2011 Pentax Video 01: The SolidWorks Interface

Summary:

• Menubar
• Tool Ribbon
• History Tree
• View Orientation
• Mouse Gestures
• Mouse Navigation
• Keyboard Navigation
• Magnifying Glass
• Common Keyboard Shortcuts
• Key Accelerators
• Shortcut Bar

More in this series:

• SolidWorks 2011: Tutorial Overview
  
  
• 2011 Pentax Video 01: The SolidWorks Interface
  
  
• 2011 Pentax Video 02: Sketch Setup
  
  
• 2011 Pentax Video 03: Tool Basics
  
  
• 2011 Pentax Video 04: Fully-Defined Sketches
  
  
• 2011 Pentax Video 05: “Smart” Sketch Basics
  
  
• 2011 Pentax Video 06: Finalizing the Sketch
  
  
• 2011 Pentax Video 07: 3D Element Relations
  
  
• 2011 Pentax Video 08: Illustrator to SolidWorks
  
  
• 2011 Pentax Video 09: Wrap Tool
  
  
• 2011 Pentax Video 10: The Derived Sketch
  
  
• SW Pentax Camera 11: Finishing Touches
  
  

Full Transcript:

The first thing we need to do is create a new document by clicking the icon at the top of the window. We’ll discuss the differences between parts, assemblies, and drawings later. For now, let’s just create a new part document by clicking ‘part,’ then okay.

Before we actually begin our first modeling tutorial, I want to take a moment to familiarize you with the SolidWorks 2011 interface (or SolidWorks ’11′ as many folks call it these days).

Menubar: By default, SolidWorks hides its menubar. To reveal it, we simply mouse-over the arrow to the right of the SolidWorks icon at the top left of the window. I prefer to keep the menu bar visible at all times by clicking the push-pin to the right of the menu.

Tool Ribbon: You’ll notice the ribbon of tools at the top of the screen. We’ll be using them, but I want to first point out that virtually every tool in SolidWorks is also available in the menubar above. If you can’t find what you’re looking for in the tool ribbon or other toolbars, try perusing the menubar, particularly the insert menu. But more on that later…

Until you are familiar with the interface, I recommend leaving the ribbon in its default location. If you should accidentally drag the tool ribbon from the top of the screen, you can replace it by dragging the title bar of the window over the ‘up’ icon that appears thereafter.

Right-clicking a blank area of the tool ribbon provides a drop-down list of every default tool pallette available in SolidWorks. If you prefer to work with floating tool palettes as in Rhino or Adobe applications, feel free to experiment with these. You can drag them anywhere you like, and dock them neatly on the sides of the screen.

At the bottom of the tool ribbon you will see a variety of tabs. These correspond loosely with the ‘insert’ menu at the top of the window. As I said before, if you ever have trouble finding a tool in SolidWorks, check the ‘insert’ menu, and there’s a good chance you’ll find it.

When you right-click on one of the tabs, notice that there are a variety of other tabs available. Check and uncheck tabs so that you have Features, Sketch, Surfaces, Direct Editing, and Evaluate checked. These are the tabs we’ll be using in this video tutorial series.

The History Tree: The vast majority of the screen is taken up by our 3D viewport, in which you will probably see a vast gray expanse of nothingness by default. On the left, you’ll notice a vertical strip with the name of our part document followed by a list. The only things that we care about in this list are the Front, Top, and Right planes. You’ll see that as I mouse over them, they temporarily show up in the viewport on the right.

In order to give us a sense of space as we learn to navigate, I want to show the Front, Top, and Right planes in our viewport. To do so, I’ll click the ‘Front’ plane, then shift-click the ‘Right’ plane. This selects all three planes. I now right-click on any one of the three planes, and click the little blue eyeglasses icon to show the items.

To hide and show the origin, we can click the hide/show icon at the top of the viewport and click the ‘origin’ button, or we can click the ‘view’ menu, followed by ‘origins’. In my studio, I generally keep it hidden.

View Orientation Dropdown: To practice navigating in 3D, open the finished lens file in the project resources folder.

