Start sketching

Your first step to create any feature from solidwork is drawing a sketch.

To draw a sketch you need a plane. But when you open a new document from solidworks, planes are not visible in the graphic area.

So go to the feature manager design tree and select the all three planes. (top, right and front planes).

Then you can see the planes like this.

Then right click on one of a plane and you will see following dialog box, from that click show button.

Now the planes will visible in the graphic area. Click anywhere in the graphic area and select any plane you want crate the sketch.

When your cursor is going near to a plane that plane’s color will change from blue to orange. 

Right click on that plane when the color changing occurs. Then the following dialog box will appear.

Now click on sketch icon as shown in the figure. Then new sketch will open on that plane.  And the user interface will look like follow picture.

In the right top side of the window there are two icons. They are a pencil with an arrow and a cross sign. If you want to cancel the sketch While you are sketching you can click on the cross sign. If you finished the sketch and want to save it you can click the pencil icon and close the sketch.

If you see the feature manager design tree you can notice that it display that you added a sketch your model. Like that it will display all of your steps of the model.

As you can see the selected plane’s orientation will change as it is facing you. This automatically happens with your first sketch only on every new document. After the first sketch you have to set this manually when you are creating another sketch.

To do that go to the View Orientation icon after you open the sketch on a plane.

From the options select the Normal to icon then the plane will change its orientation as it is facing you.

Now you can start to create the sketch on the plane. When you open a sketch the sketch tools will automatically visible in the command manager.

From using sketching tools you can create the sketch on the plane. Try to create a sketch using these tools. I will explain you about these tools from my next post. 

First step for SolidWork learning

SolidWork is a CAD (Computer Aided Drawing) software. It is very popular and a user friendly program. If this is your first time with SolidWork, this is the place for you.

When you are going to use any software first time you need to familiar with its user interface first.

When you first open SolidWorks the following window will be appear.

There is the menu bar in the top of the window as like any other software.

Next step is how to open a new page. For that you need to go to the file menu and click on new or just click on the page like icon on the right side of the menu bar. Then the following dialog box will appear.

There are 3 options for you to select.

• ·         Part- To make a single 3D part
• ·         Assembly- To assemble created 3D single parts ( Join single parts)
• ·         Drawing- To generate 2D drawings of the parts or the assemblies.

If you are a beginner first you have to learn how to create a single 3D part. So select part option from this dialog box. When you select part option it will appear follow window.

When you create a model mainly you have to interfere with the following areas of the user interface. Following three are the most important.

• Feature manager design tree- It is an overview of the steps how you created the model. There you can see, access and edit the model step vice.
• Command Manager- There it is listed the editing tools to create the model. So you can easily access to the editing tools when you create your model. As a beginner first you have to familiar with Features and Sketches tools.
• Graphic area- This is place where you create your model.

There are other two areas you have to know also.

• Head Up View Toolbar- There you can easily access to the tools such as zoom, section view, view orientation and display orientation.
• Status Bar- It will show some important information when you create the model.

Now you have to do is just open the SolidWork software and get familiar with the user interface.

Next you have to learn how to start sketching. You can learn it from here start sketching.