- [Instructor] Using mirror entities
and dynamic mirror can be very easy
and help you a lot when speeding up symmetric designs.
Here I've got a plate that I've started designing.
Everything that I want to mirror is to the left
of the construction line that I have running out
of the origin.
To use the mirror entities tool, we just go up,
simply click on mirror entities.
Now that I'm inside the mirror entities tool
I'm just going to select all of the options
that I want to mirror.
Now that I've got all the entities that I'm going to mirror
selected, I've clicked on the mirror about window
and I'm going to select this center line.
Usually you have to use a construction line
or a center line as indicated by the SolidWorks sketch.
So you see the dash center line here.
We get a preview on the left side,
hit the green okay for accept
and now we've got our mirrored part.
If you click on any of these entities
you're going to find that they all have symmetric relations
to them now, that's part of the mirror feature.
And when you click on it you can see
34 is the number for this particular reference,
and it's got this center line and it's mirroring
the point on each side.
Alright, so pretty easy there.
I'm going to undo that.
And the other way we can mirror which is a little bit
faster is I'm just going to box select.
I'm just going to click over here
and drag and select everything.
You can see I've got the construction line
and the other entities selected,
I'm now just going to click on mirror entities.
When I do that it automatically uses the construction line
that I have selected with everything else
and mirrors all of the entities about that line.
You get the same effect, you get your symmetric relations
and a part that will mirror and be adjustable
about that center construction line.
Now another feature that we want to leverage
is the dynamic mirror.
I don't use it often so I'm going to go up to my command window
here and search for it.
I'm just going to type in D Y and the first thing
that comes up is dynamic mirror entities.
I'm not sure where it is and I don't just want to turn it on
so I'm going to hit the show command location button
and let my mouse maneuver to where it is.
We can now see that it's located here in the sketch tools.
I'm going to click on that.
Basically with dynamic mirror it lets you mirror
in real time after you've selected a construction
or center line to mirror about.
So I'm going to select the same center line
that I used for my other mirror right here.
You can see that it's added this equal sign symbol
to the top and bottom indicating
that I'm in dynamic mirror mode.
And now I can just simply start sketching
and whatever I sketch on one side
is going to pop up on the other side.
So this can be pretty handy too,
especially when you're working with things
that have to mate up to each other.
And you can see it works really quickly
and you don't have to go in and use that mirror entities
feature after the fact,
you can just sketch and go and mirror on the fly.
And it's going to add in all of those relations
just like before when using mirror entities.
So that's mirror entities and dynamic mirror.
Very easy functions to use
and can really speed up your sketches.