- [Instructor] In the previous section,
we looked at how SolidWorks Cam can automatically detect
aspects of your design intent.
Along with the features you've incorporated
into your part design.
In many cases,
this is all you need to generate tool paths
from your SolidWorks part, using the Cam tools.
In other cases however,
we still need to have a manual way to insert,
organize, remove, or combine features
in order to machine our part effectively.
Perhaps you've imported a part from a neutral file format,
like a step file and SolidWorks Cam was unable to detect
certain geometry.
In other cases,
you might not want to machine all the features
that were designed in a given part.
The interactive feature recognition tool
gives you complete control over what features
are carried over to your Cam routine.
This tool allows you to add
or delete features that feature tree,
reorganize features to change where they are
in the feature tree.
For example, grouping similar features together.
Suppress features that you don't want to machine
without deleting them for the feature tree
manually select and insert features
that SolidWorks Cam may not have found
or group and combined features
so that a single strategy or tool
can be applied to machining those features.
Let's take a look at adding and deleting features
in the feature tree.
I'm going to start with the SolidWorks part here,
even though we're going to be using
the interactive feature recognition tools.
We're always going to start by running
the automatic feature recognition tool
to add any detectable features to our mill parts setup list.
So in our Cam dialog box, I'm going to go ahead
and click the extract machinable features.
Once I do that, you'll see our mill part setup
shows a number of features
that SolidWorks automatically detected, in our part.
We can then begin to work with this list
using the interactive feature recognition tools.
In this case,
we've successfully added all of the features to our part.
So I'm going to go ahead and delete some of those features
to show you how we can insert them interactively.