This video demonstrates how to use Reference Sketches as an alternative to top-down assembly modeling in SOLIDWORKS. To start, I have a PCB assembly and designed this PCB shield melt component in the context of the assembly as a virtual component. I could save it as an individual file, but it would still have all of these external references in its features pointing to other components of the assembly. So, it's dependent on the assembly. The problem is that in the assembly, all of those external references create update holders. Those update holders can cause performance slowdowns, especially if there are a lot of them. The advantage is that if the assembly changes, then the part can change automatically to match those changes to the assembly. In this case, I know this assembly is never going to change. It's a vendor part. There are several different ways I could make this part independent, but I want to show you a way of avoiding top-down assembly modeling in the first place and doing bottom-up, but still having the size of the assembly that I need to work with. #solidworkstutorials