Sketching polygons

- [Instructor] The polygon tool is one of the more powerful tools inside of SolidWorks, and it's one of my favorite sketch tools for sure. Let's go ahead and learn how to use it. So under the sketch tool bar, under polygon, click on polygon. Now I've got this dialog box opened up over here. I can choose if I'd like to make a construction polygon, which is pretty helpful a lot of the times. Then you can just define how many sides your polygon is going to have. In this case here I can kind of just push it up or down, so all the way down to a triangle, square, and so on. I can keep adding more and more sides.

Now I can define if I'd like to have an inscribed circle or a circumscribed circle, which is going to define the size of that polygon. You can also define where this polygon's going to end up, as well as the size of that circle, and the angle. But if you want to just go ahead and click anywhere out on the screen and then drag out kind of the radius of that polygon. Click once, and now you've placed the polygon. Alright, this one has six sides. Feels to change that you can easily just click on the up and down arrows to define a different size or shape of your polygon.

If you want to switch from a inscribed circle to a circumscribed circle, you can easily do that as well. So you can kind of define how big that controlling circle is, whether it's on the outside or on the inside of your shape. I generally prefer to have it on the outside of the shape, makes it a little bit easier for me to control it. The next thing is where this is located. So you can of course, can type in a number here and it's going to move it around. Or you can just go over here and grab that shape and move it around here. So I just drew another one by accident here. But delete that one out, get out of the command and then you can move it around very easily.

So if you want to also grab the corners you can move things around that way. And if you want to add some relationships you can easily do that as well by making something like a line like this. Make this one horizontal for instance. It will give you an error because you've already got a relationship here and here because of the way I drew it. If you want to get rid of that, just go ahead and delete that one and then this other one becomes active. So you have a couple different options how you can create those polygons. Let's go ahead and create one more, up here to polygon. This time I'm going to say it's only going to be a triangle. And let's go ahead and put the circle on the inside.

Click once, define what that angles going to be. Click again to create that shape. Of course I can then move things around here a little bit, wherever I'd like them to be. And then you can of course snap like the end point to something else. And then you can move things around as needed. But those are the basic options for working with polygons. You can see it's a pretty useful tool. And it's pretty powerful because you have the ability to create a whole bunch of different shapes all with one simple command inside of SolidWorks.