Name: Drawing Templates Tips & Tricks: From Start to Finish (2)
Uploaded: 2026-07-24T21:33:13.188Z
Duration: 32 min 43 s
Description: Drawing Templates Tips & Tricks: From Start to Finish (2)

Transcript for "Drawing Templates Tips & Tricks: From Start to Finish (2)": Good morning or good afternoon, depending on which side you're coming from. We're gonna be going over some drawing, templates, part templates, part properties, linking all that stuff together, and then we're gonna start modifying our sheet formats. And if you don't know what any of that is, Peel, stay tuned because we're gonna be going over all of it. Alright. So here's our little pink slide. You can see it's pretty much broken down into two sections here. We have part properties, and then we have creating the templates. So we wanna discuss some of these things first, and then we'll start getting into everything else. If you don't know, GoEngineer is now pretty much nationwide. We're up in Canada now, and we have a new VAR that we acquired down in Brazil. So if you see some of those maps pop up, make sure you welcome some of our South, American friends. I'll be your host today. My name is Craig Maurer. I'm from Colorado School of Mines, and I did not have these kind of fun activities when I went there. But currently, I do love cycling, and, of course, you visit all of the many microbrews in the Denver Micro Area. And then I'm definitely into some fitness. play a lot of disc golf, and the wife and I can't wait to explore The United States with our new camping unit that we picked up a year or two ago. I'm out of Denver, Colorado, so let's get started with some of these best practices in GoEngineer properties. So we're gonna go over some PowerPoint slides first just to kinda get a big familiar background and everything, and then we're gonna jump into SolidWorks so that we can explore it in real life real clicks. So we're gonna do first is we're gonna link some properties to the title block. We wanna modify existing templates and sheet format files. That's gonna be some of those big ones coming later. Just No now we have a working idea as far as what part we're gonna be working with. Since I did mention that I'm CATIA Denver area, you can kinda see some of our landscapes here, some mountains, and, of course, some of that cool Colorado flag and some of this ATX form factor motherboard that I had three d printed and just as a mounting platform. Easy peasy part that we're gonna mess with. So why do we need part properties? Well, a, I wanna make sure that we can do some revision control. I might wanna throw some descriptions or part numbers. Again, part properties you can kind of think of as the metadata in the file. So if you CAD, like, our iTunes or something along that side, it would be like who's the artist and what album did it come from, all of that fun stuff. So this is kind of the same thing that we can then put into our PDM data cards, and all of these properties can then be pulled into our drawing, title blocks. So we might also have some special things here, like SolidWorks math properties. So those would be something like material or weight that automatically gets calculated into our part. We can pull all that stuff in, of course. And if you guys are out there that make downloadable parts, so all of our favorite McMaster part McMaster CAD Artec, right, they all have all of this metadata prebuilt into that. So when they Artec downloaded, you know where it's gonna come from, who's their part number, you know, any of their information. Right? So that you know where to go owner those parts. So we also wanna understand some drawing templates. Why do we need these? Well, if we're gonna start our part assembly or drawing at a good starting point, we wanna have a template that gets us to that good starting point a lot faster. It saves a lot of time. Right? So then we can have different UltiMaker might need different settings or different logos, maybe different sheet sizes, or maybe some company uniformality. So same document properties, but maybe with different fonts, arrows, units, and style that go into all of that stuff that makes your company maybe stand out or a little unique. So understanding some drawing templates, I thought this was a cool graphic to show as different sizes of paper when we start talking about US ANSI standard, architectural standard, or maybe even our metric standard friends. Right? So we have these different sheet sizes just so that, you know, we can understand how big an a, b, c size sheet is. Something else that we need to understand going forward is understanding our drawing templates. Now inside of a drawing template, it can be very confusing because when we first start a drawing, we kinda get a bunch of prompts if we're not careful, and these are what those prompts might indicate. What, sheet format are we copying onto that? What is our drawing sheet settings? What are our document property settings? So let's go through some of this stuff here. Again, so our drawing document, that's gonna control all of your document properties, those custom arrow settings, your units, and that kind of fun. Then on top of that, we will have our drawing sheet. So our drawing sheet is just those views, annotations, scale, type of projection, maybe some datums and labels. So we can also go over here to scale and all these other properties are also embedded into this. Now our sheet SolidWorks, this is your title block. Your border, your annotations, notes, anything that you want to highlight or put on top of your drawing sheet is then on this title block. This is something that is copied onto our drawing sheet. So it's a different file, but every time that we use it, it's copied onto it. It's not a linked parametric thing that as we change it in the background, it automatically gets updated. And there's reasons for that that we can discuss later, but for the