- The combine command is what I call a bullying operator.
It's going to allow us to add things together, subtract them,
or find what is in common between two individual bodies.
Now the problem is, I only have one body so far.
so I need to create a secondary body
and I need to not merge the two bodies together.
So I have this sketch right over here.
I'm going to go ahead and create a revolve feature.
So here's my revolve.
I'm going to go ahead and revolve around that center axis there
and then make sure I uncheck this merge result.
I don't want that to be combined together.
I want two separate bodies.
So now you can see I've got this body here
and I've got that body there.
So you have to have multi-bodies obviously
to make this command work.
Now over here under the direct editing tool bar,
we've got the combined command right over here.
We have three different options.
We can add them together,
We can subtract theM or we can find what is in common.
So my bodies to combine are these two.
This guy and this guy.
If we want to add them together, click okay.
And all of a sudden we've got one body.
Great, and we've used this a little bit already
in the course,
by combining a couple things together.
And if you have two different bodies you've brought in
or imported from another part,
using the combine add function is really powerful.
But I can also do some things
that are even more interesting, like subtract.
I could subtract the main bodies.
That's going to be this one here,
and I want to subtract.
Right over here is going to be the main body.
And then I'm going to subtract this.
Click on okay.
And now what I've done is I've removed that.
I've hollowed out the center of this block
from the other solid.
Let's go ahead and take a look at the section view.
So from the top,
right over here top,
you can see inside there.
I've actually taken one solid and removed it
from the other solid to core out the shape.
This is also really helpful
if you're working with a mold or something like that
and you want to take one shape
and you want to cut it out of another block of material
that you're going to mold.
There's also some mold tools to help with this as well.
But this is how you could get started.
Now let's go back again to the combine feature.
This time let's click on Common.
So let's click on the common bodies.
We're going to tick both these and then click on okay.
And turn that section view off.
And you can see here.
This is what was common between the two bodies originally.
So anything that was enclosed in one
is also enclosed in the other,
is what's in common and that's what we kept.
So three different ways we can use the same exact tool
to do a lot of work behind the scenes in SolidWorks.
I definitely use the combine add command probably the most
because a lot of times I do bring multiple parts in
and combine them together.
Or I will actually have a multi-body part
and then, or maybe even section my body
into a few different pieces,
and then to some operations on one or multiple pieces,
and then use that add command
to bring everything back together at the end.