- [Instructor] SolidWorks is a very powerful tool
that's used in a variety of industries.
Now, whether you're designing consumer products,
or building big weldments,
maybe you're doing advanced surfacing,
maybe you're an architect and you're using it
for designing buildings or structural framing,
there's a whole lot of things that SolidWorks can do,
and we have all these tool sets
that can plug into Solidworks to make it
give it some more functionality
that it might not have from the base package.
So you have a base package here,
which is your basic sketch toolbar, your features toolbar,
to create your basic things
like extrudes, revolves, and sweeps.
Now we have a whole bunch of the tool packages
we can turn on, and again, SolidWorks
is a customizable environment,
so you can turn these tools on or turn them off.
So, to turn on different tool bars,
you can come up here to any one of the tabs,
right click on them, and come over here to tabs,
and here are what we have.
So we have sketch ink, which is a quick way
to use like, a tablet to mark up some drawings.
We've got the full surfaces toolbar,
we've got the sheet metal toolbar, structural systems,
weldments, mold tools, if you're designing,
you know, plastic injection molding,
you have all those tools available to us.
Mesh modeling, this is something that's been added
in the past couple years, allows you to bring in STL files
for 3D printing and work with those, which is really handy.
Data migration, working with different file types,
bringing those in, direct editing is great
if you're bringing in, you know, dumb solids,
which are like, things like STEP files or IGES files
that they don't have any feature tree,
they're just bringing in an imported file
and do some direct editing on it.
We got the markup toolbar, you have this MBD dimensions,
you have rendering, all these different things,
right, analysis preparation,
so all these toolbars are available to us.
So you can go ahead and just turn any of these on,
and if you click on the tab, just turn them on.
I can just keep going
and just adding all these things in here.
And I just want to kind of show you
some of the more important ones that's available to you.
Now this course is an essential training course,
so we're not going to go into every one
of these available tool sets, but I do want to point out
that they're available and what is in there,
so if you want to dive in to any one of these things,
you can come back over here and take a look at
some of the things that are available to us
in all these tabs, and you can see I'm turning them
all on here, so they're going to cross your screen.
And normally I turn all these things off,
'cause I want to make it as simple and clean
to see the SolidWorks environment
without all these tool bars on, and it can overwhelm people
because there's so much in SolidWorks.
But don't feel overwhelmed, you can turn them off
if you're not using them.
But, starting over here on the left is the basic features
toolbar, which are your boss, extrude, and revolves.
Pretty much everything uses a sketch,
so these are your basic sketch tools up here.
The sketch ink one allow you
to just draw on top of it or erase things,
and just kind of make do markup work on there.
Your surfaces, we're going to cover that
in this course as well, or we already have,
and surfaces allow you use them as helper surfaces
to create solids or we can just create surface models.
We can do some really powerful things inside of surfaces.
The sheet metal toolbar
we've looked at a little bit already.
Of course, you're creating sheet metal parts,
is a really handy toolbar, and you can switch
between solids and sheet metal parts
by using the convert to sheet metal tool.
Structural systems and weldments kind of play together.
If you're creating any type of welded structures
using I-beams, or box channel, or things like that,
this is a great toolbar and it really does save you
a lot of time by designing and using weldments
versus creating these shapes
using basic extrudes and things like that.
Your mold tools are very handy
if you're designing injection molded parts.
Now, you might not be using these tools exactly
if you're just creating a molded part,
but if you're creating actually the molds themselves,
these tools are there to actually create the molds.
But a lot of them happen to really help out
when you're creating molded parts as well,
like things like draft, and draft analysis,
to make sure your part is set up correctly for molding.
Mesh modeling, again, is when you're bringing in STL files,
or one of the other formats of different
subdivision surface model, or something like that,
you're going to bring in and work with,
you've got a whole bunch of things you can do here
using these tools, and every year
they're adding more and more to this tool package.
Again, this is pretty, yeah, this is a little more advanced,
but it allows you to, you know, to really start working
with mesh bodies, and SolidWorks, in general,
has not been good at working with meshes in the past,
but now the tools are getting pretty powerful,
and we have a lot more options.
So, data immigration is bringing in imported geometry
and analyzing it, and things like that,
recognizing features, knitting things together,
fixing faces, and so on.
Your direct editing, I love direct editing, by the way.
Now you can do direct editing on imported
surfaces or bodies, but you can also use direct editing
in your regular models, right, if you have a face
and you don't want to go back through the feature tree
and figure out how that face was created,
you can just grab that face, move it, delete it,
whatever you want to do, all in the direct editing toolbar.
Now we've already covered a little bit
of the direct editing in this course,
but again, definitely take a look at those tools.
Markup, we're also going to be covering,
is a great way to just make notes on your drawings,
which is an overlay on top of your existing model,
which is really handy for keeping up with what's going on
in your design and also collaborating with other coworkers.
Evaluate, this is where all your tools like measure,
and interference detection, and things like that
are available, right, and evaluate,
I use these all the time, my favorites
are interference detection and measure,
but any of these other things here are really handy
and we can dive into those a little bit more
as we go through the course.
And I also have a couple more advanced courses
that do cover some of this in more depth.
MBD dimensions, so this is model-based definitions
that you're going to have, or dimensions, and you know,
a lot of times they're going to be using this now for,
instead of creating a drawing, you're going to have
these MBD dimensions in some type of a file.
So instead of having to actually create a drawing,
you can just pull up the model
and you'll have that information available to you.
Next one over here is the rendering tools.
SolidWorks has a couple of different rendering packages
available, and this will allow you to kind of
prepare your model to get into those rendering tools.
And then these are a bunch of the SolidWorks add-ins,
which are going to extend SolidWorks even further,
like circuit works, or photoview 360, scan to 3D,
you know, motion, routing, simulation.
These are all add-ins
that make SolidWorks even more powerful.
And it's also, you have add-ins for like, CAM,
or, you know, CNC machining, things like that.
So you're going to use the basic tools of SolidWorks,
and then just extend them a little further
using one of these packages here.
And the last one here is the analysis preparation.
Sometimes when you're working and preparing to do
an FEA analysis using SolidWorks simulation,
you need to simplify it, right,
and get rid of extra things that are going to cause problems
for the analysis, and that's when you're going to
jump into this analysis toolbar.
So anyway, that's a long, (laughs)
long winded overview of some of these tools.
Obviously we don't have the ability
to get into every single one of these things,
but I do want to point out that they're there,
and we have courses on almost every one of these things,
or a lot of them, in the library,
so if there's something you're interested in,
definitely take a look at that course in the library.