most part, we do need to know that our our sheet format or our title block is copied onto this. We start you looking at these different document templates. Right? Some might already have, right, something in the background here. So as we go through and scroll through these, we might already have a different sheet. We might already have a different, borders and everything. Some of these other ones, they might not have any sheet SolidWorks. So what it's gonna do is it's going to prompt you to kinda pick one. Right? Depending on where you have it, if it's a standard sheet or a custom thing, we can always browse to a specific location, or we can use something from the standard stuff that SolidWorks gave us. We CAD always get into that editing sheet format. Right? So there's probably, I don't know, five different ways that I CAD come up with is right clicking on a lot of areas inside of the drawing and finding that edit sheet format. Once we do edit that sheet format, this is where your title block is gonna be, where you can add new lines, you can add new notes, you can add new, fields if you would like. But for the most part, we're editing that copied on sheet format that we can then use at other places. All of these things can be either stand off pieces of Artec, or we can link them to a property somewhere. Speaking of all those different properties that are linked somewhere, here's what some of those little dollar signs or codes mean as you might find this out. So anything with a PRP property name, these things are linked to custom properties of that current document. That's gonna be the big kicker here. So most of the time when we do this, it's gonna be linked to the current drawing document. So when we start seeing PRP property name, now we can understand that there's a property inside of the drawing, and we can link to properties outside of the drawing. If it's outside of that drawing field, we're gonna see that PRP sheet property name come up. This is gonna link to anything outside pretty much of that drawing document. We also have the other two options here is the PRP with the SolidWorks property Cameo. So this is gonna say SolidWorks, you know, weight or SolidWorks mass, something along those lines. Maybe it's this file name of some sort. So again, different property name that can be automatically pulled in that SolidWorks calculates. So depending on if it's PRP or the sheet variation, you'll know where that property is coming from. So as an example, we've created this little cute graphic, and it's a little color coded. So we have our green, which is our SolidWorks special properties. So, again, a drawing number. This might be the actual name of that file, sheet one of whatever. Right? What kind of scale? What size of piece of paper? Right? Some of those generic things that SolidWorks kicks out automatically is can be in this field. Now our model custom properties, this would be something with that PRP sheet name. So here's our material. So if it has a material assigned to it, we can bring in that model custom property. We can bring in a finish if that's labeled. We can bring in a weight if that's calculated out, or maybe even the description of what that part actually is. Now as an example, we also have the drawing custom properties. So a lot of people, they might stash everything in the model then pull everything out of that, No some people will put some properties inside the drawing document. In this case, the red items are coming from the drawing custom area. So again, maybe a rev scheme, right, some special text up here with whatever the company might be, and so maybe the drawn date checked GoEngineer approvals and their dates of sign off. Just just a generic example, but I wanted to kinda highlight where things can go. What we're gonna be doing is we're gonna be linking some properties. So we're gonna be creating, some properties here. Right? We wanna pull all of these properties into our drawing document. So either it's the drawing document itself or through, our title block. Now we're gonna be spending most of our time in that title block field, but it's still a link property, so we can add unique notes to just the, drawing itself if we needed to. My My number one thing that I like to do is I like to come up with a dummy document that has all of these already done inside of a part. Once it's inside of that part, then I can drag that part into my field here to start making sure my links are doing going to work right. Once my links are working right, I can delete the part out and then start saving it as a template. So here's how we can kinda do that. So when I'm creating those templates, adding more properties to our title block, we'll grab a simple No, And then in the properties field right here is where we can say link to a property. That will then pull up this dialogue box. In this dialogue box is the current document. So, again, that's gonna be the drawing document Oryx the model found here, the model that is pasted onto our drawing. Right? Here's a different property name that can be listed, and then here's the evaluated thing that might come up. We'll say, okay. That then fills in this little area here, and then we repeat the steps for every other piece that we want, some text to be automatically filled in. So we create templates. We can also add in some plain text here, and all these other pieces in blue were kind of fields that would be pulled in automatically. Once we exit that sheet format, we'll make sure we save that sheet format. We'll put it in a special location, and then we'll add some views to it, make sure everything's working. Sometimes we can add these predefined views. That's always a fun step to do, and then we just kinda load in that model if we would like to later on. Other things that we would like to check MBSE before you keep saving out your drawing document is check the document properties. Because