From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2024 Essential Training

Using surfaces to build solid models - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2024 Essential Training

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Using surfaces to build solid models

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- [Instructor] For this video, I want to show you how you can work with surfaces as the ending points for solid bodies. Now, we've already looked at a little bit on how to create an extrude and end it at a surface. Let me show you a little bit more detail about how to do that. So before we jump into this regular extrude, let's try the Revolve. So I've got this little line here I want to revolve around and I have this shape up here at the top, and let's go ahead and just take a look at that sketch real quick. And looks pretty good here, so I can just move things around a little bit. It's just an example here, but here's my sketch, and there's the line I want to revolve around. All right, so now, what I want to do is I want to go up here to Features. I want to go to Revolved Boss/Base. And as soon as I do that, notice it comes down here and it goes right through that surface. And instead of Blind, I can actually choose Up To Surface. Right? And choose that surface right there. Or you could choose that surface right there. Right, so I can go all the way around here, click Okay, and there is my shape. And if I click on this surface here, I can hide the surface, and then you can see I've got this shape right here and I can go ahead and hide that one as well. And now, you can see I've got this revolve that's kind of ending at this other surface. You can do some really complex geometry by doing something along these lines here, right? I'm going to go ahead and hide this little plane right here for a second so you don't see it. And there is my first revolve ending at a surface, right? So let's go ahead and hide that one for right now. Let's hide that, and let's bring those surfaces back. All right, now, down here at the bottom, I think we've got Top Plane right down here. Let's go ahead and show that one there. Now, if I want to make an extrude and have it end at a surface, I'm going to go down here and click on this plane here, click normal to it, and then let's go ahead and create a sketch. My sketch is just going to be a rectangle. Here's my rectangle that's drawn out. Okay? Now, I'm going to go over here to Features, and I'm going to say, let's go ahead and extrude that up to the surface, right? So Up To Surface, which surface do I want to do? I want to do that one. And you go and, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Something's wrong here, right? So if I click Okay, notice it didn't go up to the surface over here, it just used that one over there, right? And it kind of extended that surface over here, so it's not coming up over here. And you might be asking, "Well, why did that happen?" Well, let's go ahead and delete the feature. And oh, hold on. Let's just click on it and hit Delete. All right, now, the reason it's doing that is because you actually have two surfaces here, Surface A and Surface B, and here they are. So Surface 1 and Surface Sweep, right? So over here, what we need to do is we need to combine those two together so you have one continuous surface that's going to be the ending feature for that extrude. So to do that, go over here to Surfaces, come up here to Knit Surfaces, and that's going to be like sewing the two surfaces together. I might grab this one here, that one there, click Okay, and now, they've knitted together, so notice there's only one surface now. And now, when I go back to this shape over here, there's that sketch, I can click on Extrude, and I can bring that up to the surface, right? So Up To Surface, right? Click on that, and then bam. Now, if I hide this surface here, whoa, uh oh, look what happened. I actually created another surface. I was thinking about creating a solid, but I actually clicked on the Extruded Surface button versus the actual Extrude button. Well, that's okay, right? Because now I've created a new surface body that's going up and ending at that other surface. And if you want to create it as a regular surface or a regular body that's ending at a surface, no big deal, right? I can just go ahead and just hide this one here. I already have that sketch. Let's just reuse the same sketch. Come over here to Features. Go over here to Extrude. Right? And I'm going to end at that surface. So I want to go ahead and show that surface again. So here's my surface bodies, and that one right there is what I want to show. Show that one. We're going to extrude up to there, click Okay, and now, we've got that extruded body. All right? Okay. And if I go ahead and hide that surface again, Hide, you can see I've got a body here. Now, notice this little hole in the bottom here, right? So this is a defect, because my surface actually extended down below there. And because it's below the surface of where everything was sketched on, it actually left a little hole. So keep in mind, you want to make sure that you've got one continuous surface that's going to stop your design and make sure that's the ending feature. And, of course, SolidWorks is pretty smart and it can solve some issues for you. But you might want to just play with a few other different things and look at how you can create these shapes with either a surface or a solid, or a combination of the two.

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