Sketch Ink

- Hey guys, If you have a pen or touch input device like a Cintiq Tablet or any other type of device that uses a pen or your finger for input, you have the ability to use SolidWorks with those tools. Let me show you how you can use Sketch Ink. Up here at the top, notice how I have this tool bar called Sketch Ink. If you don't see that one you can just hold down on one of those tabs and click on Sketch Ink to make sure you're showing it. But once you do have that shown, I can go here and start a sketch. I'm going to go ahead and choose that front plane. And now I can go ahead and turn that off and just jump over to the pen tool here. And I can use this to design anything I want.

Just basically a sketch like you would maybe on a piece of paper. And just draw something out on the screen. I can draw circles. I can make notes. Maybe some arrows. Whatever you want to add to your design. You can just basically sketch it out here. And they you can maybe hand this off to maybe another designer who might be defining your shape for you later on. And you're just trying to get something down on paper. All right so that's just a very basic design of how you might do that. You can also switch over and just use your finger. So if you want to click over here to ink with touch, I can use that to draw things out on my screen.

Just like you would maybe on a laptop. Now you can also switch over here under the pen, click on that one there. I can switch over to maybe like a red pen. I can change the weight of the pen by this little slider down here. So, I can just kind of slide that back and forth to the different size. And now I can kind of draw. Wait, hold on. Back to the pen. So, I'm using ink with touch. So, only that works. So, notice I've got to little bit thicker line there. Now if you want to create something besides just free form lines, I could go ahead and grab the eraser tool and just click on the individual lines.

And because I didn't have the pen activated it wasn't working. So, you have to make sure you do switch between the ink with touch or go back to pen input. So, you have a couple of options there. But if I want to switch over here to auto sketch entities, then when I draw something like a square or rectangle. It automatically turns that into a real SolidWorks sketch entity. Same thing with circles. Draw a circle. Now notice it's using that same red pen that I was using earlier. You can of course switch to a different style or color of pen very easily by doing the same thing.

If you want to create something like a spline, it will automatically create that for you on the screen. So, you have a lot of ability to create entities inside a SolidWorks just using this pen or even your finger. Now if you don't want to create auto sketch entities, you can turn that tool off and you can just add auto shapes. So, now I can draw something like a rectangle or square and it will turn into a rectangle or a square but it won't actually be a real SolidWorks entity. So, it really depends if you're using it for conceptual design or if you're actually really trying to create something in SolidWorks. Now because I do have a couple of real sketch entities here, I have the ability to go over and turn that into a 3D solid just like you would normally.

I'ma choose that surface in that one. Let's go ahead and just drag that out. And there we go. Click okay. And we've used the pen or touch to create SolidWorks entities or some little nice conceptual designs inside of SolidWorks.