in the document document properties here is where we could go find all sorts of import annotations, if you wanna have center marks, center symbols, balloons. Right? All of these different things can be automatically populated. Maybe you wanna have some annotations Peel in as well. So we can do all of this in the document properties, and we can also go into annotations, find different Artec, find different arrows, whatever you might wanna make your document unique with, or you can keep the same. So here's where we'll make a lot of those changes, and anything in the document properties, remember, is gonna be linked to our template. Once we decide that everything is good, we can then save this out as our template. So we'll hit the save as, not the sheet format, but the save as, and we wanna make sure we save it as the template here, and then we can stash that wherever we'd like. Again, when you use that one, you have predefined views. You'd like to right click on that predefined view. It's just a insert model to go find it. Once it's inserted, right, we always have to come back in and make a lot of edits, but that's the easy part. Let's go ahead and get started here as far as getting that far, and then we'll show you what happens if things change. So let me bounce into SolidWorks and show you around. Here's my part that I have pinned. Let's go ahead and load that up. Again, this is just a test part. It can be any Artec, really. But up in my properties, I've already have something started. Right? We have a revision. We have a drawn date, drawn by, weight, paint. Right? Yeah. Some buttons or something, and then some description. So right now, Peel gonna keep that description and see where this goes. Sometimes I like to keep a lot of my stuff on the custom tab. And if I have different configurations, this is where I kinda post everything. And if I come back to my configuration tab, this is where things would be unique. So if I have unique configurations here, this is where different labels of different part numbers for different descriptions would be a thing. Alright. Let's open a new drawing document. So you can see that this drawing document is coming from a regular old spot, has nothing in the show in the background over here. So this is gonna then call and ask for a new sheet format. So I'm gonna open this up. You see here it's asking for just a generic sheet format. This is where I go back here and select the size that I would like. Remember, our a, b, c different sized pieces of paper. Let's go ahead and put that base plate in. It doesn't matter what view we Artec gonna use, because we're always curious about the property itself. So when I put that view in here, you can see that some things already fill out down here, but let's zoom in. The drawing number here, it's got too many letters, or maybe this is just too big for the spaces here. So when we look at this, maybe we would like the Colorado base. Right? This might be the maximum number of characters that the drawing number would PBI, so that way we can scale that down. So let's go ahead and right click. We can say edit sheet format here. We can go to the sheet format. We can edit sheet format here. We can right click the sheet, and we CAD say edit sheet format there. We even have a whole tab dedicated to editing the sheet format. So like I said, there's several ways that you can find the button. Once we are here, you can notice everything is pretty much a sketch based unit. So that's why the sketch tab is also pretty Zeiss, as we can add lines or squares to kind of expand out our title block. We're not gonna do all of that work. Right? The main goal here is to show you how it works. So here's where you can kinda go through here, mess with your different tolerances. Right? We can add in the names. We can add in logos. Right? And maybe we change something out. So on this one, we have Colorado base. It's just too big. So by double clicking on that, we can always go find the units and maybe drop it down a little bit. So by dropping it down to maybe, I don't know, 16 units or so, you can see now it's gonna fit nicely in our box here. Our weights, scale, sheet size, that's already being calculated. So if you were to hover on that, you would see that it's PRP, it's all over sheet scale. So that's coming straight from the scale of the page versus the weight over here. The PRP weight PRP sheet is that sheet that we're looking for that is ending pulled in the model. Materialise over here, you can see it's PRP sheets. So if we were to have a material, that would also work out just fine. And a finish is also going to that other area, so that would work fine. Our name over here says drawn by, but we don't have anything in our current document, so we would like to redo this one. So by double clicking in this field, we could go to the link to new property. Right? We wanna look at the model found here in a property name, drawn by. Say okay. And that then relinks this to look at the part file and not the drawing properties. We can always do that to the date as well by just relinking that somewhere else. So now those are gonna be good. They're gonna pull from the right place. Again, we can keep going here, but I think you get the idea of going to the properties and spec ing that out. Maybe we should add some text here in this field, so we can always double click in this Peel, stretch it. Here's where we can assign if it's a center, right, left, or right justified piece of Artec. And this is where we can also decide if it's coming from the top or being in the middle or at the bottom of our box. So in this case, let's just go with, weather, Ford, design. And we might need to make that just a bigger piece. We'll be sending that up. Alright. So this is just a standard piece of text. So I'm gonna exit that. Right. So we've made some changes to our sheet format. First thing that we need to do is now