Introduction to Solid Modeling

00:01

Welcome to a Shapr3D tutorial series. We're gonna be talking about solid modeling basics. In this video, we're gonna do a quick overview of the software and a bunch of the features that are available to us. And we'll expand on them as this series goes on. So this is our main view when we start up the software. It gives us a bunch of information, files that were recently opened, including new features that have been added to the software. On the lower left-hand side, you're also gonna see

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that there's a bunch of learning resources. So tutorials, workflows, stories, these are really great to get a sense of how the software might integrate into your own workflows. So definitely worth checking out the additional content there. I'm gonna get right into our projects here. So if I click on our projects tab, it opens up all the projects that are available to us. If you look in the upper right, there's a little cloud here. This shows us that all of the files that are listed here are synchronized.

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That means that all of these projects here are available to all of my devices that share the Shapr3D license. I'm going to create a new file by clicking the plus mark up here. And this brings us into our main view of an empty project. The first thing I'm going to do is title the project. I know that we're going to be working on a water pick throughout this series. And so I'm just going to title this project and it's going to automatically sync that project to the cloud. And...

01:25

Now we can start talking about the interface. So you see our main view here. On the left hand side we have our items panel. Our items panel shows us all of these elements that we can bring into Shapr3D and organizes them into groups. It also allows us to create folders and manage the assets that we're building into the workspace. On the right hand side you're going to see a history panel.

01:49

And this is going to show us a feature by feature history of how a model was built. So if it was built in Shapr3D, you're going to get some history features over here that you can edit. So really quickly, we're going to just make a couple of sketches to start off our waterpik design. And I'm just going to draw a couple of circles and we'll talk about it. So our first sketch here, I'm just going to draw two concentric circles and automatically

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makes our sketch over here on the left hand side and also tells us that we started off creating this history sketch here. So we're going to exit out of that sketch now. And right away we have these two areas we can select separately. And you can see that on the left hand side, as we select various things, we get features that we can use automatically that Shapr3D suggests to us. So this is sort of a contextual tool panel.

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As we work with various elements, these tools here will appear contextually based on the elements that we have selected.

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So the first thing I'm going to do is just a quick extrude, and I'm going to extrude this downward. I'm kind of arbitrarily picking these things. I don't really have anything that I'm making quite yet, but we'll get into dimensioning in the next video. So automatically you see that we're building these items here. So our first body is the cylinder here. We also have our sketch that automatically hid out of the way. If we wanted to bring it back, we can click on this little eyeball.

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And on the right hand side in our history, you can see that we're populating those elements. So I can open these and start to edit those features individually. So this is our workspace. As I select things, you're going to see that on the left hand side, that contextual tool panel changes and gives us different options. So along with being able to generate the CAD geometry we want, we can also do a bunch of different features like inspection.

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look at a cross section of this I could take one of our origin planes here and I'm just going to create an offset plane.

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and I can select this plane here and create the section. So I can look at the cross section of our object. Obviously, if it gets more complicated than this, it's very useful to see the internal geometry. I can do things like isolate the individual component and also measure point to point distances and verify that the dimensions I've selected are correct. So I'm gonna turn that section view off. As we start to build things,

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You'll notice that we start to get items in our item panel here. And I can select all of these things and to help me stay organized, I can add them to a folder. So on the bottom left-hand corner, there's a folder button. The folder pops up here, I can right click on it and rename it. I'm gonna name this the water pick head. And this really is just gonna help us stay organized as we build more and more components. So this will allow us to selectively turn on and off a series of objects.

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Additionally, on the history panel, you'll see that we're getting our features build up, and we can look at those individual features and adjust those using the parameters that are there. But the other thing that we can do is we can click on individual components. The history panel will show us features that are related to that selection. So very useful in being able to see very quickly, what are the things that drive those those individual components. And additionally,

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individual items light up as we select them. So it really helps us stay organized and see how everything fits together. Along with the CAD modeling features that we've talked about so far, I can click up here and go into our visualization tab, which brings us to a built in renderer that allows us to apply materials and create images of rendered objects from a shape or 3D directly. I can also create drawings from.

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CAD models and that helps me create dimension drawings that I can then share outside of the CAD environment with people that you know just need to see dimension drawings without having to be able to manipulate the model. So both of those are additional features in the software that are very useful. In the next video we're going to take a look at the differences between direct modeling and parametric modeling in Shapr3D and how those two things are combined to make a very flexible work environment.