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.