SolidWorks gives us a variety of ways to navigate in 3D. One is the View Orientation icon at the top of the viewport. In it you’ll find your standard orthographic views, standard isometric, trimetric, and dimetric views, and a very useful tool called “Normal To.” To use it, just click a plane, and then click Normal To to align the view to said plane.

Mouse Gestures: Another great way of navigating, new to SolidWorks 2011, or SolidWorks ’10,’ for short, is to use mouse gestures. To get the most out of gestures, click Tools > Customize and click the ‘mouse gestures’ tab. Make sure that ’8 Gestures’ is enabled, and click OK. Now when you right-click in the viewport, you’re presented with a variety of standard views in a ring around your cursor. To activate a particular view, drag your mouse over it. This way you can change views merely by ‘flicking’ the right mouse button in a given direction.

Mouse: To freely navigate in 3D, you can use the middle-mouse button (MMB) to rotate the view. If you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, you can usually press down on the wheel to activate the MMB. You can pan by holding ‘ctrl’ while dragging the MMB, or zoom by holding ‘shift’. Alternatively you can use the scroll wheel to zoom, or hit the ‘F’ key on the keyboard to “zoom-fit”. So if you ever get lost and you can’t find your model in the viewport, try hitting the ‘f’ key.

Keyboard: You can also use the keyboard to change views. Holding the ‘ctrl’ key and hitting any of the numeral keys can set your view as well. Holding the ‘ctrl’ key and hitting the numerals 1-8 correspond to Front, Back, Left, Right, Top, Bottom, Isometric, and Normal To respectively.

You can use the arrow keys on the keyboard to rotate the view in fifteen degree increments, or hold ‘shift’ with the arrow keys to rotate in ninety degree jumps. You can pan by holding ‘ctrl’ with the arrow keys, or even tilt the view with ‘alt.’

Magnifying Glass: The last keyboard shortcut that I think is really great is the ‘g’ key, for ‘magnifying glass.’ This lets us zoom in on a particular part of the model, without having to zoom the entire view. This can be really useful for looking at little details. To drop the magnifying glass, you can either hit ‘g’ again, or ‘esc’ as is my habit.

To the cool kids, keyboard shortcuts are dry, boring, and generally not-worth-remembering. To us cadjunkies, exceptional use of keyboard shortcuts separates the men & women from boys & girls.

Keyboard Shortcuts: Speaking of keyboard shortcuts, here are a few more tips. First of all, I’m a huge fan of what are called ‘accelerator keys’ in CAD programs. These allow you to access menu commands by simply hitting a single key. For example, if I hit the ‘alt’ key, you’ll notice that the menu bar at the top of the screen becomes active, the File menu is highlighted, and underlines appear under certain letters.

Accelerators: This allows us to access any menu command simply by hitting the appropriate letter. If I want to access the ‘Insert’ menu, I just hit the ‘i’ key. For the ‘surface’ features sub-menu, I can hit the ‘s’ key, and for the ‘Extrude’ feature therein, the ‘e’ key. So in fast motion, if I like keyboard commands, I can activate the surface extrude tool by hitting ‘alt > i > s > e’ in rapid succession.

Not convinced? Here’s another great use of accelerator keys. Notice that whenever you right-click something in SolidWorks (or any Windows program, for that matter), letters are underlined in the contextual menu items. In this case, when I right-click the Front plane, if I want to see its properties, I can move the mouse down to click ‘properties,’ but it’s quicker to simply hit the ‘t’ key. ‘RMB > t’ will give me the properties of any object. Pretty nice, right?

Shortcut Bar: Another important shortcut is the [s] key, for “shortcut” bar. This gives us a context-sensitive group of tools, depending on which part of SolidWorks we’re using at the moment. In this case it gives me quick access to a few common tools from the Features pallette. The shortcut toolbars can be customized by simply right-clicking and selecting ‘customize.’ From here you’ll be able to drag- drop new icons in, or drag out the ones you don’t use often.

You can use the Tools > Customize dialog to customize any part of the SolidWorks interface, including Keyboard shortcuts. I recommend sticking with the defaults at first, but as you get more confident, you may find custom shortcuts will be very useful to you.

There’s a lot more to learn about the SolidWorks interface, but this should be a good start, and we’ll learn the rest as we go along. Let’s get started!

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