Fusion 360 - 23 Tips Beginners Must Learn

First thing, when I get started, I like to hit that save button, give it a name. This is great to get the auto-save started type in S K fine sketch, select the plane that I'm going to sketch on. So I can use these items from the tool bar. If I'd like to do the pull down and find them, or you can use your S search and start searching for what you want. So I'm gonna look at for different rectangles. And by looking at this, I can see there's three good options here. Maybe I'll start by centering on the origin, drag that out. I'll hit D on the keyboard that brings up the smart dimension, and this allows me to place the dimension, but it's also editable. So we do that and place our dimensions. Okay. We've got this built and will extruded

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finish it.

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I usually hit E on the keyboard drag that out. Okay. So we've got this box. We've shaped it out. Now, if you wanted that hollowed out box, we could have gone back sketch and offset. This that'd be great, but I want to introduce a new command for hauling things out. It's called the shell command type in part of that. So with shell, I'm first going to just select the body from the menu. And this is one gotcha. For me, when I first got started, select it hit. Okay. And select in, you know, put in the thickness value of the walls. Did anything happen? Right? So here's a tool. This cross section tool, section analysis. Can you use this face and drag it? Okay. Can you see what happened? So we've got the ability to see inside, and when I didn't select any faces, it hollows out the entire body.

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How do I turn off the cross section? This was a gotcha for me on fusion. How do I find it? Turn off now lives in this analysis folder, and I can turn that off visually and I can turn it on. Right? Okay, great. So if we go back and look at the shell feature and edit it now, what happens if I were instead to do the body, I do a face. It's going to remove the face and hollow out the rest. So if I select a couple faces holding control on the keyboard, it's going to remove those faces and hollow the rest. So if we select three of them, starting to see that pattern, I'm sure. So let's remove that top face. Okay. So we've got the shell body. We finally have that result that I asked you to do kind of earlier on, but what happens if you want multi thickness now in solid works, I learned that you could do that in the shell command.

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The way I do it in fusion is I would use the Q command. This is the ability to press poll. I love this. So, um, you select it and drag it you'll notice it does all of it by default. And that's cause it's using an automatic offset. So this drag push poll, we want to go to a new offset and it's creating a new feature in the design history. So I select that drag it. Now I have multi thickness happening and I'm going to repeat that right. Click drag up is an automatic repeat. You use that one pretty often drag this a little bit, get the value I want. And what's cool is these are editable in the design history. So I could go back, find that value, adjust it to what the thickness should be. But one thing to keep in mind is let's measure this.

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So another tip what's measure, how do you measure? I use this inspect tool I'll select face and the other face it'll give me the normal distance of 0.38. What was the offset at the offsets at 0.28, right? Because you're adding both that original shelf feature and this new offset. So something to keep in mind, that's where maybe I'm having an all in one shell command would be very cool. It's probably worth submitting to the fusion team to have them kind of add that functionality. Let's now dimension. This I'm going to start dropping in dimensions. Now, how do you have the part kind of designed in your own head or what you're referencing? Are you thinking of this in halves? Are you thinking of it as a whole, since we planned to mirror it? Now, if you have it as kind of a half, then this dimension is completely adequate, but let's just say that you plan to mirror this whole thing.

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Well then when you're doing the dimension, if you dimension to the center line and when you place this, all right, so this was a gotcha for me as well. Is it dimensions this often to space and that's kind of not helping me. So instead, what I want to do is I'll start from the construction line, go to the entity that I care about, right? Click diameter, dimension. It doubles the direction I care about. Great. That makes way more sense. Drive the dimension. I care that I want construction line, right? Click diameter dimensions. Great. So I'll continue on placing the ones that I need. Okay. Something to be aware of. I know that this isn't fully defined cause I have these light blue lines. So one thing that helps me is I like to drag these points on the blue, and then I can start to see what isn't defined.

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That can be a very helpful tip is just dragging. So what's missing now. Okay. So you can see the entire thing is moving up and down. So we could align this bottom point to the origin, a constraint where they run horizontal with each other. Now it's fully defined, everything's black, but I haven't defined where this construction line finishes. I don't think that's critical for the design. Um, but I'll connect that have adequate incident and it's finished and you'll notice that this icon changes. And so that is one give away that the sketch has been completed, that it's got all its dimensions and constraints, which can be helpful for capturing your design intent just by having those done. Okay. So let's give this some depth. We'll hit extrude. Okay. So how are we going to mirror this object?

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We want to do the entire body, not just faces, not just features. We want to do the entire body in this case. And we're mirroring across. We could use this point. That happens to be in the right space. You can use a face as well. So we mirror this and we've got it done. Now, when I, excuse me, add this mirror, it is still two bodies is something I wish that a fusion had is maybe like a merge result. I know that's a tool in some other CAD systems, but there is a way to combine this into one. I just gave it away. Right. So how do you combine two bodies esky combine select the two bodies we're going to join. And it's, now that seam goes away. We have one mirrored body. Okay. So how do you edit this? Of course, going back to that original sketch. Now that's one thing I like about our mirrored sketches there. Um, it's a little simpler, there's less, uh, sketch entities on the screen in some cases. So when you get into really complex sketches, that's where mirroring the sketch can be simpler and editing it down. The road can be simpler than the same.

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Okay. The next one is, how do we create this shape that follows a cross section. That's not just a straight path. It's a path that goes straight and then curves comes back a different direction. Curves. How do you do that? So whenever you have a cross section that follows anything but a straight line, you should think about a sweep. So let's get started with that one.

