SolidWorks® 2009 Bible

Chapter 3. Working with Sketches

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Opening a sketch

• Identifying sketch entities

• Inferencing in sketch

• Exploring sketch settings

• Using sketch blocks

• Tutorial: Learning to use sketch relations

• Tutorial: Using blocks and belts

So far in this book, you have looked mainly at concepts, settings, and setup, which is necessary but pretty mundane business. However, here you begin to learn how to control parametric relationships in sketches. Then in later chapters, you 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, you will move into putting the parts together into assemblies, which helps to make the "pretty pictures" look like something useful. Finally, you use the parts and assemblies to create drawings.

This chapter deals mainly with sketches in parts. However, you will be able to apply many of the topics I cover here to assemblies. Some related topics, such as Layout sketches, have functionality that is exclusive to assemblies and are covered in the assemblies chapter.

Several basic facts about sketches may be helpful before you 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 nature of the software; every entry in the FeatureManager tree must be edited in the position in which it exists in the tree.

While you can create both 2D and 3D sketches, you will use 2D sketches most of the time. ...