SolidWorks® 2007 Bible

Chapter 4. Working with Sketches

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Opening a sketch

• Identifying sketch entities

• Inferencing in Sketch

• Sketch settings

• Sketch blocks

• Tutorial: Learning to use sketch relations

• Tutorial: Using Blocks and Belts

This is where the fun begins, or begins to begin. To me, training animals has always been fun, especially when the animal begins to respond to my instructions. Learning SolidWorks is like working with an animal that has already been trained. You know it is supposed to respond to you in certain ways, but there is always this little thrill of having communicated with something outside of yourself when it actually responds with a predicted behavior. This is not to say that it is surprising; it is just somehow a little thrilling. SolidWorks programmers have created an animal that responds to your input with intelligence and comprehension.

So far in this book, we have looked mainly at settings and setup, which is pretty mundane business. However, here we begin to build models, simple at first, but gaining in complexity and always demonstrating new techniques and features that build your modeling vocabulary. Beyond this, we move into putting the parts together into assemblies, which helps to make the "pretty pictures" look like something useful. Finally, we use the parts and assemblies to create drawings.

Several basic facts about sketches may be helpful before we start. While a part may have many sketches, only one sketch can be open at a time. This is due in part to the history-based ...