From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2024 Essential Training

Navigating in the 3D workspace - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2024 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Navigating in the 3D workspace

“

- [Instructor] So the name of this movie is "Navigating in the 3D Workspace." And you might be thinking, what in the world does that mean? Well, that means I've got this block open up here. We created this block in the last movie, and you might be thinking, well, how do I move this block around? How do I zoom in, zoom out? How do I manipulate the block? How do I work in this world? Well, let me show you how to do that. So first things first, let's go ahead and grab our mouse, right? And you've got a couple buttons on your mouse. You've got the left mouse button, you've got the right mouse button, and then more than likely, you've got a scroll wheel in the center. You can, you know, scroll up and down, but you may not know about this other secret thing is actually the scroll wheel, you can actually push down on the scroll wheel and there's actually another button in there. And if you have a really fancy mouse, you may actually have a button directly behind the scroll wheel or somewhere located there that you can push down, which does exactly the same thing. So it's a three button mouse, right? And so the left mouse button, middle mouse button, or right mouse button, and a lot of times, the middle mouse button is under the scroll wheel. Okay, we are going to use that scroll wheel all the time and we're going to use that pushing down on the scroll wheel all the time. So make sure you have a mouse that can do that. Okay, so the first thing we want to point out is if I left mouse click and hold it down, I can click on different features here, and I click, click, click, and anywhere I click, I'm showing where that is. Now if I want to spin my model around, I'm going to push down on that middle mouse button, right? And if I click on it, notice my little icon changes to this little, you know, circular arrow here, and I can spin this around. So if I move right to left, I can go like that. Or if I go up and down, I can spin it this way, right? And whatever face I happen to choose, will stay active, or I highlighted it, and I can spin it around, right? So that's just pushing down on the middle mouse button or the pushing down on the scroll wheel, okay? Now what happens if you scroll with the scroll wheel? So if you scroll with the scroll wheel, it is going to zoom in and zoom out, okay? Now this scroll wheel can get a little bit funny, the way you scroll, because it wants to scroll into something. So what happens if you scroll like this and it goes flying away and you can't figure out what's going on? Well, right over here, we can save the day by pushing zoom fit, it's going to bring it right back where it is. Now if you want to zoom in on a section here, you got to put your cursor, like this little cursor here, right on that, and then zoom. So you're going to scroll and you're going to zoom in. Just keep your cursor exactly where you want to see, or what you want to zoom in on, and it's going to allow us to zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom. And if you don't like that, you can go and say, "Hey, I want to zoom to an area." I can make a little window here. I can go back, right, you know, things like that. And I can always zoom to fit to save the day because a lot of times, when people are first getting used to using SOLIDWORKS, they're going to zoom and your model is going to fly off the screen and they're not going to know what's going on. Well hit F on your keyboard, it's going to bring it right back to the center of the screen and you'll find it again. So that is a couple techniques for using that. Okay, now there's a couple modifiers for that. So if you hold down shift and then you push down that middle mouse button, now it allows us to do that same zoom in, zoom out, but instead of scrolling, I can just literally hold down shift and push down that middle mouse button to zoom in, zoom out. Okay, if you hold down control, that's actually pan. So I'm holding down the middle mouse button and holding down control and now I can pan my model around the screen. So pretty fancy, right? All right, couple things there. All right, now what happens if you do something like a right click? A right click will bring up this in context menu here and it's going to give you a bunch of options here. So I can do things like starting an extrude, or starting a sketch, or a whole bunch of things. A lot of things you can do here are what you can do up here. It's just going to bring it right to where you're at. In fact, you can also hit the S key to bring up an in-context menu wherever you happen to be. So if your cursors over here, hit S on the keyboard, it's going to bring up that little menu there. You can also do this thing called a mouse gesture. You see how that, if you right click and move real quick, you can get this little window that pops up here and it gives you the option of like looking at the top or the bottom or the side. And if you keep going that direction, it's going to zoom or flip over to that view. That's called mouse gestures. You have to be kind of quick though. So you just hold down the right button, real quick, and then move in one direction, it'll automatically spin around to that. So, and you can configure that to have four or eight, I think even maybe 16 or 12 different views, depending on which direction you go with that mouse gesture. Okay, so that is basically how we can move our model around in the workspace here. Now when you're working into designing things, you may be wanting just switch from different modes. So if you look down here at the bottom of the screen here, I've got this thing called IPS. And you might be thinking, well what is an IPS? Well, an IPS is actually inch, pound, second, and if you click on the little arrow right next to it, it's very small, over here, you have the option of choosing inch, pound, second, millimeter, gram, second centimeter, meter, so on. So these are your basic modes, right? You're either going to be in a millimeter mode or in inch mode, generally, right? And if you'd like to have more fancy modes than that, you can click on edit document units, and you're going to get the full window that pops over here. And notice you got document properties right here. I'm down here at units. I can choose one of the basic ones, or I can choose my own custom ones. So I can choose how I want the length to be. You know, I can choose which method or which one of these things I want to have in here. And so if you happen to really want angstroms, you can get it, right? So it's right over here. But more than likely, you're going to choose, probably, millimeters, inches, or feet for whatever you're doing, and you can choose the decimal points that are relevant to you. I would not recommend going more than like three. I've seen people set up SOLIDWORKS with, you know, eight decimal places and it just makes no sense, unless you're maybe making, I don't know, (laughs) something very small. Anyways, the idea is you can do a lot of things, you can change things, you can modify things, and these document properties, you can adjust everything that's related to this open document, or you also have system options over here and you can change anything about the system. Anything you change in system options will stay for any document you open. Whereas the document properties are only related to the exact document you have open currently. And if you click okay, this goes away, but you can always get back to it right up here with that gear icon, and jump back in, and make whatever adjustments you want. Anyways, hopefully this gives you a good understanding of how you can rotate, how you can zoom, and you can take a look and move the model around in your strain and navigate in your 3D working environment.

Contents