- One of the best ways to do work inside of SolidWorks,
is to have SolidWorks do most of that work for you.
So, in this case, we're looking at
dimensioning this component right here
and we've already looked at a few different ways
to dimension it using ordinate dimensions
and regular baseline dimensions.
And that can take a lot of time, a lot of work.
And so, SolidWorks actually built in a feature
that's called auto dimension.
It's going to automatically dimension our part fours.
And let's take a look at how that works.
So right over here if you click on the twirl down,
we've got a bunch of dimensions
and this smart dimension here,
actually is the very first one we've already used,
but notice there's two tabs at the top.
One of them is called auto dimension.
If I click on auto dimension,
it's going to automatically dimension our part fours,
but we just have to give it a little bit of information.
So first thing I need to do is choose
whether I want all entities or just selected entities.
I only have one right here so let's just use all,
and then choose the scheme.
So I have the baseline, I have a chain,
I have an ordinate dimension.
Let's go ahead and just keep the baseline dimension.
Now choose an edge.
What is that baseline?
And I'm going to choose this edge right here
and it should show up right there, so highlighted in pink.
And then if I come down here, the baseline on my other edge,
it's going to be selected here,
I'm going to go ahead and delete this edge out here,
I'm going to choose this edge right down here at the bottom.
And that will be my other baseline edge.
And then you can choose where you would like
those dimensions play.
So in this case here, I'm going to be below the view
for the horizontal and to the right of the view,
actually, I want to go to the left of the view
for the vertical dimensions,
and that's all we're going to do.
Click on apply and bam, it did all that work for us.
Click on the green check mark
and now you can see our drawing is fully dimensioned.
However, it's a little bit messy, this looks like a mess.
Everything is defined though, that's a start.
So let's grab this and see if we can figure out
how to make things a little bit cleaner.
So, move our drawing over here.
Notice we've got a lot of things
that are sitting on top of each other
and dimensions that are just, kind of ugly.
So, sometimes I feel that
if you use the auto dimensioning tool,
it actually takes more work to clean up the dimensions
than just to do it the right way the first time
or just do it with yourself
but it doesn't miss anything, which is nice.
So, you might need to come over here
and just start adjusting these dimensions
and figuring out which one's the biggest one
and starts cascading on them and moving them around
to this dimension scheme you'd like.
And you can eventually get to something
that looks pretty nice.
Now you also might want to switch to a different style,
right?
Instead of the baseline dimensioning,
which can be kind of complicated,
we might want to switch to different styles.
So let's go ahead and hit undo a few times here
and get back to the place that we,
okay, let's look close.
Do the twirl down.
All right, back to there.
All right.
So now, let's try it one more time.
This time I'm going to go up to smart dimension,
go to auto dimension
and instead of the baseline dimension scheme,
let's try using the ordinate dimension for both of these.
Here's our ordinate dimensions,
the edge I want to choose, is that same exact edge,
right over here, so click on that.
And same thing with this edge down here,
I want to choose this edge, edge three.
Okay, once you've done that, click on apply
and now you can see if you click on the green check mark,
that ordinate dimension scheme has been applied to our model
and it looks a little bit cleaner,
but we still have a lot of cleanup work to do.
So of course, we're going to be grabbing these dimensions
and moving them around and making sure
that everything starts looking the right way.
And if you don't like a dimension or it's just irrelevant,
notice this one over here like, what is this dimension do?
Just, I guess it's to the center point
of this arc right here, so I probably don't need that one.
So, let's go ahead and click on that one
and just get rid of it.
Hit delete, and you can delete any dimensions
that don't really apply here.
And you can move them around, of course,
and get them to a place that makes sense in your drawing.
And if you have something that's been added
and you don't want it, hit delete.
Or if you want to add to the ordinate,
right click on the ordinate and say add ordinate,
and then I can add something like this,
right into the ordinate and everything looks good.
So anyways, that is the auto dimension tool
inside of SolidWorks.
It does a nice job of adding all the dimensions
but it also adds a lot of work to go clean them up,
'cause it doesn't do it perfectly.
So you still have some work to do,
to make everything look good at the end of the day,
but it is a nice tool for getting
a lot of dimensions on your drawings very quickly.