- [Instructor] When trying to create
very specific driven curves in SolidWorks,
sometimes you want to use the equation driven curve.
This gives you the ability to use medical equation
or relationship to drive the feature of a curve.
This is similar to what you do, plotting it in Excel
or using a software like MATLAB or Mathematica.
So I'm going to go up to the spline tab
and hit equation driven curve.
Now the explicit is what we use for the 2D curves
and the parametric is more for defining
more complex geometry with more parameters
and usually used to make a 3D representation.
But for this example,
we're going to focus on the explicit version.
Pretty simply, you're just going to put in some parameters
for your change of x over a certain time,
so I'm going to start with X1 being 0
and X2 being 50 and I'm going to say
that Y equals X plus 50.
Now if I hit Return and zoom out a little bit,
we can see here that I've got a preview of a curve.
X goes from zero to 50
and Y goes from 50 up to 100.
Now we can change this
to use more complex math equations as well,
so I can put the cosine of X, for example.
And you can see here how we get that cosine curve,
use other geometric features like sine,
you see you get the inverse.
You can also add powers.
So we can square that.
We can also do other basic math features like division.
So as you can see, this is a pretty cool tool
and if you have a specific equation
that you're trying to model out
to make like an airfoil for example
or another very specific geometric feature
like doing nozzle design,
this is a great way to make that spline.
Once you hit accept, you've got your spline
and if you need to go back and edit it at all,
all you have to do is click on the spline
and you get all of the parameters here.
You can change it to a construction line,
just do with a normal spline.
You can also fix it and add relations
from other features to it.
So that's how you create a basic equation driven curve.