- [Instructor] Another great tool
inside of SOLIDWORKS drawings
is the ability to use an empty view
inside of SOLIDWORKS drawings.
This doesn't seem really obvious at first
but let's say that you don't want to put information
that's attached with a certain SOLID part file,
so you're not doing a model view
of a part you're trying to get made,
you're not trying to do a sketch entity
or a sketch layout that you want to bring in here and scale.
Instead, you want to, for example,
group a set of notes together
an be able to move them all over the drawing together.
You can do that with an empty view.
So I'm going to go up here to the top, click on Insert,
Drawing View and then come down
and you'll see Empty view here.
You see down at the bottom of the screen,
it tells you it adds an empty view
that is often used to contain sketch entities.
So I mentioned notes as my example
but you can also put sketch entities inside the empty view.
So I'm going to click on that.
Now you see that on my cursor,
I've got a highlighted rectangle
with a dashed outline
so I'm going to click with my left mouse button
in the middle of the screen
and just place that view.
Now on the left side, we can see in the Property Manager,
the Drawing view properties
for this particular view.
So we can set the scale,
we can align it with the sheet, for example, right now.
If I zoom in, I've got one-to-one on this.
You can confirm that here as well.
We can use our own custom scale if we choose to,
we can change the dimension type,
cosmetic thread display
and all the other attributes
you would normally be able to change
with a drawing view.
I'm going to go ahead and click the green check mark,
the close dialog and hit Control + Q
to update everything.
Now I'm going to insert some sketch entities
and some notes into this empty view.
So I'm going to click on the view.
It's important that you have the particular empty view
that you want to put things into,
activated when you start using these functions.
So the first thing I'm going to do is click
on a corner rectangle over here
and just drag and create one
like I normally would in a sketch.
You can see that the empty view,
the dashed outline has already automatically updated
to fit the geometry that I have inside of it.
So if I do that again,
you can see that the empty view has stretched over
to contain all of the geometry.
Now you'll notice when I click on the empty view,
everything goes blues.
That means it's active and I can adjust it.
If I click outside of it, it's gray
and I'm not going to be able to necessarily activate everything
at once but you can see you can just click on it
and it activates it
and then you can drag it, adjust it,
add dimensions, whatever you'd normally like to do.
And you can also add notes
so I'm going to click on Annotation here, click No.
Now you can see right now I'm not inside that view.
If I hover over and activate it,
I can click in here,
I'm just going to type in Notes.
Hit Escape and you can see that note
is also inside of that drawing view.
Now, if I'm not inside that view
and I just click a note down here,
start typing and the function,
that note isn't going to move around
with everything else and it's the same thing
if I make more sketch entities
and I'm not inside of that drawing view.
I can make those entities down here
but they can't be moved around inside of that.
I can connect them by sketching from here
to there, it's just kind of difficult sometimes
'cause as you can see,
it doesn't want to activate those items over there.
I can't get my normal coincidence as easily
so sometimes you got to zoom in a little bit
and really get it to pick it
'cause what's going on is the first time
that I clicked, this wasn't inside the drawing view
but now that I've clicked an entity over here,
it is inside the drawing view.
So I'm just going to go ahead and click Escape
and again, I can drag this all around together.
So these are some of the things you can do
with a empty view but a nice thing
might be if you're trying to make a flow chart
or ping an ID, other schematics
where you're going to have blocks of systems
that are all built by sketch entities,
you can then move them around pretty easily in groups
without using a traditional block.