From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2020 Essential Training

Sketching polygons - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2020 Essential Training

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Sketching polygons

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- [Instructor] Let's talk about polygons. Now, poly means many and gons mean angled, so that's many angled shapes and we have the ability to create those inside of SolidWorks. Right up here under the sketch tab, in the ribbon bar, let's go ahead and choose polygon right here. And let's choose that front face or front plane. Now, right over here, on the left hand side notice we have some parameters. And it's saying how many sides do we want to have in our polygon? All right, we can have all the way down to three. We can't have two, you got to have three. So, you can have a triangle. And we can go up to as many sides as we would like. And then we can define how that shape will be created. Whether it's an inscribed circle or a circumscribed circle. So, what that means is, for an inscribed circle, let's go ahead and try the triangle out. Let's draw one out right here. You can see the inscribed circle is the circle right in here which is defining that size. Now, if you switch over here to the circumscribed circle, notice it pops it to the outside. So, we're defining that shape either from the inside or the outside. We can define the center coordinates of the outside diameter as well as the rotation all over here. And, when you're done, click on the green check mark, right? So there's our polygon which is really a triangle. But we can also then grab those lines and we can say, hey, I'd like to make you horizontal. Or I want to make this thing a little bit bigger or move it around. I can define the size by adding a dimension here to the actual circle. Say four inches? Makes it bigger, so then you have a four inch outside circle. Now, you don't have to use that, right? I could delete that out and I could say, instead of that, I want to define one of the legs. I could say, well, this leg's going to be four inches. And you can define it that way as well. But it's just allowing you to control that shape either with the circle or with the inscribed circle. Let's make a couple more just for fun. Right over here, polygon again. This time, I'm going to try a seven sided shape. Click in the center where you want to drag it out. It doesn't really matter the angle at first but you can just kind of place whatever that radius wants to be. And notice you get that little heads up display as well showing you the length of the line and it's also showing you the angle. Now, if you click here, you don't like it, you can always add something like a construction line. So, come over here, center line, grab to the or snap to the center point. Drag it up to here. Click there. And then I can use that to make a vertical line. So, make vertical. That will control it. I can then define a dimension for that inscribed circle right there. Say, four inches. And now I have that shape. So, a bunch of ways you can control it. Same thing over here is you can actually grab these points and drag it around. But, one bit of caution here. What happens if I start deleting these relationships? So, if I hit there and delete it? Now, we don't have a polygon at all. These things are not connected. They're just a bunch of lines sitting out in space. So, I generally don't recommend deleting a relationship that creates a polygon. So, to go back, let's go ahead and hit undo. Undo one more time. So, here's our polygon. If you did want to make some kind of, like, modification to this shape? Instead of defining it or deleting that relationship, what I'd do is click on a couple of these lines, holding down control. So, those two lines there, and say let's make those guys construction, right? Notice the rest of 'em are regular lines, just those two are construction. Then grab your regular line tool and just draw something else out. So, that's the modification to the shape, we've got the shape we want, but we haven't destroyed the original polygon. So, that's how you can work with polygons without destroying them and adding and modifying as needed. So you can always switch between regular geometry as well as construction geometry.

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