Whether you’re taking on a simple project or a more complex one, it’s important to consider your design intent before you dive in. Where to start?Ī while back I decided to attempt to model my dog Piper in SOLIDWORKS, with the end goal being able to 3D print it, paint it, and make it into an ornament. For instance, a model of a cat and a dog. You can even use surfaces to create more organic forms that would typically be difficult to create with standard solid modeling. You can use it to add to, repair, and modify imported existing models. Surfacing can be used to make complex geometry that would be very difficult with standard extrusions, lofts, and sweeps. These tools are sometimes underrated, as they open up a lot of flexibility to your design. Many people rarely venture to the Surfaces tab on the CommandManager, or commonly use splines in their sketches. It’s great at making geometric models, but did you know there is also an organic side to SOLIDWORKS with surfacing? I have not bothered to search for either unfortunately as I rarely if ever print from DS.If you have found this page, I am sure you are aware that the majority of SOLIDWORKS users mostly use the program for its mechanical design aspect. I am sure if you look hard enough you should be able to find a video or two about the subject and maybe even an independently written tutorial. I haven't looked but maybe printing to scale from Draftsight is covered in one or the other E-Book called Tips & Tricks (Vol. should adopt feet and inches.so much easier. I need a mind reset when I start helping those of you who are stuck using metric units. Anyways, when I draw anything with DS I use the default template ( standard.dwt ) which is set to utilize decimal inches. I'm not sure how to change it in Draftsight because I could not find anything equivalent to AutoCAD's -dwgunits command. I believe the Draftsight template I used ( standardiso.dwt ) is set to use millimeters. Neither AutoCAD nor Draftsight really cares it's all arbitrary. One unit can be equal to anything you want. I find this confusing because if the unit type was set to meters this should show and it doesn't! I mean if I am in meters and draw a box of 10 x 20 or if I am in mm and draw a box of 10000 x 20000 mm the way this is represented in A3 paper should be the same, shouldn't it? What is it that I am missing here?ĭo I have to assume that as a matter of fact DraftSIght only deals correclty with mm or inches, all other unit types must be introduced using some kind of "trick" to obtain the intended behaviour? On the other hand if I open a new document with unit types as mm and I draw a box of 10000 x 20000 mm big (again 10 x 20 meters as a matter of fact) then the scaling occurs similarly to the drawing you did. There you can see that the box appear as a tiny little box in the middle while, according to my reasoning, it should exceed the A3 paper size because at 1:1 scale it is 10x20 meters wide. If I change the scale to be 1:1 the drawing desappears: does that mean that it is bigger that the A3 paper format? If this is the case why doesn't the rectangle become red? Or may be it does become red only if a portion can be printed?īut.I did another similar experiment which I think is meaningful (to me at least): I opened a new document which has meters as unit type by default, and drew a box of 10x20 (meters, or so I supposed) when I go to Print and set the print configuration as you showed above, I get this picture: The only thing I didn't catch at the beginning was that you had to set the units type as mm as well (you didn't say that but I guess you assumed it.). Ok, I did this exercise too and I got the same result as you. This exercise was done entirely from within model space. If everything is to your satisfaction then go ahead and print your drawing. Click on the button and you will see your drawing as it will appear on the paper. If it were red then that would indicate some portion of our drawing falls outside the edges of the paper.Īs a final check if you look in the lower left hand corner of the Print Configuration dialog window you will see a button labeled "Print Preview.". The fact that it is green tells us everything will be printed. The green rectangle/letter is a pseudo-representation of what falls within the confines of the paper. In the upper right corner there appears a white border representing the sheet size (297x420). Look to the far right and you also see that I have elected to center my model space geometry on the paper. Using the down arrow after the option Scale: User-defined I can select 1:10 which is then reflected below. Note that I "unchecked" the option "Fit to paper". Let's say I have drawn a box with the dimensions of 2100 by 1485 and I want to print it on an A3 sheet of paper at a scale of 1:10.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |