- SolidWorks is the world leader
in 3d solid modeling software.
SolidWorks is both a history
and feature based parametric modeling program.
The software uses a simple set of tools and commands
to help you design parts, assemblies and drawings.
Now let's go ahead and fire up SolidWorks.
At the bottom of the screen, I've got solidworks,
let's go ahead and click on that
it's going to fire up SolidWorks.
You can see here working on SolidWorks 2020.
When that opens up,
you can see we've got what we call the home screen.
Now the home screen has the recent documents
you might've been working with.
It also has the recent folders you've been looking in.
It gives you some resources down here,
as far as what's new, my SolidWorks, the SolidWorks forums,
the customer portal and so on.
And then right over here,
you can see I've got the part assembly and drawing buttons.
Now Solidworks has three different modes,
right, so you can jump into the part mode,
which you're going to create parts,
then you can jump into the assembly mode
where you take those parts and you assemble them together.
And then finally jump into the drawing mode,
which will create drawings
of both the parts and the assembly.
Now if you already have a file that's been created,
you can jump over here to the open command
and find where that happens to be more than likely,
it's going to be probably in your recent documents.
But if not, you can always open it from some other location.
Now let's go head over here and click on the part icon.
And that's going to fire up the part environment.
Now I just want to cover some of the basic sections
of your user environment.
Now right up here, at the very top,
you can see we've got file, edit, view, insert and so on.
And notice this little pin.
If you turn the pin off the window kind of hides,
if you click on the little flyout, it brings it back.
So I like to actually pin that out
by clicking on the little pin at the end.
At the top you got that home button,
you got the new document, you've got open,
you've got save, you got print,
pretty much all your usual suspects at the top.
Over here is rebuild,
you've got file properties and the options.
Here's the name of the part you're working on,
here the ability to search inside of SolidWorks.
And directly below that is our friend the ribbon bar.
Now the ribbon bar allows me to switch
between different ribbons.
Notice I've got surfaces, markup, sketch and so on.
And I can turn those ribbons on
and I can turn those ribbons off.
So if I right click on any one of these little tabs
right over here, I can say tabs,
and I come down here and I can turn them on or off.
So for instance, if I started to work in sheet metal,
and I want to turn on the sheet metal tab, no problem,
click on sheet metal and magically
here is the sheet metal tab.
If I want to turn that off,
right click on any one of those tabs again,
come over to tabs and come down here to SolidWorks add
and let's turn that one off.
And now we don't have to see it.
So if you want to make your environment very compact
and very simple, just turn on the tabs you're looking for
and your ribbon will be very clean.
Okay, on the left hand side is our feature manager.
The feature manager is going to have
all the individual features and sketches and everything else
we use to create our model.
It's a feature based modeler.
So this is kind of our main area,
we're going to be adding things to to create our parts.
Now everything starts with a fundamental plane.
So you've got a front plane, a top plane
and a right plane as well as an origin.
And we're going to be learning about those in extensive detail
as we go through and create our first parts.
But for right now,
just know that that's where we're going to to start.
We're going to choose a plane, we're going to start a sketch
and we're going to start creating some features
that build our part.
Top of the screen here,
we've got some more navigational things,
as far as zoom in, zoom to area and so on.
But it's kind of hard to learn about those things
until we actually have a part to see.
So I'm going to come back to those.
And then over here on the right hand side,
we've got this little flyout with a few other options
as far as SolidWorks resources,
some of our libraries and so on.
Now, I don't want to really jump
into too much of that right now,
we don't normally start with that kind of thing.
But that is a flyout window.
And we'll be getting into that further
as we go through the course as well.
And then down here at the bottom.
Notice I have this IPS which stands for inch, pound, Second.
If you click on that,
you can easily switch from inches to maybe millimeters
or whatever unit system you want.
And if those options don't make you happy,
click on that edit document units.
And that will bring up a lot more extensive options
as far as changing the unit's we're working in.
But anyways, those are the mean environmental areas
that we can look at.
Right, so at the top we've got the ribbon bar.
Over here we got the feature manager,
we've got our heads up display up here,
which is mostly view options.
And on the right hand we got a flyout window
that has a few other options for working.
And then right in the center,
where we're going to be creating our actual parts.
So those are the main areas of SolidWorks.
Let's go ahead and start creating our very first part.