Fusion 360 Move Copy Command Explained

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In this video, we're going to talk about how you can save out and copy a component, how you can copy components and bodies and move them around quickly in your assembly and the gotchas you should be aware of. So check it out.

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All right. Let's get into the many different styles of copying in Fusion 360. So, uh, first one is if you are in a design that has lots of different components, if you want to save out a component or copy it into like another file. So for example, if I wanted this spring and let's find it in the browser, right. Quick grind in browser, there's that component. And I'd like to save it out into its own new design or right. Click. And do you save a copy as in, this'll be my spring assembly. We'll save that out. It might take a second and let that work for a minute. Okay. It's ready. It's in my data and it's in that folder. If I go double click, I can open that by itself. So that's one way of copying out, you know, a file out to another location. Okay. The next thing is if I hit search type in the S key and search for move copy, um, I had to come up on the channel that someone mentioned how come it feels like it's a lot of steps. And one thing to keep in mind is when you are doing with components, bodies, these all behave a little bit different. So if we're doing the body, I select that.

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And I don't see any of those options that I was looking for. So if I cancel and do move, copy doing a body, make this selection. Now everything wakes up and I can also do the create. Copy. One got you for me is if I start dragging this and then want to create a copy that doesn't seem to work in Fusion 360. You can even close it out, select the body again. And now it's kind of brought that option back. It's not great out any longer. So that seems to be a sensitive step is you do have to hit that, create copy before you start moving things, and you can now create a body copy or component copy. Alright, so in this case, um, I'll talk about how we move these here with the triad and just a second, but we create this body copy and it copies it over.

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Okay. I have two different components. Let's talk about moving them. So they're free to move about. And whenever you do that in Fusion 360, the components that get moved, um, it's going to ask you about, um, creating a parametric relationship to the movement. Meaning do you want to just move it in space and capture where that lives and make that a recorded point for parametric design purposes? Or do you want to revert back to where it was? Okay. So we move this over and hit capture. It adds that to the history tree, and now this lives in that location and we can revert back to that saved point or save the next one that drag that's happening at the component level is almost identical to what's happening when I dragged it. It's just this move component option has a lot more specificity on how we move it. It's versus that very rough, random drag. And you'll notice the capture position. It's the exact same button that we were seeing below. So are above here previously. So if I capture that position, it's a new position added in the timeline. Okay. So you can just move it around kind of a free form and capture that or keep it, um, or right click and find the move. Copy search, find the S key, do the component and then use the triad to move the components.

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Let's talk a little bit about all the different move styles. So if we go to the body copy, select, and I'm gonna select this body, you notice it just kind of put this kind of out in a nearest location there, and we can choose to do a free move where we've got all these different move styles, or we can start to, um, be more specific about what we want to move in. What directions do you want to translate? So you can only move in the X, Y, Z. Do you want to rotate, um, about, uh, an access, right? You select that axis and then I have one rotation handle. Do you want to move point to point? Um, you also have this ability to set where the pivot lives. You see all these locations. If I click that set pivot, now it's going to let me snap to corners, midpoints faces, centers, all these different areas that we could move it along, select that, be sure to hit the green check marks so that it doesn't relocate it. And now can translate in that direction. Could rotate about this handle. These planes mean move along a plane or translate, or along a point. It looks like it's moving around in space, but in reality, it's moving along that plane the whole time.

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Also, you can grab the sphere and that's kind of the free form move wherever you want, or you have these translation handles. So there's a lot of power here at work for the different move styles you then of course can do it numerically with these different, um, tools, whether you're using angles or distances, negative or positive. All right, let's talk a little bit about the additional option of faces. So for faces, how do you, um, move or change the values of the location of something when it's a body? This is all one big body. So if I'm trying to kind of pick out this particular face series, this whole thing right here, what I want to do is rotate that a little bit. And since it's not its own body, I could use faces to do that. And in this kind of direct editing methods. So if we just kind of rotate it a little bit, can see how it's rotating there. Okay. And so we're able to move using those faces, even though it's all in one contained body. Thanks for watching.

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Check out this beginner playlist I made for you as well as this other video that YouTube thinks would be a great fit.

Fusion 360 move copy has lots of options.  Hopefully this tutorial explaining how to use move, copy for bodies, components and faces was helpful.