- [Narrator] Let's talk about polygons.
Now poly means many and -gons means angled.
So that's many angled shapes
and we have the ability to create those
inside of SolidWorks.
Right up here under the sketch tab in the ribbon bar
let's go ahead and choose polygon right here.
And let's choose that front face or front plane.
Now right over here on the left hand side
notice we have some parameters
and it's saying how many sides
do we want to have in our polygon, right?
We can have all the way down to three.
Can't have two, you got to have three,
so you can have a triangle
and we can go up to as many sides as would like.
And then we can define how that shape will be created
whether it's an inscribed circle or a circumscribed circle.
So what that means is for an inscribed circle.
Let's go ahead and try the triangle out.
Let's draw one out right here.
You can see the inscribed circle is this circle
right in here, which is defining that size.
Now, if you switch over here to the circumscribed circle
notice it pops it to the outside.
So we're defining that shape
either from the inside or the outside.
We can define the center coordinates
of the outside diameter,
as well as the rotation all over here.
And when you're done click on the green check mark, right.
So there's our polygon, which is really a triangle.
But we can also then grab those lines and we can say,
"Hey, I'd like to make you horizontal
or I don't want to make this thing a little bit bigger
or move it around."
I can define the size by adding a dimension here
to the actual circle, say four inches makes it bigger.
So you have a four inch outside circle.
Now you don't have to use that, right?
I could delete that out.
And I could say, instead of that
I want to define one of the legs.
I could say, well, these legs are going to be four inches
and you can define it that way as well.
But it's just allowing you to control that shape
either with this circle or with the inscribed circle.
Let's make a couple more, just for fun.
Right over here polygon again,
this time I'm going to try a seven sided shape.
Click on the center where you want to drag it out.
It doesn't really matter the angle at first
but you can just kind
of place whatever that radius wants to be.
And notice you get that little heads up display as well
showing you the length of the line.
And it's also showing the angle.
Now, if you click here, you don't like it.
You can always add something like a construction line.
So come over here, center line, grab to the, or snap
to the center point, drag it up to here, click there.
And then I can use that to make a vertical line.
So make vertical, that will control it.
I can then define a dimension
for that inscribed circle right there, say four inches.
And now I have that shape.
So a bunch of ways you can control it.
Same thing over here is you can actually grab these points
and drag it around. But one bit of caution here.
What happens if I start deleting these relationships?
So I hit that and delete it.
Now we don't have a polygon at all.
These things are not connected.
They're just a bunch of line sitting out in space.
So I generally don't recommend
deleting a relationship that creates a polygon.
So to go back, let's go ahead and hit undo.
Undo one more time. So here's our polygon.
If you did want to make some kind
of like modification to this shape,
instead of defining it or deleting that relationship,
what I do is click on a couple of these lines,
holding onto control.
So those two lines there and say
let's make those guys construction, right?
Notice the rest of them are regular lines.
Just those two are construction.
Then grab your regular line tool
and just draw something else out.
So if that's the modification to the shape
we've got the shape we want
but we haven't destroyed the original polygon.
So that's how you can work
with polygons without destroying them
and adding and modifying them as needed.
So you're going to switch between regular geometry
as well as construction geometry.