- [Instructor] SolidWorks is getting better and better
at dealing with mesh files.
So you can see here,
I'm on my desktop under exercise files chapter eight,
and I'm in the 8.17 folder.
And I've got this 8.17.STL file,
which is what you'd normally use for 3D printing.
So let's click on that one,
and then come down and click on Options.
Now, notice, inside your options,
we can choose to bring this file in as a graphic body,
a surface body, or a solid body.
So you have a few different options
of how you can try to work with it.
We actually want to get this to being a solid body
at some point in time,
so we can choose a couple different ways to do it.
But right now, I'm going to bring it as a graphics body,
which would probably be the least useful body.
Click on OK, and then come over here and say Open.
It's going to open up SolidWorks,
and now we're looking at this graphic body here.
I'm going to change the color just to make it
a little bit easier to look at,
and let's change this thing over to red.
All right, so there it is.
Now, what I want to do because I only have a graphic body,
there's nothing I can really do.
There's no surfaces I can really work with right now.
I might can select the entire thing, but other than that,
there's not much you can do.
And that's where this Slicing tool comes in.
It's a pretty cool tool that you can use
to create a whole bunch of slices and actually profiles
as you go through the part very quickly.
So right down here, I've got the top plane.
And so I want to go to Insert,
and then come all the way down here to Slicing.
Click on Slicing, and notice what happens here.
I get its little box,
and it's showing me I've got a few slices already.
Now, I can increase the amount of slices
that goes through my part.
I can change the spacing if I want.
I can do a whole bunch of things here.
Let's make it go all the way up here,
pretty close to the top,
and that is going to allow me
to create all those sketches in one shot.
Now, I can come down here,
and there's a few different options I can look at.
I can say add slicing planes
and sketches to a folder, sure,
preview the slices.
Yeah, let's do that, why not?
So there, you can see they're all coming into the screen.
Now, there's a couple ways we can do it.
We can do the Intersection command,
which is a great way to do it.
I could also do the circle or rectangle,
but I like the intersection.
And I've noticed, actually, if you turn Exact off,
that actually makes it work a little bit easier.
Sometimes if you put it on Exact,
it makes a whole bunch of tiny little lines.
It makes a really big file.
If you turn that off, it will perform a little bit faster,
but not be obviously as exact.
So let's go ahead and try this out, click OK.
And let SolidWorks do its magic,
and now you can see that we've got all these little sketches
that have been created for us in this little folder.
And inside there, we have all these planes
and the sketch associated with it.
Now, what we can do is we can create a lofted feature.
So I can go ahead and pre-select all these.
I'm going to hold down control,
select each one of these sketches that's been created,
not the planes.
All right, so there's all of my sketches.
Now come up here to Loft,
and it's automatically going to build that lofted feature.
The only issue here I'm seeing
is that some of these little green dots are not lining
up the way I like 'em to.
So I have to grab this little feature here
and move it around this side,
and make sure all those green dots are lining up
in a somewhat reasonable fashion.
Now, if you wanted to, you could actually even create
another little cut type feature that would allow us
to line up each one of these little dots
in a much more scientific method
than just dragging them around like I'm doing here.
But you do have the option of how you want to bring this in.
So let's go ahead, and just do a few more of these.
Just clean it up.
Okay, that's looking pretty good.
These ones down here are still quite a bit off,
so let's fix those.
All right, that's definitely not perfect,
but we've got most of the little green dots
on that side of the model.
And again, if you wanted to use a slicing plane
that you could then snap those two,
that's probably a good option.
But go ahead and click on the green check mark.
And we've created that loft.
Now, if I go over here,
notice I've got the original graphic body,
and inside it, we have our new shape.
So I can click on that graphic, and I can say Hide.
So now I'm not looking at my graphic.
I'm actually just looking at my lofted body.
So here's my lofted body right there.
And inside there is the original graphic.
So a couple different ways you can do that,
but that's how you can bring in a STL file
or any type of 3D printing style part
that is not a SolidWorks native part.
And you can actually go ahead and slice it up
and then maybe create a solid directly from those slices.