From the course: Modeling a Motorcycle Engine with SOLIDWORKS

SOLIDWORKS user interface: Quick review - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: Modeling a Motorcycle Engine with SOLIDWORKS

SOLIDWORKS user interface: Quick review

- Before attempting to follow along with this modeling series, if you've not already done so I would recommend watching the SolidWorks 2014 Essentials training series presented by Gabriel Corbett, found here at Lynda.com. It'll greatly assist you in keeping up with me during our modeling process since I will not be explaining every detail about how to use certain tools or tasks that are considered to be basic and already covered during the Essentials course. Now as a refresher to what you would have learned during the SolidWorks Essential series and since during the modeling process I will be referring to different dialogs, windows, and tabs within the user interface of SolidWorks, let's quickly review those user interface terms I will often be referring to during the series so you can more easily follow along. At the top of the screen we have the menu bar which has a number of frequently used menu command icons. If you hover over the SolidWorks logo at the top left corner of the screen, the menu bar will expand to the right showing us the relevant menus with their pull downs. When you move your mouse away, the expanded menu will again collapse. I prefer to keep this expanded so my familiarity with the available menus continuously improve and I can save a bit of time when I need to activate a command from them. The expanding and collapsing of the menu can be toggled with this keep visible icon. Just below the menu we have the command manager (ribbon) where we find most of the common commands for easy access. From the default available tabs we will mainly be using the features and sketch tab. Remember where they are so you can get to them speedily. Below the command bar, on the left of our screen and in the first tab of this window, we have the feature manager where all the features we create are listed. The second tab is the property manager tab which we use to make command property adjustments of sketch lines and feature commands. In the center of our screen, where we do our modeling, we have the graphics area. At the top of the graphics area we have the heads up view toolbar and of particular interest to us is the displays styles flyout and the hide/show items flyout since we will be using them frequently as well. To the right of the graphics area we have the task pane which is collapsed by default and will fold out if you click on one of the task pane tabs. Note that here too you again have a keep physical icon to toggle the pane's visibility. As discussed in the exercise file video you can easily access the exercise files from the design library location found here. Now take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with these user interface terminologies so you know where to find them instantly as I refer to them during the modeling process.

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