Changing Model Orientation

Today's video is intended to address an issue that is fairly commonly encountered when you're creating parts in SolidWorks. When I've been working on a part, you can see my part here, and I go put it back in isometric view because I'm getting ready to print it. I click on isometric and it turns out that that the isometric orientation that SolidWorks is using is not the isometric orientation that I want. Now there is a way to fix this and in order to do this we are going to bring up the View Orientation menu and we're going to click the little pin because we're probably going to need it a few times. So right now you can see that isometric is highlighted if you double-click on any of these views it takes you to that view as defined by the current isometric orientation. Now if I want to modify my isometric orientation then I will need to redefine what views of the object are considered front, back, left, and right. So one of the first things I need to do is recognize which views I want to correspond with the standard principal views. In this case, the view that I want to be my top view, which is the view that would be looking at the top of this surface here is currently set to be the front view, so if I double-click on front, it takes me and I look at that surface. Now, because I want that to be my top view, here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to left-click once on top and then I'm going to go here to where it says 'Update Standard Views' so if I hover over this icon it says 'Update Standard Views' and I'm going to click on it. I will say okay this is going to change the orientation of your model, which is good because that's what I want, so I'll click 'Yes'. Now I will double-click on 'Isometric' again to see what's happened. Okay, so we're getting closer. Now, I have it facing upright but I don't want the model to be facing this direction toward the right. I want it to be facing toward the left so I can see this notch over here, so what I'm going to do is look at what is currently the right-side view and say that I want that to be the front view, so I will left-click once on 'Front' and I will update my views again and now if I double-click on isometric my object is pointing in the right direction. The number of times you're going to have to go through this step depends on just how far your model is from the orientation that you want. Occasionally you will change or update a view and it will rotate the model in an unexpected way and it will undo previous changes that you have made. And it just becomes an issue of trial and error at that point. But if you're patient and you think through the changes that you're making you can fix the orientation of any model.