- When working with various paths,
as we've discussed in other videos in this course,
sometimes you want to add a path length dimension.
So we find this by going to the Smart Dimension drop down,
and selecting Path Length.
This set of sketches right here,
I've already made a path by selecting them all
and hitting make path.
Now if I go ahead and select any part of it,
I'm going to get a length for this entire path,
and it's going to choose a beginning and end point basically
for the loop.
So if I go ahead and click,
you can see I now have the ability to adjust this,
which is a little bit weird and kindof hard to follow,
but you can see as I start to adjust this,
and increase it very slowly,
it actually grows the path out
in the point of least resistance,
I think that's closest to the dimension.
So in this case, it's the arc
that I have going out to the left.
So if you're working on a chain drive or a belt,
for example, and you need to know what your path length is,
this is a good way to actually add a dimension to it,
so it's something permanent and stable,
and if somebody goes in
and goes to drag a sketch for example,
they're not going to mess with that.
It also gives you a dimension
that you can pull into your model
when making drawings after the fact,
and also gives you the ability to do some fine adjustments
like this if you need to tweak your path a little bit
to adjust for different hardware,
if there were several spindles all inside of this
to make a serpentine, for example.
So that's the path length dimension.
You're not going to use it a lot.
You're really only going to use it
when you've made paths in your sketches,
and you need to control that length.