- [Instructor] No, I would be the first to admit
that doing floor plans inside of SolidWorks drawings
isn't the most ideal CAD platform to use.
Many people out there know that there are other 2D platforms
like DraftSight from SolidWorks or AutoCAD
which handle this kind of 2D work a lot easier.
and it has a little bit more functionality,
but if you do need to do 2D work like layouts or floor plans
you can totally do it inside of SolidWorks
and I don't think it's that bad at all.
So this is an example of a floor plan I did
for one of the jobs that I used to work at,
and I've actually leveraged a couple of things here.
So what I did is I got a copy of a PDF
an image of the original floor plan,
I dropped that into an empty drawing without a drawing view.
So now you can insert this picture
or your sketches into an empty drawing view
and you can do that by going insert 'Drawing View',
inserting an empty drawing view
and then dropping all of these things in there.
The reason you do that is it's a little bit easier
to move things around.
Just like we talked
with working with blocks inside of drawings,
it's a similar thing.
You can almost treat the empty drawing view as a block
put all of your items in it and then move it around
and scale it up and down on the fly if you need to.
This drawing,
I knew what scale I was working with
I knew all the information from the beginning.
So all I wanted to do was go ahead
and create a sketch picture
and then start drawing on top of it,
which was really easy.
I was able to just trace the lines
and then insert some hatching,
to symbolize some different things to different areas
use some different kinds of notes.
One thing that's really important when doing this
is you will want to have that line format toolbar
available to you and you can turn that on...
Now I'm using SolidWorks 2020.
If you don't have that
and you right click right here,
you'll see all the toolbars.
But now we have a new dropdown
where you go down to toolbars
and select and turn off those various toolbars right here.
So again, line format.
So, I can select my line for example, and change the color,
I can drop various other little pictures in here.
So I got a little picture
for a fire extinguisher that I dropped in there
and I can scale it down
and move it around and copy it into various positions.
So, really not too bad if you're tracing something
or if you know all of the dimensions
of what you're trying to lay out or do a rough floor plan.
I know a lot of people also will use this to sketch
and lay out parts of their home.
And what's great is you're doing everything to scale.
So as long as you have your units set up right down below,
and when you right click
and go to the properties of your drawing...
Let's expand that and see our properties.
You got to know what scale you're working with here as well.
So I'm doing a one to 10 scale.
So that means, if I look at this line,
this is actually a 54 inch line
but that represents 540 inches in real life.
So it's much larger in real life.
So, remember you can use SolidWorks
to do these floor plans,
it's a little bit different.
Typically, like I said, "I like to insert a sketch picture.
"like I showed us how to do in a previous video.
"and then I'll use my sketch geometry lines,
"circles, arcs, splines to trace over that,
"trim it all up
"maybe insert some other sketch pictures
"for some various symbols,
"and then you're off to the races
"and you can get a layout pretty quickly."