Connection points and routing points

- [Instructor] Before we start creating routes, we need to understand some important terminology related to the creation of pipes in SolidWorks. Specifically, we need to look at connection points and routing points. These points help orient us and position our pipes correctly. Let's zoom in on one specific pipe part, so we can get a little bit of a closer look at where these points appear on the pipe. So, routing points determine the location of where your pipe will be dropped. When you drag a pipe, you are dragging the routing point. It is usually fairly centrally located on the pipe.

On this 90 degree turn, we would have it, either at this point or at this point here on either end. Connection points are also located at either end of a pipe segment. Connection points tell the program where the pipe comes in, the direction, and how far it comes in. They're actually part of our feature tree on the left as well and we'll take a look at that in the individual elbow part in a moment. Now, if we want to see these a little bit better than just these dots here on either end, we're going to go up to the top center, and click the dropdown here on the right, and scroll down to this little square that's located on a line, and click View Routing Points.

Now you'll see some letters pop up next to each of the points that we were looking at before. You can see this one is called C.2, C.1, and if you look behind this one, it's actually located on the same point as also the routing point. It's a little bit hard to see but you can see the overlap of the R and the C there and you'll know that that is the routing point and the connection point for this individual tube. Let's open this actual individual part of the pipe to look at it a little more closely. You can click this pipe and select Open Part here, or you can right-click it to get to the same menu, right-click, and go up to Open Part.

Now that we have the individual file open, you can see that on the left, you have the CPoint, CPoint2, and RPoint1, all located over here on the design tree. Now, if you highlight each one, you can see appearing in orange on the screen, so you can better identify which point is located where. At least one end of this pipe has to be connected via a connection point, in order to be considered part of a route. These are crucial to making sure that your route is continuous as you create the pipes.

The library parts already have these individual points inserted, however, if you're creating a custom part, you're going to actually have to add these in as you design it, and we'll get into that a little bit more later as we go through. So let's X out of this and go back to our assembly. Now that we can locate important parts and points, in our feature trees, we're ready to look at the parts that make up the routing in SolidWorks.