With every release of SOLIDWORKS there are hundreds of enhancements added, both big and small. Some of these enhancements are little time savers while others are huge game changers. One thing’s for sure, as you’re busy getting your job done it’s tough to keep up with all of the enhancements year after year. Sometimes we find that SOLIDWORKS users are so wrapped up in their day to day modeling that they miss some of the new features. Although these features might not be exactly new to SOLIDWORKS, they could be new to you. In this week’s Video Tech Tip, we take a look back and showcase some of the best additions to SOLIDWORKS sketching.
Sketching in SOLIDWORKS
Sketching is the core of the modeling process and in this tech tip, Application Engineer Michael Souders showcases some of the best time-savings tips that every power user needs to know:
- Temporarily disable the auto relations: By holding the Control key while sketching entities, the auto snapping behavior will be disabled. This means your entities will no longer snap to other geometry. This only happens while the control key is pressed. Just let go of the control key and then the sketching behavior will go back to normal.
- Increment values in whole numbers: With the shift key selected while you add entities, for example, a circle, you can increment the size in nice clean, whole numbers instead of highly precise values with five digits.
- Access the context menu: By pressing control, you can force the context menu to appear. The context menu is the rectangular set of commands that pops up when you click in SOLIDWORKS. Every power user takes advantage of this box to work as efficiently as possible. But once you use this box, or move your mouse away from it, it disappears. Use the control key to get it back
- Power trim: When using Power Trim, or the SOLIDWORKS Weed Whacker, you can trace back over an entity to undo a trim.
Put these tips in practice and become a SOLIDWORKS Power User.
Ready for more sketching tricks? Click the button below to watch our On-Demand Webinar “SOLIDWORKS Sketching Tips & Tricks”
