From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Piping and Routing

What is SOLIDWORKS routing? - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Piping and Routing

Start my 1-month free trial

What is SOLIDWORKS routing?

- [Instructor] Let's get started by going over what SolidWorks routing is. This tool's exceptionally useful for planning the paths of, and modeling pipes, tubes, and electronics in your models. It allows us to connect the points in existing models, as well as to parts in the extensive design library with pipes, cables, and tubes. To do SolidWorks piping and routing you must have SolidWorks Premium. We'll create a new assembly and work in it for our modeling. So let's go ahead and go up to open that from our exercise files. We're going to click that file to start with, and go ahead and open it. Now, after it loads, you'll see these two tanks and these pipes here. But we actually don't have SolidWorks routing turned on yet. So let's go ahead up to the SolidWorks add-ins tab. And then go right above it, and select SolidWorks routing. And it will turn on our routing add-in for our SolidWorks Premium. And with that, you'll see some new tabs pop up and you'll have some more things to work with. Now, you have the option to launch routing every time you actually launch SolidWorks. So, the way you can do that is, if you go up to your drop down here and click add-ins, these are all the add-ins that come with SolidWorks Premium, and as a default in SolidWorks. So, if you wanted to actually launch SolidWorks routing every single time you start this project, go ahead and click that box there to select Start Up. And Okay. And now you won't have to go ahead and enable SolidWorks routing for each time you're working in this class. So, as I mentioned, you will get new tabs up here for electrical, piping, tubing, and user defined route. Part of using these as we go through the course for different areas as we create new pipes and tubes. Additionally, settings are also now available for routing. You'll want to check the use upon your first opening to make sure things are set appropriately. You're going to go up to the gear up top and select Options. Click that. And you'll get this Systems Option General. Now, specifically for the routing options you're going to go down to a little bit below the middle center and click routing. These are going to be some check boxes that you can use as you go through the course, to adapt things to your personal design style. The one that I would point out right off the bat is component rotation increment degrees. So as you're rotating pipes and tees and elbows within your course, you can use different angle increments. So if you want something to automatically rotate by 90 degrees, you can set that 45, 30. Fifteen is the default and that's what I'm going to leave it at for myself. But feel free to go back in and change that as you go through if you're more comfortable. Now we'll get into some of these other options as we go through the course. So go ahead and click Okay to go out of that. And now that we have SolidWorks routing up and running our settings are good to go, we can start exploring the other tools that it has to offer.

Contents