Auto-routing

- [Instructor] It's time to explore the SOLIDWORKS Auto-Routing function. This is a fantastic tool for minimizing your work times and creating quick, simple routes using options that you've input. SOLIDWORKS Auto-Routing auto-calculates what it predicts will be the best routing options between two points that you select. To start out let's go ahead and put flanges on the points that we would like to AutoRoute between. This time we're going to connect these two points on these tanks. So I've turned on the option that auto-starts my route when I drag a flange on. So I'm going to come up to my Design Library flange and drag it right onto my tank.

I'm going to hit OK for the configuration and my Route Properties has already come up. Again, I'm going to leave everything as it is, because that's definitely good for what we're working with. And we have a stub length that's been created. Now let's go ahead and drag our other flange onto the other tank, click and drop, and again, going to stay with the same configuration. I'm done inserting these components, so I'm going to click the X. And now we have two stub lengths that have been created.

Now I'm going to go down and change my units to inches, which feel free to do if you need to do that as well. Now I'm going to go back over to this new route that we created, right-click, Edit Route, and now we can work on connecting these two. But instead of doing any sketching ourselves this time we're going to use AutoRoute. So before you use it you're welcome to add any dimensions to these stub lengths that you've already created. So I'm going to go up to Smart Dimension and now I'm going to dimension between the start and the end point of this tube and I'm going to click, and now how about we make this 10 inches.

As you can see, the length has changed. And let's go ahead over to our other one, dimension that from the start and end points, and let's make that one 5 inches. Now that we have those lengths whatever we would like I'm going to right-click on the end point of that stub length and this time I'm going to select Auto-Route. So you'll see we have some new options come up on the left. It's letting us Auto-Route and pick the points that we want to go between. So right now, because this is blue, we're working on our Current Selections, and I can go pick the end point of our other pipe.

So I'm going to click that center point, you'll see that there's a lot of sections of pipe that were automatically created. So if this looks good to you you're all done, no more work is needed. You can see it's added in radiuses, as well as the lengths of pipe. Now this is why it was very important when you were selecting some of your route options when you put your defaults in if you selected form bends or elbows, because this Auto-Route is going to pay attention to that. If you don't like this route that's been created SOLIDWORKS might have some other options for you. It will give you other alternate paths that you can choose between depending on what is needed for your route.

So if you keep clicking between them it'll just alternate and see which ones that SOLIDWORKS has generated for you. I like this route that it's created, you can see it's coming up from the end of this pipe length and right into the end of the other. Because I like that all I have to do is go ahead and click this green checkmark and you are done, your route has been auto-created by SOLIDWORKS. However, if you don't like it feel free to go back and delete it, you can edit any of the stub lengths at the beginning and end, and then try your Auto-Routing process again.

After I exit out of my sketch and exit out of my assembly you can see that these form bends were created based on what I put into my route options and we are all done. So now you are all set to move forward and you are able to generate routes without tediously creating 3D sketches for all of your new pipes.