- [Instructor] Inside of SolidWorks,
we also have the ability to create a sketch
from an existing drawing.
Drawings may exist in a .dxf or .dwg format,
and we can pull those directly into a
SolidWorks part file.
So I'm going to go ahead and do this real quick,
I've got an example dwg file prepared right here,
I'm going to open that up, and you'll notice
we get the DXF/DWG Import dialog box.
I'm going to go ahead and switch this to
import as a new part in a 2D sketch.
Clicking Next, it asks you what you want to bring in,
if it's a multiple layer dxf or dwg,
you're going to want to select which layers
you want here and you can turn them on and off accordingly.
I'm going to keep both layers, clicking next.
You can also adjust if points need to be merged,
if the repair sketch tool needs to be run,
if you want to define the origin yourself,
or if you want to rotate this before you do anything.
So basically, any final manipulation you want to do
before you get all of this stuff into SolidWorks.
I'm going to go ahead and click Finish,
I'm going to click Yes to enable the Explode Blocks option
in case there are blocks, I want to be able
to explode them, so I can take them apart.
And here we've got the geometry.
Now you can see it's got some stuff that I don't need,
so I'm probably going to go in and start selecting entities
and deleting them out, but you can see here
if they're part of other curves or things like that,
there can be issues, so you have to be careful
in what you do.
Typically, what I'll do is, bring this geometry
in first, leave it on a top level sketch,
and then start working in another sketch
to convert those entities, whatever other
features I want to use, to replicate this geometry,
to make the 3D model, in this case,
of a shoulder screw.
So you can do that with a .dxf or .dwg
and bring it right inside of your sketches.
If you're using DraftSight, you can also
take views directly from DraftSight,
and drag them into your model.