, import our general assembly, and get started making a drawing.