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So for doing a sweep, you can start with the cross section or the path I like to start on the path in this case, I'm gonna start on the front point. I always like to start from my origin, just out of habit. I can create new planes if needed, but I'm going to use that line arc technique where you drag out when you're in a line from the end point and it'll drag a tangent arc, it's even adding those tangent constraints. As I sketch this, I'm going to drag holding down my left, click on the mouse and drag out another tangent arc as well. So now let's throw on a cross section. I should stop and dimension that. But just for the example, if we're trying to get the shape, I'm going to go to that plane at the origin. It needs to be at a 90 degree angle, right?

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They cannot be on the same plane. So when you look at it, they should be 90 degrees to each other, at least. So you have a profile to sweep along. So when I type in the esky and go to sweep, I can select this profile and it's going to follow this particular path. There we go. Okay. So you can see, I kinda didn't get that spacing, right? So I can go back to my original sketch, right? Click, edit, sketch, and start dimensioning this so that I can make sure that everything's going to be maybe uniform for this particular paper clip.

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Okay. So we've got a paperclip thrown together and that's the sweep command. You'd like to learn more. Check out my video that had just on doing sweeps, where you go more in depth on how to create that functionality. Okay. Next challenge. You've got a plate with four feet that are all the same size, same spacing from their corners. And it's also, it's transparent. It looks like it's like a glass material, right? So how could we build this infusion? Is there a new design let's start my rectangle. And one thing that's worth noting is you can just start a rectangle. You don't actually have to hit the commit, the sketch command. You can just grab any kind of sketch object and begin sketching. So I want to create, you know, a fully dimensioned sketch we'll put in this value. Are these the same side length? Is it square? Is it rectangular? Let's say it's rectangular. So then I'll add another dimension. And what I want to do is drop in those feet already. I have, because I use the centered rectangle. I have these center lines to connect to, which does save me some of the constraints that I'm going to need to build. Now I'm going to drop in the thickness, excuse me, the diameter of these feet. And then also I want to go to the trouble to get the spacing, right?

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So I'll dimension this corner. And why is that fully defined already? It just gave me an error because I've placed it on this construction line. So it knows where it sits kind of in that vertical alignment now, but it does, it needed the horizontal alignment to know where it sits in space. So it's fully defined or at least this circle is the placement. So how can we get all of these circles now lined up correctly without dimensions, let's use constraints to do that. So I'll select the center points of each one, Cole control select these two right click. And I can line these up horizontally.

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You'll notice the constraints command is also up on this toolbar so we can select that and then select these points. If we want to do it in that way, it's like these two they're aligned. It's like these two they're aligned. So these line up vertically, these lineup horizontally. Perfect. Okay. So nothing's dragging. There's no way to, oops. I was wrong. So that is still moving. So we haven't defined all of the sizes of the circles. We've just done one. So pretty quick, just select each circle, hold control. I'm gonna select all of them and choose the equal. They're out all now defined. I just take a peek at my sketch. You can see as the little walk, showing the sketches fully defined rate. So that's now going to behave in the way I want it to, and it'll be easy to edit in the future.

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 Okay. So let's hit extrude. So I am going to do the plate at a thickness. So I select all of the objects. Let's say that it's quarter inch. Great. Now how do I add those feet without having to do a, you know, a whole new sketch? I've done all the work I don't want to have to start over. So this was a gotcha for me is it's you can't really extrude that original sketch without it showing. So turn on the visibility of the one you've done hit extrude and I'm going to select just the circles for the feet and I could extrude them down. It wants to do, um, a cut. If I go through here, I don't want to do that. So instead I'm gonna do a new body or a join. So I'm gonna do a join so that it adds new material.

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Now, some things I could do here, do I want to just extrude at this depth and then kind of do the math myself. So I'm doing it at 0.6, but then I said, subtract whatever the thickness of the plate is. Maybe I don't want to be thinking about it that way. Cause that 0.6 could be confusing for me instead. I'm going to start from, okay, so we're going to extrude all four of these feet. So instead of from the top and extruding down, I'm going to do a from object select this bottom face, do 0.4. And so it's only adding 0.4 from that bottom face. I love that command, how you can use the same sketch without having to change it. Now, there is a way I could have done this without having to kind of get so fancy and advanced. So instead of extruding the plate down, what if I had extruded it up at 0.2, five?

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Great. And then when I was going to do the extruded down, I wouldn't have had to get so fancy. I could have just started from these circles and extruded down because I extruded up for the plate and down for the feet. And now these distances all make a lot more sense. That'd probably be a better way to do this, but cool. Nice to introduce that additional feature there. Okay. So we've got this now. Um, let's talk a little bit about displays. You can see it's kind of, uh, kind of a muted appearance. And if you go to under this display image, there's visual style and this is where you can show shaded with edges and that now you can make out those edges as well as we could also introduce any hidden edges, right? That you can't see when you're looking through the component. How do I add that glass material that I had shown earlier? I'm gonna hit a on the keyboard, brings up my appearance toolbar, and I'm gonna go to my Fusion 360 appearances. And some of these you will have to download. I'll have a little download link next to it and it's free. Of course it just doesn't install automatically all of the materials to save for space. I think so I'll drag on this glass and now I have this nice appearance applied.

Fusion 360 - 23  Tips for Beginners.