- [Instructor] Once you've gone ahead and imported
geometry from another software into SOLIDWORKS,
the next step in the process is deciding
whether or not to save that as a part or an assembly file
in the native SOLIDWORKS format
and the implications of that.
Let's walk through a pair of solid assembly
so we can see what I mean.
I'm going to go ahead and navigate to a pair of solid
that I have ready.
You'll notice this is the XT version
and I'm just going to hit Open.
You can see here when I opened this part that originally
was constructed as an assembly file,
this is made obviously by the fact that in the feature tree,
we can see several parts underneath it that are all separate
in creating separate 3D geometry.
Now if we want to at this point, we can go ahead
and just click Save.
And it'll save it in the location where we found it
and you can say I've saved it before.
So I'm simply going to overwrite that.
And as well as saving the top level, it's also going to push
all of the components that have been used in this assembly
out to that same location essentially
recreating your file structure.
So let's go ahead and see what that looks like
inside my folder.
So you can see here
that I've go the SOLIDWORKS assembly and all the part files
that are needed to make that assembly right here.
Going back to my window, I also have to option
to save it as a part file.
Now sometimes you'll be sharing this data with someone else
and sending multiple files in an assembly format
just isn't necessary.
Let's just say that I want to send this to a customer
who's going to 3D print this for me.
They would be able to use the part file version
much easier which is much smaller than the assembly version.
So let's see what happens when we save this
as a part and open it back up.
So I'm going to Save As, go down to my Save As file type,
and save it as a part file.
Down here we have a different options.
These all revolve around the geometry
that's actually important to us.
So let's say that we were doing a 3D print,
the internal geometry is of no consequence.
So we might select only show the exterior faces.
It's a good option but not always complete.
The next step up is exterior components.
Let's say you have a very large assembly with many
different kinds of hardware inside and you don't care
what that hardware is but you want to see
all the external features maybe for a presentation
or something like that.
You can select this option,
it will be a smaller resulting file.
What I always tend to do is select all components
and then cut out the geometry that I don't need after.
So I'm going to select that again, then hit Save.
So now you can see here that everything's saved the same
in my assembly part file.
But I'm going to go ahead and open up
that part that I just made.
Now the first thing that comes up is the
FeatureWorks feature recognition.
Because this was created in SOLIDWORKS,
sometimes I want to say yes.
But for now, I'm just going to say no.
We'll come back to that shortly.
As you can see in the feature tree, instead of having
parts in an assembly, I now have bodies in a part.
We still have the ability to hide, save,
combine all of them, whatever we'd like to do.
But now we have a smaller file that's a little lighter
and can be sent easier.
So I'm going to go ahead and save that and approve this.
If we go back to our exercise files
and look at that same part and go by size,
and if you add it up, the assembly and all
these resulting parts below, it's going to be much less
than the 1,175 KB that we have here.
I'm going to go ahead and close that.
Now let's open it up again and this time,
we're going to run FeatureWorks on our part.
Now you'll notice here that we have overlapping solids
and that's one of the limits for FeatureWorks
so we can't do anything further here.
I'm going to close this part
and now I'm going to go back to one of the original parts
from our original assembly and try the same thing.
So you can see this is a single body
so there were no failures.
I usually go with the automatic option in Standard features.
If you're designing a sheet metal part,
you select sheet metal features.
You scroll down in the property manager, you can see
what features we want to include.
So we're going to include extrusions, revolves, wholes,
fillets, chamfers, and ribs.
I'm now dragging from right to left, going to select
all of the features in this part.
You can see that it's populated the blue window down here
to contain all of the faces.
I'm going to hit go.
SOLIDWORKS will now try to rebuild the feature tree
as it was originally.
As you can see, we have our results in the feature tree
and what it's done is it's gone through
and recreated this part all the way from the ground up.
You can see the original imported geometry we started with
and then all the features that make up the parts.
So we have a boss extrusion here
for each one of the letters.
We have cuts for the wholes that are going through.
And then we also have clearance holes in the right size.
All of this is detected simply by the geometry being there
and the standards that SOLIDWORKS has built into it.
So as you can see FeatureWorks is a very powerful tool
that typically works best when the data that you have
was originally created in SOLIDWORKS.
Please leverage FeatureWorks everywhere you can
to give yourself the best options
for editing a part moving forward,
especially when dealing with imported geometry.