- [Instructor] When creating a SOLIDWORKS drawing,
especially of a part that's going to be CNC machined,
having the ability to use the Baseline Dimension feature
is going to be very important if at least not helpful.
If we go up to the Annotation tab, we can see under
Smart Dimension we have the Baseline Dimension feature.
If we go up to the Tools, Dimensions selection,
we also find Baseline dimension here.
How this works is we're going to essentially select
a singular edge or vertex to start as our baseline
and all the other dimensions and geometry that we select
after that will be based on that first reference.
So let's see how this works.
I'm going to select the Baseline.
You can see that my cursor now has the baseline dimension
feature icon right to the bottom right of it.
I'm going to zoom in on this top view right here,
and I'm going to select this left edge as my baseline.
So I'm going to pretend that my CNC machinist,
who I'm going to hand this off to, is going to zero,
or plane, off of this side and then make
all the other features based off of that.
So if I click on the first threaded hole here,
you see that it automatically
creates a dimension down below.
I'm going to click a couple more times for the other holes;
and as I go, you can see that it's evenly spacing and adding
the dimensions for each of the features based on
the distance from this edge that I selected as my baseline.
Now, I'm done with the dimensions for this baseline,
but the tool is still up.
I'm going to click in the middle of the drawing
and then hit escape to exit the tool.
I can now zoom out and move my drawing view around
so that everything looks nice and neat.
If you want to, you can also come back
and shift all of the dimensions up and down
together to get them a little closer.
If you want to change the arrows or the positions
of the dimensions, you can also do that and drag them out.
Their representation is really up to you
or whatever standard you want to use.