SolidWorks Section View

Sometimes I get people who email me SolidWorks technical questions. You know, like I’m tech support and get paid for this. Worse yet, they send me complaints. Like I can do anything. Sometimes the answers to these questions are interesting enough to warrant a blog post.

First, a philosophical lesson. If the solution to your problem could be A or B, but you prefer A even though there is no difference in the effort, number of button pushes, keystrokes, mouse travel, consequences, or anything else, then A and B can be said to be equivalent or interchangeable. And you shouldn’t complain about A or B.

There may be a lot of reasons to complain about this software or that software, but when you are complaining about swiveling the model around to see the other side or clicking a little button, what’s the difference? Please be aware of all the options before you start to complain. Further, make sure you’ve really checked it out before you put your name on a public complaint.

So. Section View. As an example of how to use section view, I’m going to use this other part that a reseller used as a misguided example of how to do direct edit. This guy thinks that direct edit means “delete and recreate” (more commonly known as “hack and whack”) because it has the same number of “t”s. I dunno. Nice model, but bad example. As a hint to resellers who care about their reputations – don’t try to prove that SW does direct edit on a part with fillets. You will lose every time.

Ok, so four paragraphs and 2 false starts. Off to a good start for a Monday morning.

Back in 2015, SolidWorks changed their section view so you can select “zones”. If you are using planes to section the model, you can section with multiple planes, and select the zones created by the planes and the model bounding box to display. The default appears to be that SolidWorks cuts off the part on the positive side of the section plane. If you don’t like that, flip the model, flip the direction of the section, select another zone, or complain to SolidWorks directly. I can’t help you with this kind of thing.

If you use the pre-2015 method, which is now called Planar, you can use the little arrows beside the plane selection box to flip the side of the plane you want to show.

You can get a fancy section, like a cutaway, by using the Zonal method and selecting 3 section planes in the Section View PropertyManager, and then selecting in each of the appropriate zones to get what you want. 3 planes give you 8 zones.

The interface for this could be simplified some, as the section planes could all be selected in a single box instead of scattered hither and yon throughout the PropertyManager. On the other hand, it is nice that they automatically show the bounding box when you select the Zonal selection box.

There are some other things that you can do with Section Views. Notice at the bottom of the PropertyManager that you’ve got the Preview and Save buttons. Preview either adds or removes the orange arrows/arcs. Save will save the section view so that it comes up in the list of saved views that you get when you hit the spacebar on the keyboard.

The view cube that comes up with the spacebar is a really nice addition to the software. The View Orientation box has this list of saved views, which you can recall when you need to. To add other views where the Save button is not available, get the model into the view that you want to save, press the Spacebar to bring up the View Orientation box, and use the New View button (second from the left at the top), and give it a name. That way you can access that view later on.

The whole idea with these named views, especially in the discussion about section view, is so that you can switch between multiple sections as you’re working with your model. Visualization is one of the most important things you use a CAD tool for, and section views are a huge visualization aid. The named views can be accessed later on when you are making drawings.

A lot of people get confused about two things with section views: how to turn them off, and how to edit them. Neither one of these is exactly obvious. To turn off a section view, hit the button in the Heads Up View Toolbar.

Then to edit a section while it is still active, just click the RMB in the view, and select Section View Properties. It’s not obvious, and it doesn’t work like other things in the software, but it does work.

I think section views are cool. Especially for big assemblies. They are extremely powerful, and can really help with visualizing large or complex models. Next time you make a Section View, just take some time and check out all the options in the PropertyManager.