From the course: Learning CATIA v5

What you're looking at - CATIA Tutorial

From the course: Learning CATIA v5

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What you're looking at

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- [Instructor] Here I want to discuss the user interface, what you're looking at. The first and most important thing that I want you to pay attention to is the model tree. The model tree is going to contain all elements within the CATPart. It doesn't matter if it's a point, line, plane, sketch, solid, surface, whatever it is it will display somewhere in the modeling tree. Within the part design workbench we are going to be creating sketches and solids so they will all be contained within the initial part body. Here you can see by expanding the part body we can see all the features that are nested within the tree. The sketch is the parent to the pad. This pad one is the first feature within the tree and everything is within timestamp order afterwards. It's important to understand that within the CATIA world when we're dealing with solid based features everything will appear within timestamp order in the tree. When we get into additional workbenches in future courses the elements do not necessarily appear within timestamp order so it's very important you have a good understanding of what's happening within part bodies before we move into additional body and element types. You'll see here as the tree grows we have the scroll bar. This allows us to navigate through the tree. If you happen to have a wheel on your mouse you can also scroll through that tree as well. You'll note in the upper right corner you have an element called the compass. This compass is sort of like a working coordinate system. We can visualize our part with a compass by manipulating it, moving the part data across the screen by grabbing on that compass, you can click on any one of the letters on the compass and it will true the view up to that access direction. In the bottom right corner is an axis system. This access system always points to the absolute X,Y,Z. The reason why this is important is because there are going to be times when the compass is no longer oriented to absolute and you can use the absolute access in the lower right corner, here, to reorient your compass back to its absolute orientation. Next you'll see our menu. One of the things that I do want you to note within CATIA is most of the options that are contained in the menu are also iconized, you will have an icon, and most of the icons have a menu option. You'll notice I said most. There are some tools that do not have an easy access menu pull down and there are some tools that do not have an easy access icon and I will point these out as we go along within the course to make sure that you're not trying to find something somewhere that it doesn't exist. We'll come down to the bottom of the screen and you'll see at the bottom you have a command line. This command line is very handy for the new user to pay attention to and even somebody, an old salty like myself that's been in the system for nearly 20 years. This command line is the prompt. It's going to tell you or ask you pick this, do this, and so on. So by paying attention to that command line when I do select an icon, for example, or enter into one of the tools you'll see enter desired data to modify the pad. So I can pick the sketch, enter in my limits, etcetera. Let me get out of that. Next to the command line is a text entry field. This text entry field is for some users that like to actually type in the functions that they want access to. In some cases it's really simple to go in there and type in what you're looking for. You can setup a list of commands and quickly rifle through those commands through that text field. A lot of people don't like to use that, but there's some old timers that have been around since AutoCAD days that do like to enter in their commands and this is where they can go into it and enter those things in. Other things to wary of is at the very top you're going to have your part file name as it exists in your database. At the tree this top level node in the tree this is going to be a reference name. So there is potential for this name and this name to be different. When we get into future courses we will discuss what the reference is versus what the document is. It's important you understand that there is a difference. So when you get into the system you'll note that those names can be different.

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