Many times, an industrial product designer will sketch out the design either on paper or on software like Adobe Illustrator. These designs are very stylized and a lot of thought is put into these drawings. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use these designs more readily? SolidWorks has all the tools available for this process. In the first part of the demonstration that I am giving, I will insert a picture into my SolidWorks model and use that as the basis for a new design. Since I have a lot to show in the webcast I will not have to to show the following steps in detail, so here you go! Let’s work on a remote control design. Step 1 is to take a digital format drawing into SolidWorks. We support many raster formats, but we will bring in an Adobe Illustrator file as shown in image “A” below. The next step is to format the picture so that it lies on top of the origin of the SolidWorks model, so we can take advantage of the datum planes we already have. Simply zoom in and drag the sketch to position it. A little known feature that SolidWorks has in the Add-Ins list is the “Autotrace” tool. (See image “B” below) This allows you to actually convert the raster image to vector information if you have a crisp and clean image. Chances are you do not have this tool turned on, but is is part of every seat of SolidWorks since 2008 I reckon. If you have this Add-In turned on, you will have an arrow in the PropertyManager for the Sketch Picture command as shown in image “C”. Now that the tool is available, you can edit the sketch picture with the sketch that you have inserted it into open, by double clicking the sketch on-screen. Then the arrow is available and you can use the tracing tools that SolidWorks has now revealed. Choose a selection tool, like a rectangle or a lasso, and select what you want to convert on the screen. In image “D”, I used the rectangle tool to select the end of the remote control. If the entities do not look too good using your picture, then you can play with the “Adjustments” settings inside the PropertyManager. Very often changing the brightness and image contract will make your sketch conversion look smoother.
Of course, this is only one way of using imported data, and very often you will find manually drawing lines and splines will do a better job as you can assign parametric behaviors to those elements in an easy way. Then there is the who other topic of importing 3d scan data, which I plan on getting to at some point. Make sure to check out the webcast Thursday by clicking here to sign up. It is better if you can watch live as it is interactive and you can ask questions. I will of course record it and edit this post with a link to the recording.
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