save our sheet format so we can reuse it later on. So we're gonna go to the file. We're gonna say save sheet format. Right? Remember, that's just our title block information, and we wanna make sure that we stash it not in our install directories. We've done special work to this. So if I use 27 later on, it's now going to be somewhere else. So what I've done is I've created a new folder somewhere, and we can now label this. So let's put No engineer Webinar. Alright. So that is now saved. The next thing I like to do is now we have to save our our document. Right? So I'm gonna delete this out. It does not like you to have extra views that are just in here. Otherwise, it'll be blank views. I'm gonna kick that guy out. So now I need to save this. So, again, file. This time, we're gonna say save as. And it's not the drawing. It's a template. So there's a special extension at the end of it, drawing template. Right. Again, it usually dumps you to a different spot, so you always wanna make sure it's going to a location that you can always get back later. Let's Cameo it something different. Yeah. I'm gonna close this out. Right. So now I need to tell SolidWorks where did it look for those items. If I hit the new button over here, you can see that it's not available on any of my current templates. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go into my options. I'm gonna go over to my file locations, and you can see I need to add that location to my document templates that listed. Go ahead and hit the add button. We'll go find that. Select that folder. You see it's listed here. You also need to do it to the sheet format. Add it. It's the same location, which is perfectly fine. It just needs to move over and go look that file. If you would like to look for this location first, you might wanna say move up No that looks here and then maybe here. Say okay. Gonna ask a few questions and then prompt you with some security updates Oryx passwords, and it should prompt twice. Now if I go back to my new, you CAD see that here's my drawings webinar folder. This is gonna be the name of that folder that you've specified where things live. Here's my webinar template. I can go ahead and say okay. Everything's looking great. Let's go ahead and test and make sure that this goes in first. Hey. Look at that. We have our Metal. We have our drawing number, description. We have our name, dates. So it looks like everything's working. Something to watch out for is when you hit the new button down here. Notice when I hit the new button, it didn't bring in my titles anymore. It didn't bring in my names. So something is amiss. This is where I find a lot of people get hung up. There's a special thing they have to do here. And that's when we go to the sheet, we need to go to the properties of that sheet. In order to pull off all the other sheets that when you hit the new, there's a special thing here that you have to go to the browse button. You physically have to go to browse, select that sheet Formlabs, open it, Apply the changes. So now if I hit the new button, you can see it's bringing up our new template over here. No now it should work every time. So let's go ahead and delete this page. We figured that out. Right? We did not just save our template again. No, save file, save as, drawing template. Remember, it ditches you into the wrong spot sometimes, so find the right one. It should save over the top. Now we'll go ahead and test that one more time. It's always a good idea to test it as we go. You don't need to put the drawing instead because we know that the first thing that we're gonna do is just hit the new button. And if I hit new, we get our board design back. Looks like everything's working as that should. So let's go ahead and add in a view just to make sure everything else is working. And all of our stuff is now populated. Cancel this out. Right. And we'll get back to here. That's how we can create quick templates. Now something with our part area is if we have a dummy part like this and we went ahead and made a bunch of files. Right? Here's all of these names for testing. I might wanna take all of that and copy it to a blank template. So I'm gonna hit control c on all of that. I'm gonna hit new. I'm just gonna grab a basic Artec here. Now I always like to turn on my origins No I can see where I am in the world. In any starting point, if you have different plates set up, this would be a great time to insert those. Remember, inside of our options, any of those document properties that I would like to use would be nice to be changed now. So any kind of annotations or dimensions that you want to be different, a good time. On our Artec properties here, right, we've already listed out those ones that we wanted, so we can hit our control and v to stamp in all of those nice little property names No that way we can use them. Something here is where we go through here and put in, you know, different valuations because we'll fill those in later. Something else that might get you is drawn by. Like, this is gonna be different than drawn space by. So it has to be spelled exactly the same with the right amount of spaces in order for that to be a different field, I guess. So drawn space by is a different field than drawn by. So you wanna make sure everything's nice to Peel, but that's why we're doing a template is because everything is still the same with the right spacing. All we have to do is go back and fill this out. So now we have our unit set and everything else that we want. We need to save this as a template with all of our properties. So we'll save file, save as. This is gonna be a different template. So now we're into the part template. So the part template. Remember, look at where you're stashing it. So we wanna go to that special folder. And sometimes I like to put in inches, if it's in inches, per millimeters, if it's in millimeters, or whatever you'd