Get insights into more efficient modeling and troubleshooting in SOLIDWORKS. This article reviews important techniques, including working with measurements, accurate sketch references, managing filter icons, adding commands to your toolbar, using mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts, and navigating the model in the graphics area using the view cube.
Key Insights
- The article underscores the importance of ensuring that your working in the right measurement system, like inches, when modeling in SOLIDWORKS to avoid inaccuracies.
- It calls attention to the potential pitfalls of SOLIDWORKS's automatic reference creation when building sketches, stressing the need to ensure that only intended references are created.
- The article also offers tips on enhancing efficiency by using mouse gestures, hotkeys, and the view cube for easier model navigation, as well as managing filter icons and adding frequently used commands to your toolbar.
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 video we're going to do a quick review of troubleshooting and efficient modeling. Make sure that your master file part is open and take a second to look underneath and we're going to add two bodies to our green group. We'll right click this material, edit appearance, and with the bodies tab or the bodies button selected, add this inside frame piece here and add this inside frame piece here.
Once that's done, click the green check mark. Go ahead and take a second and make sure that your green pieces match the green pieces that I'm showing in my model. All right, next if you haven't already, please go down to the bottom right hand corner and make sure that you're working in inches.
If you are working in millimeters, unfortunately, you're going to have to go back and change all of your dimensions so that they are accurate in inches. Set your system of measurement to inches and then fix all of your previous sketches so that you aren't building a teeny tiny outdoor playground in millimeters. All right, it might take a second, but it's better to fix it now rather than later once this model gets really complex.
Let's go ahead and save our work. Next, continue to get into the of unchecking merge result each time you make a new boss. This is going to be important, especially down the line as we start to delete some bodies and keep others.
All right, next I'm going to create a sketch. You do not have to create a sketch on your own. I'm just going to show you a concept.
SOLIDWORKS is in the habit of wanting to create references automatically. It's trying to give a horizontal or vertical reference to this line. If I move this line over here, it's trying to establish coincident relationships, collinear relationships, all kinds of references.
That's great for quick modeling. However, it's possible that you may inadvertently create references that you don't actually want the sketch to have. It's important that as you build sketches, you are only creating the references that you intend that sketch to have.
Just something to keep in mind. All right, now you're probably a person who has assigned a few hotkeys and uses your keyboard as you model. If that's the case, it's possible you might tap the wrong key and create this little cursor icon that shows this upside down pink funnel.
This is the filter icon, and it only allows you to select a certain type of sketch category. In this case, it's edges. I can't select faces, and I can't select vertices when this is open.
This can be very problematic if you're trying to work in SOLIDWORKS and you can't select the thing you want to select. If this ever happens to you, where you accidentally hit a hotkey that brings this pink funnel up, go up and uncheck it here in filters to make it go away. If you do not already have this taskbar here, let's add it together now.
We'll go to customize, and we'll be in toolbars, and make sure that selection filter is checked as blue with that blue check mark. Close it out, hit okay. There we go.
Again, if you ever tap the keyboard and automatically activate this filter icon, you can get rid of it by pushing this button to toggle it off. Great. Now, if there's ever a point in this course where I refer to a command that you do not have in your command manager, or any of your hotkeys, or any of your toolbars, you can go up to search commands in this search toolbar, type in the command.
Let's type in extrude cut, see how that gets us. You can grab the command here and activate it, or you can click it and grab it and bring it into one of your tabs. If you're going to do that, make sure that you're in an appropriate tab for that command to live.
Don't put sketch commands in your features tab and feature commands in your sketch tab just for cleanliness. Now, if it's a command that's going to be used over and over again such as cut extrude, for instance, maybe you want to think about creating a hotkey or a mouse gesture that allows you to access that command quickly. Once more, to create hotkeys or mouse gestures, we go to options, customize, and we have these tabs here to do so.
I personally use mouse gestures all the time, and so if you see me get into a command, but I didn't click any button to get there, it's because I used a mouse gesture. I'm going to do that to continue to move quickly through the course. All right, last thing that we will review today, we'll be navigating the model in the graphics area.
We know that we can use our arrow keys. We know that we can select normal two to get a perfect side or top elevation. We can hold shift and use the arrow keys to move in 90 degree increments.
Control and arrow keys allow us to move throughout the screen, and then ALT and arrow keys allow us to tilt our model at angles. We also have these buttons at the very top, which if you do not have a scroll wheel can be very convenient for you. For instance, you can tap this rotate icon here and use the left button on your mouse to move the model like you would if you had a scroll wheel.
You can also click this button and use the left button to move your model like this, and so on and so forth. Now, as I mentioned in a previous video, I do highly recommend getting a mouse with a scroll wheel because it really just makes modeling nice and quick to be able to hold that scroll wheel down and move the model, or use it to zoom in and out. So you don't have to use any of these buttons or any of your keyboard keys in order to do so.
Just something to think about. And lastly, we have something known as the view cube, which if you go to this drop down menu here, it pops up and you can view any side of your model by clicking that side on the view cube. I set a hotkey that assigns my space bar to bring up the view cube.
I find that convenient and if you don't already have that hotkey, I would recommend setting it on your own as well. Now that we're done, we go ahead and save our work and that's it for this video. In the next video, we will learn how to mirror sketch entities within a sketch.
