Do you need to create more complex shapes in Fusion 360. Let's do a beginner's guide to using surfaces infusion. Here we go.

Hey, this is Tyler Beck with tech and espresso. Let's talk about the beginner's guide to surface modeling infusion. So I have this complex design here. It's a spoon. And when you look at it, you can kind of see it's got all these different profiles, right? So if this is the top profile and then the side profile, when you look at it, it's got complex curvature, right? So it's got no one feature would be easy to create this, whether it's a sweep or a loft would be challenging. So in creating, this was a series of different lofts created this kind of complex surface shape. You can see it's got different radios for, um, throughout the scoop. So it's changing kind of the, the way that that spoon is folding up.

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So then I trim out that profile with another sketch and I have this amazing kind of surface put together. So very complex shape, very difficult to make, and it was easier. Cause I used surfaces. I then thicken it. Okay. So this is the why of using surfaces. It lets you create more complex shapes a little bit easier. So let's look at some examples. First thing that's worth noting is a surface is very similar to a solid. So when you create a cylinder and you give it depth infusion or any CAD model for that CAD tool, for that matter, you've got a cylindrical extrusion with solid volume inside, right? It extruded that it kept the ends and filled up the volume. So if we sent this to a three D printer CNC machine, it's going off of the solid geometry. Now what happens if we do the same thing with surfacing? So I'm going to do a sketch, do a circle, and we're going to do an extrude.

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But this time we're using the surface extrude fusion denotes, their surfaces is this light orange colors. That's kind of a giveaway that you're working with. Surfaces can see that it's not capping the ends. It's not filling it up with volume, but it's kind of performing similarly. Now this is a cool thing about surfaces is it does not force you to have a thickness to every body. And that's what makes it helpful to kind of work with it. So I have one surface body here and what am I do is use the patch, command patch, this end, repeat

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patch this end. And now I have three surface bodies and now it's bringing all of those together. And there's this command in surfaces. Let's jump into the surface command just so we can kind of get a quick preview patch, the ability to extrude revolve sweep. Does this look familiar? Absolutely. A lot of these commands are just like the ones in the solid modeling except this whole stitch and trim tools. And this is where it starts to get kind of even more powerful. What stitch all of these three surface bodies together. You notice something, what happened to our surface bodies? They all became one solid body. So if I section this looks like it's a solid in there. So that's what the stitch command gave us. So surfacing is pretty similar, right? To working with solids. Let's look at another example. This is kind of interesting. So if we sketch a simple profile, just align, not a closed profile and then

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going up, we sketch a line. This is the path. So I'm about to sweep this up along this line. It's Trisha a little bit. Great. Okay. So let's do a sweep and again, let me use the orange sweep, which is telling me it's the surface and I'm gonna do the profile, which has aligned, which is strange, right? You'd think that it needs to be a closed profile. That's more common like we're used to. And so we're getting this surface sweep, nothing fancy about that. But what I'd like to do is, is introduced a twist. So I'd like it to twist all the way around as it goes through. And so this line is now this sweep profile over the path, but it's also twisting and it's kind of cool. So surfacing allowed me not to have to think about the thickness yet. And then if I introduced the thicken command, then I'm going to be able to thicken this.

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And again, I can thick into one side or symmetrically or flip the side that it's thickening. And now I have my solid body all from very simple sketches, right? And that's another kind of power or usefulness of surfaces. Okay. Let's look at just a few other little features and surfaces that are kind of cool to be aware of. I turned on the solid surface body and I could use a simple sketch to use as a trimmer. I like this, how the trimming kind of works within a surface body. So if I came in and sketch this circle, that's all I do. And now we'll use the trim command, a trim. This trim is using the sketch and then the body that will remain there select the, to the surface body and the cutter or the sketch tremor. And this is what remains. So it's still solving for that kind of complex sweep geometry, but keeping that circle pretty rad. I, the capabilities with surfacing and of course, what about using a revolve? I kind of covered this in my thin wall tutorial. Very similar. You can just sketch a simple line command and use the surface command. Let's do a revolve again, orange surface around that axis revolves this. And again, we could fit in this to quickly turn this into solid geometry. Now a little tip. This is from Jason Lichtman, my good friends at honor desk. He said select the whole surface body. It's a quicker way too thick and great tip.

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So that's an introduction to surfaces in Fusion 360 and a little bit of why you start to use these.