Viewpoint Reference Block

Last crawled date: 1 year, 11 months ago

This model has become somewhat obsolete, since Solidworks has now an improved Viewpoint functionality, nevertheless I leave it here...

And here my favorite (and oldest) tool for use in SolidWorks, finally decided that others might find this useful, too: Its a cube to create named viewpoints for later use in Drawings. Import this into your model then: Hold CTRL, then 1st left-click on the face you want to look at (direction) then 2nd left-click on the face you want to appear above in your view (orientation) then trigger the NORMAL-TO command. Save the thus created view under a name of your choice, delete this cube again, save the model and voila: it becomes available in SldDrw as a named view. This is much faster and more repeatable than manipulating view orientations in a SldDrw view manually. Example in SldWrks: Hold CTRL, LC the orange face no.7, then LC the adjacent green face, NORMAL-TO and you get the same view as the ISO-VIEW command will give.
When inserted into a SldPrt or SldAsm model with axes aligned (which is the default): Face no.1 marks the standard FRONT view, no.5 the standard TOP view and no.7 the standard ISO View. All other orange faces give the ISO view from any (here virtual) corner of the cube. The yellow ones are 15° above the XZ plane, the green ones parallel to XZ, but 15° lower than the XZ-normal. These later ones are very handy for explosion views. Very rarely, I still need manual modification of the view (a little more here, a little more there) but this I do then from a well defined starting point.
Remember: good technical drawings contain at least 1, better 2 isometric views, particularly for complex milled pieces and sheet metal parts.