From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2024 Essential Training

Copying, moving, and rotating parts - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2024 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Copying, moving, and rotating parts

“

- [Instructor] Now that we have a few components inside of our assembly, let's go ahead and figure out how we can move this environment around, move the parts around, rotate them and start connecting them together. So the first thing I want to point out is just the basic navigation. So the navigation in this environment is very similar to the regular part environment, but you can tell we're in the Assembly mode. Now notice we've got a bunch of Assembly tools are up here and so on. So if you zoom in, zoom out just by rolling your scroll wheel, that's going to bring in and zoom in your display to whatever you're looking at and it's context sensitive to wherever your cursor is. So if you want to look at this green part over here, put your cursor on top of that and then just start zooming in and keep your cursor directly on whatever you want to see and it's going to zoom into that. If something goes wrong and you start zooming off the screen, go ahead and just click on this little Zoom to Fit or just hit F on your keyboard and that's going to bring it back into your view. Alright, next thing is spinning the entire world around. So if you hold down the middle mouse button, so actually push down on the scroll wheel, it allows you to spin the entire world around, right? So you can spin it like this and move it around, and notice that little triad down here also is moving around. In fact, you can actually click on that triad. If you double click on each one of those axes, it'll actually spin the world into that orientation by clicking on those, so it's a pretty handy little way to kind of spin things around. But I pretty much just use the middle mouse wheel and I zoom in, zoom out, as well as hold it down to rotate the world. Alright, now if you hold down the shift button, then you zoom in, zoom out, you push down on the middle mouse button and you hold down shift, that'll also zoom for you. And if you hold down control, that'll actually pan. So I'm holding down on the middle mouse button or actually on the scroll wheel and holding down control and that allows me to pan back and forth. Alright, once you've got it kind of looking the way you want, now we can actually move the parts around. So if you move or click on a part with your left mouse button, I can move that part around, right? If I right click on that part, it's going to spin that part around, right? So left button or right button. Now, keep in mind it's also context sensitive to whichever plane you're in. So right now if I move this part, if I click on it with my left mouse button and I move it, it's moving it in whatever this plane I happen to be looking at it. So if you want to spin your model around so you're looking more like at this plane over here, if I grab this part, it's going to move it back and forth in that plane. If I spin the model over here, it's going to move back and forth in this plane. So it really depends which view and how you're looking at the model of how it's going to rotate and move around in the workspace, so keep that in mind. The other thing is make sure that you're kind of aware what's going on 'cause sometimes you can move a part, you think it's going to be right there and actually it's going to be really far away, so make sure you're using this button here, which is Zoom to Fit and brings it back and you can drag those around to wherever you happen to be. Alright, once you've got the components kind of where you want it to be, I would do something like this, I would kind of lay things out where you might want them to go. So over here you can see like this part right here is going to go into there, so I'm going to get it kind of close to where it needs to be. And you can see I'm not perfect, right? If I move it over here, maybe it's not exactly where I'm expecting, that's okay. We just want to get it close to where it wants to go. This component over here, we want it to be kind of over here in this realm, so we just get it close to where you're going to be. And of course, move it around a little bit so you get an idea of, hey, where this part is going to be spatially compared to the other base part. And this part here is going to probably go into this little slot right here, so that's pretty much where we want those to be. Now, I've already covered this a little bit, but if you want to make a copy of one of these components, you can just hold down control on your keyboard and then click on the component and just drag out another copy. So click with your left mouse button while you're holding on control and drag out another copy. It also works over here from the tree. So if you have a component like this one here, you want to copy, hold on control, left mouse button, drag it out, and there is your copy of that part. If you don't like it, hit delete on your keyboard by selecting it, say Yes, get rid of it, and away it goes. So anyways, those are the basic techniques and tools for bringing in parts, rotating them around, rotating the world and working with those components and getting them ready to assemble to together.

Contents