- [Instructor] The intersect tool is a great tool
for using a surface or a plane
to slice up a solid body.
Now right here on the screen,
I've got this block
and I've got a surface actually that I've created,
that goes right through the center of my block.
And I want to use that to intersect the two together
and create two separate bodies.
Now, right over here under solid bodies,
you can see, I only have that one block, right?
And then I've got this surface body here,
that's going right through it.
Now, if you don't know how to create a surface
and when you probably don't already,
let me show you how to do that.
I need to turn on the surfacing toolbar.
So come up here to any one of these tabs,
right click on it
and come over here to tabs
and come over here to surfaces.
Here's my surface toolbar.
And I'm going to use this tool called the Extruded Surface.
So I'm going to go ahead
and delete the one I have right here first.
So go ahead over here,
hit delete on the keyboard
and get rid of the surface that I have.
Now, I have a plane right over here
that I drew this on.
So you can see right here,
actually it's on the side of the part.
And I just drew a simple sketch
which has one line in it which is a spline.
Now what I'm going to do is
I'm going to take that spline that I drew
and I'm going to extrude it out.
So I'm going to choose that line
and I can define it in this direction
or I can also define it in the other direction.
So I want to make sure
that is actually bigger than the block,
going a couple different directions.
Click okay.
And now I have that surface going right through my block.
Let's go ahead and change the color.
So I'm going to click on it over here
and then come up here to the beach ball
and edit the appearance.
I'm going to make it red.
Now let's go ahead and intersect these together.
So under my features toolbar,
up here I have intersect.
So it's asking me what things I'd like to intersect.
I have solids surfaces or planes
that I can intersect together.
So here is a solid, I want to do that.
And here is a surface.
Let's go ahead and intersect the two.
And go over here and just click on intersect.
And you can see what it's doing.
It's taking the surface
and it is using that to separate the block.
So I have these two regions.
I have this region here and this region here
and you can choose to get rid of one or both
or either one of 'em.
If you don't want the other region
if you want to keep them both, that's fine as well.
And then when you're done,
just go ahead and well, uncheck those
and then click okay.
And there it is.
So here is my new intersected shape.
However, looks identical to what we had before, right?
But over here notice,
that we've got,
there's a surface, there's our intersect body,
but there's one weird thing
that SolidWorks automatically turns on.
So let me show you.
Over here under intersect,
by default, for some reason,
at the very bottom here there's a thing called Merge Result.
Why would I want to cut this thing in half
and then merge it back together?
It makes no sense.
Anyways, turn that off.
We don't obviously want that,
click over here
and now you can see we've got two bodies.
Right, so I can hide the surface.
I can hide the top body.
You can see I have only the bottom body now,
or I can hide that body
and show the other one.
So now you can see that there's two individual bodies
that have been sliced using that surface.
Now let's go back and try it one more time.
So I'm going to turn this one back on
and let's go ahead
and show that surface one more time.
So now you can see there
and go back over here to the intersect command again.
And notice I can add things here as well.
If I want to add in, maybe be one of these planes
I got this plane that goes right here through,
so I can choose in that box.
Choose that plane.
I can slice it with that one.
I can also slice it with this other one.
If you want to be really fancy, I can say hey,
how about the front plane too?
So there's the front plane
and here's the right plane.
Let's use all those things.
Let's just chop this thing up
and then click on intersect.
And you can see we've got all these regions now, right?
You can actually scroll down here,
through them all,
make sure we're not merging 'em together.
We can consume the surfaces if we want.
If we want to
take that one surface we created and get rid of it,
we can do that too.
Click okay.
And now you can see, I've sliced everything up.
I've got all these solid bodies
and I can turn on or show or hide any one of them.
I'm going to go ahead and hide the plane.
And now you can see over here
I can easily just hide one of these
and you can see all these little blocks
we've created very quickly and easily
using that intersect command.