like to put in here. That kinda gets you in a tune of what you're actually opening and starting with. We've already have SolidWorks pointing to that directory for our templates. Let's go ahead and test. So if we hit our new button here, we should be able to go to drawings webinar. There's our new part that we can grab. Say okay. Right. Here's our part. Here's the part properties that we can then refill out. Just for fun. So we have our weight. Let's add the mass. Or just some material. And then let's go ahead and do a quick circle. Because it's a drawing, we need to save it somewhere. I'm just gonna keep going in the same spot. Alright. And I'll close this out. Let me close this out since we're not using it anymore. We'll also go back to new. We'll grab our template. Say okay. We'll browse because it's not open in the background. We'll grab the part just as a test. Put it there, and look at that. It looks like everything is now working. It's a new button. New piece is working. I think we're good to go. What happens if instead of it saying Craig's motherboard or three d motherboard and our logo's changed, because this is copied onto our page. Right? This might be a legacy thing. Again, nice to know where things would be if we have different companies. It'd be nice to be able to update our companies CATIA another company Peel another company. So let's go ahead and simplify those changes. Alright. So we're gonna go back into the part where it says, hey. We have this another motherboard design. So in order to really prove this out, what we need to do is delete this sheet. We'll have this one. Let's go ahead and save this. Right? Again, in a specific folder. Same PBI logo. So we know what we're doing here in a second. Oops. Alright. So let's hit our new. Right? Let's say that this is our template, and we wanna make this different down here. So never right click pretty much anywhere. Edit that sheet format. We'll go to our logo, whatever this name is, and let's change it. Peel get out of that. We'll go to our file. Now if it's a new sheet format, we wanna redo it. No, again, we'll just make sure that it's going to the right spot. Override that one. K. Now we still have to make sure that this is part of our, template. So file save as. Right. And it's our new template. Make sure you know where you're going. We'll make sure we test. It's always the big thing here. It's making sure that we test and make sure it works before we keep going. Alright. That looks good. Let's hit our new button. And the next sheet's working. So our template is now working the way that it's intended. For recent, we can grab that new logo one that we wanna use No. And you can see that this is because, remember, it's copied Oqton this page. It doesn't go back and resync. So what we need to do is reload the sheet format. So by saying edit sheet format. Right. Instead of double clicking and doing all that stuff here, we Peel to go to the properties. So properties, here's where reload is. One of the things that can get you is that we need to then say custom sheet size, and then we hit reload. You'll see that this then changes over to that No engineer one. Velo3D, apply changes. Here's that GoEngineer. For some reason, it's been kicking out this piece, but that's beside the point. So here's my GoEngineer. It's now reloaded the way that I intended it to be. So after we've done with our saving our sheet formats, remember, we just wanna save over the old sheet format if that's what we wanna do, if that's a replacement value. We can always have a new one if we would like. So you can kinda use one piece and then keep saving out new pieces if you need to start deleting some of those extra lines out for a new template. So we wanna make sure we exit, save the working drawing, start a new drawing using the template that we created or want to change. If we already have one exist, we kinda went over those steps before, but here's the slide with the details. We wanna go into those properties. We wanna make sure that we undo the standard sheet. We'll go into that custom sheet size, and we'll reload from there. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure that button reload is still grayed out. I missed the control q earlier, so I think that's why my lines didn't come back, so that was my fault. Once the sheet format is reread into the drawing, you could have to save the template again because, remember, it's saved over the top Oryx copied onto the top. So make sure that we resave the template No it takes effect of our new sheet format. A fun other option is in our document property, we can go to drawing sheets, and we could use a different drawing sheet format for new pieces or new pages. So we might have one that has our first two pages already done for us, so maybe a title page and, you know, revision page. Those might have bigger title block areas. And then after that, we might have smaller title blocks. That way we can have more paper Success. So something like this can help save some space and help with that reusability. We wanna thank you for coming in today and spending some time with us and learning a few things today. So we went over those part properties, saving out those properties inside of a custom template, and then using those templates together to create and linking those texts to the title block. Once we have all those texts linking to the title block, we wanna make sure we save that as a template. And then if something should change, we went over modifying that sheet format in a few different ways. So make sure that we rewind and rewatch some of that if needed. If you would like to reach out to me and ask any questions, my email is down here, cmauer@goengineer.com. And if you have lots of other questions as far as what we have to offer for you, please visit our website at GoEngineer.com. We look forward to seeing you on the next one, and have a great day.