- SOLIDWORKS has a great set
of tools for working with surfaces.
Now, I'm not going to be covering everything
in the surfacing package
but I just want to give you a little teaser
of some of the tools that are available.
I actually have an entire course on SOLIDWORKS surfacing
if you're interested.
But for right now, let's go ahead and turn on
the surfacing toolbar.
It is right up here under the regular tabs.
Right-click on any one of those
and make sure you've got
the Surfaces Toolbar turned on.
And inside of there,
you can see we've got a whole bunch of new tools.
So, the first tool I want to look at
is this Extruded Surface.
So Extruded Surface,
I'm going to go ahead and choose a sketch.
So I'm going to choose the sketch right here.
And notice that I can just click on this
and drag it out, right?
So it's a straight extrude,
very similar to a regular extrude,
but instead of actually creating a solid,
we only have a thin surface.
So that's just the example
of a very straight, simple extrude.
You can go in both directions.
You can even taper it if you wanted to,
or add some degrees to it.
You can do some interesting things here
with surfaces when you create them,
but I'm going to go ahead and turn that one off.
Make that zero.
You can draft it and you can also go
in a secondary direction if you'd like to as well.
So, a bunch of things you can do
with creating a straight surface
which is just a surface extrude.
Actually, let's go ahead and delete that one out.
The next tool we're going to be looking at
is the Swept Surface.
So, that one's going to allow me to take a profile and a path,
very similar or to a regular sweep.
For my profile, I can choose something like
this line right here.
And for my path, I can choose something like
this line right here.
Go ahead and click on the Okay button,
and it's going to go ahead and take that shape there.
And it's going to sweep it along that other path.
So pretty cool.
You can create some pretty complex geometry very quickly
using that tool.
All right, how about a revolve?
Now right up here is Revolve Surface.
I'm going to go ahead and choose a sketch.
All right, so this sketch over here is the one I want to do.
And right there is the sketch, sketch number three
and my axis of rotation.
So I'm going to choose this line right down here.
Click okay, and it's going to revolve around,
creating a bowl shape.
Now, of course, if you go back to that feature,
right over here, instead of that line,
of course you could go on there, hit Delete
and revolve it around this line, right?
You can choose if you want to go Blind,
or Up To Vertex, Up To Surface, Offset From Surface,
or Mid-Plane, bunch of options there.
And we can also choose how many degrees
we'd like to go around.
So in this case here,
I'm going all the way around, 360 degrees,
but of course you can choose
how many you'd like to go around.
Go ahead and click on the green check mark,
and there are our surfaces.
So, you can see there's a whole bunch
of different surfacing tools up here.
I don't have time to go through all of them,
but many of the tools in Surfaces work very, very similar
to the regular features inside of SOLIDWORKS.
So, if you look at the Loft tool or the Sweep tool,
they're going to be almost identical, but instead
of creating a solid, you'll end up with a surface.