Planes for surfaces - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

- Like most features inside of SOLIDWORKS, we need to start with a sketch on a face or a plane. Now many times when we're developing a surface model, we're gonna need to create several different planes to be able to draw our geometry and sketches to create the individual surfaces. To review surface creation, let's go up here under Features and choose Reference Geometry. Let's go down to Plane and as soon as that pops up, you can see I've got a First, Second, and Third Reference. Now you don't necessarily need all three of those to create a plane, so depending on which features you choose or what type of entities you choose, it allows you to either add a plane by making it an offset or rotating it around one of the lines or a point. There's a lot of different options for creating planes. The first and easiest way to do that is to choose a First Reference. Let's go ahead and choose something like the Top Plane or the Right Plane. It doesn't matter what plane you really choose, but notice as you choose them, they start highlighting over here and putting them in the difference reference locations. If you don't like one, just go ahead and highlight it and hit Delete, it'll take it out. The same thing up here, Delete that up there. Go back here, if I just choose something like the Top Plane, notice I only need one reference for a plane and I can type in a value here. So if I use the up and down arrows, I can just move that plane up and down, or I can just go ahead and type in a value. Now because a plane is infinite in all directions, I only need one reference, which is a plane, to define a secondary plane. By choosing the Top Plane, giving it a distance, that's all the information that I need, okay? Go ahead and save that out so you can see there's my new plane. Now if I wanted to create a more complex plane, I go again to Reference Geometry, go up Plane. This time instead of choosing a original plane itself, so I'm gonna choose this line right here. Notice as soon as I choose that line, it's giving me a plane but it's not fully defined. It's yellow still. So I need to give it a secondary reference, and that can be either another line or a point or a plane. In this case I'm gonna choose this point right here. Notice as soon as I do that, it turns blue showing me that it has all the information that it needs to define where that plane is in space. It is hinging on this line here and it's going through that point right there. So those are the two references that I need. Go ahead and click OK, and you can see there's Plane2. Now if I just want to use individual points, go up to Reference Geometry one more time, choose a Plane, and this time I'm gonna choose a series of points. I'm gonna choose this point right here, I'm gonna choose that point right there, and notice as soon as I do that, again it's hinging between those points, almost like if there was a line between the two. But it's still yellow because it needs one more piece of information telling it what rotation it is around that line where that virtual line between the two points. If I choose a point like this one right here, notice it creates a plane through those points, and it becomes fully defined so that it knows exactly where it is through those two points. So again depending on which type of features or entities you're choosing to create your planes is gonna define how many you're gonna need. So point is the least powerful, a line is the next more powerful, and then you have things like faces and planes, which are the most powerful and you can generally just get away with just using one reference if you're choosing a face or a plane. So those are the basics for creating planes. We're gonna be generating and using a lot of planes going through the Surfacing module here, so make sure you feel very comfortable with creating basic planes and working and adding a few to this model just to play with them and make sure you feel comfortable doing it.