From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2019 Essential Training

Understanding relationships - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2019 Essential Training

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Understanding relationships

- [Instructor] In this video, we're going to be talking about sketch relationships, so the first thing you need to do is start a brand-new sketch. I'm going to go over here to Sketch, start a sketch. And let's go ahead and use the front plane this time. Now let's go ahead and create a line. Now, I can use the line command, start where I want to drag out to line two, and just kind of place a line. And notice this line here, it's just kind of free floating. Grab the endpoints and move it around, I can grab the line itself and drag that around the screen. Now, if you want to continue making lines, you can click over here back to the line command, start from this line here. And notice, as I kind of go on a horizontal fashion, notice I get this little heads up display telling me the length of the line, and saying it's at 180 degrees. And it's also saying that this line, if I click right now, it's going to place a horizontal relationship. Notice that little yellow box right there. So click on that, it added that little yellow, or now it's green, it was yellow over here, now it's green, saying it's added this relationship, saying this is now horizontal. So I can't change that anymore, I can just move it up and down, but it's always going to be horizontal. If you don't like that it's horizontal, you can click on that little green box, hit Delete in your keyboard and get rid of it, and now you can just drag it around freely. So I've added that relationship, and then I've removed that relationship. Now, you can also add relationships on the fly. If I click on this line right here, notice I get this little heads up display that says hey, I can make this thing horizontal, or vertical, or I can make it fixed, or I can start adding some dimensions to it. I can switch it from regular geometry to construction geometry, I can add dimensions, and so on. I also have a bunch of other options when you start talking about line to line. So if I hold down Control, select this line here and this line over here, as soon as I let go, I get this little in context window that pops up. So I can say, I want both these lines to be horizontal, or vertical, or colinear. How about perpendicular, or parallel, or equal in length? A bunch of different options, so let's try this one here, which is called Make Perpendicular. As soon as I do that, it makes this perpendicular icon show up right here, which is in green, and these lines are now perpendicular. So I can move them around, but they're always going to be perpendicular to each other. If I want to continue on here, I can add a few other lines. How about this line over here? So starting from this endpoint here, I'm going to see these little helper lines that are yellow, showing me that if I want to make a line that's perpendicular to the next line, if I go over that line, it'll automatically add that perpendicular relationship for me. Notice it does right over here. Continue on, I can keep adding those lines and using those helper lines to generate perpendicular relationships. Now, if I wanted to off at an angle, or actually, look what happened right there, is because I go into this endpoint, it actually changed my line to being an arc. And sometimes, if you go back to that endpoint, go back to the line and then come back out, it'll actually create an arc for you. So you can transition from lines to arcs. If you don't like that, hit Escape and get back out of it, and then jump back over to that line command. All right, there's two ways to create lines. One is the click and drag, and one is the click-click method. So if I click and drag, it stops that line segment. I'm done with that line segment, but it generally keeps you in the line command. So over here, if I click and drag, it makes a line, and notice my cursor is still the line icon, so I'm continue to add lines if I want to, just by clicking and dragging. Now, if I click once and then just kind of drag my cursor out to wherever I want to go, notice all this other information. I start getting these helper lines saying that this is lined up with that, it's going to be vertical over here, it's going to be lined up with other things. As I start moving around my drawing, I'm getting all these little helper lines that are popping up and all these other relationships that could be added if I were to click in that position, and that's pretty cool. Once I click, now, because I'm using the click-click method, that line stays active, so I can continue to create more and more lines. Pretty straightforward and easy. When you're done creating lines, I'm going to create one more right here, click, and then I'm going to hit Escape on my keyboard, which is going to turn that off. Now, because I do have the ability to drag things around, I can start snapping things together. And as soon as I snap them together, now these guys are kind of tied together. Same thing over here, if I want to click on this, I can drag that over to there. I can click on this one here and drag it over here. I can start creating a shape just by clicking and dragging and moving things around my screen. If you don't like some of these relationships that have been added, feel free to just click on them and hit Delete. I can then move things around, rotate them around, and add dimensions. For instance, over here, I'll just create a line, or a dimension from this line here over to this line over here. Right now it's at 90 degrees, let's say, hey it's going to 120, no problem. Everything moves around because we have these perpendicular relationships here. Those automatically swing around in place. I can add something like a equal relationship. Click on this line here, hold down Control, pick that line there, let go of Control, and then say, hey, let's make those guys equal. No problem, they're now equal. Notice there's this little icon saying these are equal, and if I mouse over it, notice it changes to purple. It's showing me that the two lines that are involved in that relationship, notice the six. It's saying this is the sixth thing that's been added. So if you have multiple relationships, you can define where they are. Let's say this line here, this line here, let's make those equal as well. Those now have a seven, so it's saying these, seven and seven, are the pair. Six and six are the pair. These other ones don't really matter because they have to be related because they're right next to each other. But sometimes you can have equal relationships that are all over your design. You can have hundreds of lines that are all of equal length, and that would make sense. So a bunch of different options we can do here. Now, let's go ahead and just kind of delete all this. So I'm going to window over all this stuff just by holding down my left mouse button, and then hit Delete, wipes it all out. Easy way to get rid of things. Now let's go over here and choose the Corner Rectangle. Click once where you want to start, click again where you want to end. Notice it gives me the dimensions, x and y dimensions, so I can roughly get this the size I want. Click once and notice, all a rectangle really is is just four line segments. And it gave these ones on the outside a vertical relationship, and these ones on the top and bottom a horizontal relationship. And that's how SOLIDWORKS created that rectangle for us. It used four relationships and four lines. I could have easily done that with just the regular line command, but SOLIDWORKS makes it a little bit easier by giving us this rectangle command. Now, you have a couple other options for rectangles as well. If you look at this one over here, called a 3 Point Corner Rectangle, click on that. Click once where you want to start, place the first line and then drag it out to the side. You notice I've created a similar rectangle, but SOLIDWORKS added different relationships. It said, hey, this line here and this line here are parallel to each other. And this line here and this line here are perpendicular, as well as these ones over here. What that allows me to do is rotate things around. I can click on this point here and maybe snap it to the origin, and then I can rotate this rectangle around that origin. So a bunch of things you can do with these relationships. And I generally recommend, if you have the ability to add relationships, do it, don't keep adding dimensions and dimensions and dimensions when you don't need to. If things are the same size, make them an equal relationship. Of course, you could say, hey, I want to add a dimension that says, this line here is 10, and this one over here is also 10, all right, and that works. But instead of doing that, you could just delete this one here and say, this line here, hold down Control, that line there, let's make them equal. And the cool thing about that is if you want to change that dimension, 12, they both automatically update because of that equal relationship. So hopefully this gives you a pretty good understanding of how relationships work inside of SOLIDWORKS. They're one of the most powerful things, and I definitely recommend trying to use relationships as much as you can, versus adding excessive amounts of dimensions. So definitely keep track of how those relationships are added, and if there's any problem, click on the green box and hit Delete on your keyboard.

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