SolidWorks 2010 Bible

Part VII: Working with Specialized Functionality

Earlier chapters discuss the tools that are available for 3D sketches; this chapter covers techniques

for 3D sketching.

Navigating in space

When drawing a line in a 3D sketch, the cursor and Origin initially look like those shown in

Figure 31.1. The large red Origin is called the space handle, with the red legs indicating the active

sketching plane. Any sketch entities that you draw lie on this plane. The cursor also indicates the

plane to which the active sketching plane is parallel. The XY graphic shown in Figure 31.1 does

not mean that the sketch is going to be on the XY plane, just parallel to it.

FIGURE 31.1

The space handle and the 3D sketch cursor

Pressing the Tab key causes the active sketching plane to toggle between XY, YZ, and ZX. The

active sketching plane indication does not create any sketch relations; it just lets you know the ori-

entation of the sketch entities that are being placed. If you want to create a skew line that is not

parallel to any standard plane, you can do this by sketching to available endpoints, vertices,

Origins, and so on. If there are not any entities to snap to, then you need to accept the planar

placement, turn off the sketch tool, rotate the view, and move one end of the sketch entity.

An excellent tool to help you visualize what is happening in a 3D sketch is the Four Viewport

view. This divides the screen into four quadrants, displaying the Front, Top, and Right views in

addition to the trimetric or isometric view. You can sketch in any of the viewports, and the sketch

updates live in all the viewports simultaneously. This arrangement is shown in Figure 31.2. You

can easily access the divided viewport screen by clicking buttons on the Standard Views toolbar.

You can also manually split the screen by using the splitter bars at the lower-left and upper-right

ends of the scroll bar areas around the graphics window. These window elements are also

described in Chapter 2.

When unconstrained entities in a 3D sketch are moved, they move in the plane of the screen. This

can lead to unexpected results when you are viewing something at an angle, moving it, and then

rotating the view, which shows that it has shot off into deep interplanetary space. This is another

reason for using the Four Viewport view, which enables you to see what is going on from all points

of view at once.