- [Instructor] When dealing with importing geometry
in SOLIDWORKS, it's important to understand the difference
between solid bodies and surface bodies,
and then what you can do to manage and move in between
the two styles.
Here you see I've created a box just for this exercise.
Very simple, just a boss extrusion with a sketch.
Now going down this feature tree, I'm going to unroll
the rollback bar.
The first thing that I did was use the delete face feature.
So you can see here that it simply just picks a face
and deletes it.
Now, I've gone from a solid body to a surface body.
The way to think of this is just five surface planes.
They've made up the geometry of my box.
Now let's say I wanted to add to this geometry.
Let's roll our bar down some more
and see what I've done here.
So on top, I've added a surface extrusion,
a very simple process that works just like extruding,
a boss.
We just make a sketch, and extrude,
using the surface features.
I've also made a surface plane.
Similar again, just simply make a sketch,
using the surface plane feature.
Now I'm going to continue to make surfaces around
and rebuild this into a solid body.
So next I create a boundary surface on the other side.
Similar effect as the plane surface.
But the last step now is to use the surface net feature
to join them all together.
Now you can see this feature has created a solid body again.
Going into the edit feature, I can see that I've selected
all the geometry,
selected the create solid,
and merge entities options.
If you don't do this, you won't create a solid body.
Let's say I want to do some more surfacing.
I can use the current geometry that's there,
copy a sketch,
and extrude another surface.
Now you can see that I have both a surface and a solid body.
This is a situation that can often arise when importing
geometry where you have surfaces and solids
overlapping each other.
I'm going to go ahead in this next feature,
and delete one of the bodies.
Now you can see, I've deleted my solid body,
and I'm left with just the surface body.
Again, I want to turn this into a solid body,
so now I can use the thicken feature.
As you can see by going to edit feature that all I had to do
was choose a surface and give it a thickness.
I used the thickener on both sides option,
and now I've converted it back into a solid body.
When there's only one body and it's solid,
it won't be listed in the bodies above.
As you can see, it's very easy to transition between
solid bodies and surface bodies.
Important features to take note of
are the delete face feature, and the surface net feature.
These are going to be crucial when repairing or converting
from solid to surface bodies and vice versa.