- [Instructor] SolidWorks can work with many different types
of files, as well as imported geometry.
Sheet metal parts import just like any other solid,
and what we call that format is a dumb solid,
so when we're importing from a STEP file or an IGES file,
or any other exterior format,
it's generally not gonna have a feature tree,
it's just gonna have one solid with all the 3D data.
Now we can take that 3D data and add on to it
and create a feature tree beyond that,
and I'm gonna show you how to do that right now.
So the first thing we wanna do is click on Open.
Now I'm in exercise files, chapter four, 4.3.
Now you should see a list down here,
but if you don't, you might be on the SolidWorks files only,
and you'll see nothing in the folder.
So make sure you come down here and click on All Files,
so you see everything that's in the folder,
and I'm gonna go ahead and choose the IGES file.
We're also gonna be opening and importing the STEP file,
and I've also included a couple other files here
you can play with if you'd like to.
Click on the IGES file, click on Open,
and it's gonna load that model.
I'm gonna go ahead and not run import diagnostics this time,
so click on No, and there's my solid.
Alright, now, I can work on this solid,
I can say I wanna make a sketch,
and maybe drag out a circle,
do a feature, like an extruded cut,
cut through the part,
and you can see over here, I have that
original imported solid, which has no feature tree,
and now I'm adding a feature to it
and actually creating the feature tree below that,
but if you wanna actually modify this part,
you might wanna convert it over to a sheet metal part,
so to do that, it's pretty straightforward.
Let's go ahead and just choose sheet metal,
convert to sheet metal,
let's choose the bottom surface here as the beginning part,
and then click on Collect All Bends,
which is gonna go ahead and analyze the part,
find any existing bends,
and put them in this list down here.
The thickness of 40,000 looks good.
The bend radius of 03 looks fine.
You can come down here and make any modifications
to the gap distance and things like that if you'd like to,
but for right now, let's just go ahead and click on
the green check mark,
and now we have a sheet metal part inside of SolidWorks.
Alright, we can flatten that if you'd like to.
Then you can see we've got a bounding box,
we have all the bent edges, and so on,
all in that flat pattern.
If you are done with that, click on Flatten
and it brings it right back up to the folded state.
So you can see, we can easily import files from IGES files
or STEP files or any other imported geometry,
and then easily convert them over to a sheet metal part,
fold them, unfold them, and work with them
inside of SolidWorks.
Now let me show you one more option.
Let's import the other file,
which is gonna be the STEP file, so this one's here, STEP,
which is just a different type of imported file,
but it's also a dumb file type.
Open that up.
Run the diagnostics this time.
It'll look and see if there's any kind of faulty faces.
If it finds them, it'll ask you to heal them or fix them.
In this case, everything's good, so click on Okay,
and now we have one more file in here.
Now we also have the option for running
what's called a feature recognition,
and if you don't have feature recognition turned on,
you're probably not gonna see it, so click under Tools,
come down here to the bottom,
go to Add-ins,
and make sure you're turning on feature work,
so feature works needs to be turned on,
and then you have the ability
to actually recognize these features inside of SolidWorks,
and it'll create a feature tree for you.
But in this case here, I'm not gonna run the feature
recognition, but if you do have feature works turned on,
it might prompt you to see if you'd like to run
feature recognition on your part,
and it'll actually create a tree for you.
So it's a couple different options
of how you can import geometry into SolidWorks,
create a tree, convert it to sheet metal,
or recognize some of the features inside the part,
so you can work with them in a little more detail
inside of SolidWorks.