Solidworks For Beginners - View Manipulation, Part 2

By Author: Rosanna Daniel
Total Articles: 7
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Welcome back. We're continuing with the SolidWorks interface in this tutorials series for beginners, and this is our second article about view manipulation. What do I mean by view manipulation? SolidWorks gives you many different ways to view your models; you change how you see the models with view manipulation tools. As we mentioned in our previous article, SolidWorks, of course, gives you LOTS of tools for this! This might be easier to understand by watching SolidWorks video tutorials, but we hope we do a good job of presenting this material here in this article.

We left off by talking about how you can press and hold down the middle mouse button or scroll wheel on any edge, face, or vertex to activate the rotate command, and rotate your model around that edge, face or vertex.

Now let's get back to the zoom tools. We talked about regular zoom in our previous article on view manipulation. SolidWorks also gives us a Zoom to Fit tool. Sometimes this is called Zoom Extents in other software; you may have seen this in Inventor, AutoCAD or even Photoshop. When you left-click Zoom to Fit, your model zooms so that ...
... all of it fits and is seen in the graphic area. If you're zoomed in really close, or zoomed out too much, a simple click on Zoom to Fit will zoom you out to a screen-width view of your model.

The next tool on the Hang-Up Toolbar is Zooming to Window. Left-click to activate the tool and you'll see that your cursor changes to Zoom to Window icon, which is a magnifying glass with a small dotted-line rectangle on it. This is a very convenient zoom tool. When this is active, you can make a window selection in the graphic area, and SolidWorks will fit your selection to the graphic area. So, this is a very easy way to zoom in on a particular area of a model. Sometimes the regular zoom tool, if you don't control your mouse carefully to stay centered on the model, can zoom your model right off the screen. This tends to be more of a problem for beginners. You find that you zoomed in too far or out too far and now you can't see your model at all, and you have to keep trying to zoom in the opposite direction to locate your model again. The Zoom to Window tool solves this problem for you by allowing you to zoom in on a section of the model that you specify with a left-click window drag in the graphic area.

The next tool you'll see on the Hang Up toolbar looks like a telescope and this is the Previous View tool. This is a very convenient feature of SolidWorks. You can quickly cycle through any of your previous zoom positions by left-clicking on this tool. This might be easier to demonstrate in SolidWorks video tutorials, but if you refer to your own installation of the software, these instructions will make perfect sense!

This concludes our second tutorial about view manipulation in SolidWorks. Stay tuned for more in this SolidWorks tutorials for beginners series.

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This article is written by Rosanna Daniel on behalf of video-tutorials.net, provides AutoCAD tutorials, Inventor video tutorials, Solid Works training. For more details browse this website.