Swept surface - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, we're going to be looking at creating a swept surface in a couple of different ways. The first thing I want to point out is that I've got this shape here, and it kind of looks like a volcano. But this might be like an injectionable part, and you're tryin' to create some type of surface that fills in this gap here. So that's our first example, let's go ahead and find a plane that kind of bisects that, and this one looks pretty good here. Here's a front plane, let's start a sketch on there, and let's just use the three-point arc. I'm going to in 3D here, I'm just going to go ahead and snap here and snap here. Just into free air. So I'm not attaching anything at first. Then I'm going to click on that point, and click on this edge here. The edge, not the face. And I'm going to say Pierce. All right, same thing over here, I'm going to grab that point there. Click on this edge over here, and I'm going to say Pierce. And now I've got a little shape that's connecting the two together, right? So whatever shape you want that to be, right, doesn't really matter. You can try to do something like curvature control, or something like that over here. But maybe just look for more like a ball-type shape on the top. I'm just tryin' to show you how you can create this swept surface. So let's just say that's what's going to be our shape. And let's give it a basic dimension here. Point 35, looks good, okay. So there's our shape. It's not tangent. It's not curvature controlled. But we could of course do that later if we wanted to, but right now, let's just go ahead and sweep this around, so go over here to Surfaces. Come over here to Swept Surface. And my profile, right, is going to be that shape, right? My path can be anything I want. I could have it follow the outside path here. Or I could have it follow the inside path. Your choice, just choose whatever path you want. So in this case here, it gives you this little doughnut shape. That looks kind of cool. But it's not touching right, you see this little hole here. So it's creating a doughnut that's perfectly going around this shape here. But if I want to control it a little more, I can grab these guide curves. So if I choose this outside surface there for the guide curve, now it's morphing that shape by that guide curve on the outside. Click OK. And you can see that's how I control that surface. Now that's kind of a funky looking surface, and notice there's still an issue over here. So that might not be the best bet for what you're lookin' for here, but it's allowing you to control that surface using a couple of different features. So generally when you're creating a surface, if you're not getting what you're expecting, you can always go back and say hey, now that ain't going to work. How do we fix this thing up? Right, and that's where you come into these things like path, you know, a certain tangency, I can take a look at that. The curvature display will give you a little bit a heads up display, what's going to happen there. And you can start playing with things around here. But again, if that's not the right surface, sometimes you want to go back and say hey, maybe I'll create a boundary surface instead, or a patch surface. And sometimes you're going to get a lot better results with those. So in this case, this is not really what I want. So let's go ahead and just delete that out for right now, I don't want that surface, it's not the right one. But I do want to show you an example of another type of swept surface. And this one is controlled by a direction vector. Right, so this guy here. I've already created a sketch on that plane here. And here's my front plane. And I want to take this shape here, and I want to revolve that around, or sweep that around on this kind of weird profile here. And to do that, let's get into, let's highlight that sketch first. And then come over here and say Swept Surface. Okay, so there's our profile. And then our path is going to be this edge right here. And notice it doesn't automatically give us a preview. That's because it doesn't really know what to do. The guide curves, of course we can use guide curves if we wanted to, but in this case, I don't really want to do that. All right, now go down here a little bit further, click on the Options. Now the Options, there's something you might not know about. So right now I have Follow Path, but I could also say Keep Normal Constant, and that will give me kind of a weird shape here. But it's always going that one direction. So now we get a preview, which is good, so it means it's doing something. And instead of Normal Constant, let's go back to Follow Path. But now it does give us a preview, and you can see what's happening. As this thing's going around here, it's kind of giving us a hat shape. Right, but it's a weird brim, right, the brim of the hat's kind of getting squished in here, and it's going up and down. And it's a little bit rough, right? So instead of Natural, I could choose any one of these other values, right? And there's a bunch of ones that are pretty cool in here. But one of 'em here is Specify Direction Vector. Click on that one there. Very important, right? So choose the direction vector, and I want to choose a plane. So I'm going to choose this plane at the bottom, I'm going to say hey that plane, I want to hold that plane so that that face, this face here, will always be horizontal to that direction vector. Go ahead and click OK. And now let's take a look at the final shape here. So notice it's starting out here horizontal, right, and this angle here is correct. And as you go around that shape, it's holding the angle, and it's also holding that shape, so if you look from the side, notice those are horizontal, the top. Now it does go up and down with the shape. But it's always holding that relationship back down to that top line, so it's a definitely important thing to look at if you're creating a shape or a swept shape and you want to hold it to a certain angle. Another very similar feature might be the ruled surface as well. And so as a way to create the same thing using a ruled surface, so you just have to play with it and figure out which one's going to be a better option for you when you're in the exam.