- When working in sketches in Solidworks,
it can be a real pain to try to create polygons manually.
You essentially have to come in,
start drawing a bunch of lines
which you think are kind of equal, maybe aren't so equal,
and then go in after the fact,
create relations between all of them,
like making every single entity equal, for example.
But you can see selecting and picking
can be a pain in the butt.
This is really not the way to do it.
So what you want to do instead
is use the polygon tool.
So what I'm going to do is click on polygon,
and you can see here, it's pretty simple.
Basically, there's only a few parameters.
So you select a midpoint, drag out,
and then select an end point.
And this basically gives you your polygon.
Then, you can change the number of sides,
so if I want seven sides, for example, eight sides,
so on and so forth.
You can keep changing until you accept
the polygon's creation.
I can also define this inner diameter if I wanted to.
So if I want to make this seven inches straight on,
I could do that.
I can also adjust where the center point is.
So let's say I want to put that right at the origin,
I can do that as well.
I can also define the angle of the polygon.
So let's say I put it at a straight 45 or at a zero,
and you can see how it will line up.
Now, I can also do a new polygon
by clicking on this button
and create a new one over here,
and start changing its features.
Maybe I only want five sides on that one.
Or I can just hit accept.
And then once created, I've got this nice polygon
which I can drag all over the place pretty easily.
It maintains its relations
and I can also resize it pretty easily
by grabbing the diameter in the middle
and stretching it inside or out.
I can also dimension it if I want to
and add any kind of dimension
like you would to any other sketch entity.
So this can be a pretty powerful tool,
but it saves you a lot of time
from manually dragging and sketching
all of these entities out and then creating those relations.
Instead, just click on the polygon tool,
define how many sides you want in it,
and then select your midpoint, drag it out,
define your angle.
You can see how it's making the angle inside of there.
And then go ahead and click again,
and create your polygon.
Pretty simple.