360 LIVE: 3D Creating a cardboard box using Fusion 360's Sheet Metal

hello everyone and welcome to another fusion 360 livestream my name's Brad talus from Autodesk and today's topic I'm gonna be talking about how to create like packaging for any of your designs using sheet metal so you can see here that I have an example cardboard box and I'm going to show how to go about creating this now this actually came about because I actually have a cardboard box but a product that I ordered came in and so I was like hey I wonder if we could make something like this so here's the actual design and you'll notice it looks pretty much exactly the same as what I just showed so there's little tabs there's holes in here and we're gonna go through and learn how to make this box inside a fusion 360 now there are quite a few steps so I actually have an outline here that I'm gonna be following so if you hear pages flipping that is why I just want to make sure I cover everything I'm gonna be teaching some really cool tips and tricks to speed up the design process of this cardboard box I do have Erin helping me out today so if you have any questions or comments please feel free to post them into the chat window and he's monitoring that and we'll hopefully be able to answer those for you so I'm gonna start out by going into my sheet metal tab now I am using the new user interface we've talked about this previously but under your preferences under preview we have this UI preview and so if you haven't turned that on yet I highly recommend you do I personally really like it so you can see it actually puts these tabs across the top so I'm going to jump into the sheet metal tab and now you see my sheet metal commands if I go back to my solid tab you're gonna see your solid modeling commands and this is very important because we're gonna be jumping back and forth between the sheet metal and the solid command doing this design so the very first thing I want to do is to actually create a material so right here you can see we have sheetmetal rules I'm gonna go ahead and click on that and you can see that we have some default sheetmetal rules so you can see for example we've got aluminum maybe aluminum that's eighth of an inch 2006 25 we got steel etc but I want to create a material that kind of simulates cardboard now with cardboard you can actually bend the cardboard right and it almost kind of like folds in on itself where sheet metal has to do kind of a radius we're gonna kind of fool the software and simulate how it actually Ben is using cardboard so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna pick an existing one of these and you'll notice as I hover over it it allows me to edit the rule or I can actually create a new rule so I'm gonna click on this new rule and let's just give it a name let's just call it cardboard okay now the thickness I've already measured using my my calipers in this case is point zero seven six okay now I'm not gonna go into too much detail but we also have K factor I'm gonna leave that alone it's set to about forty four percent right now I'm just gonna leave that I actually linked in the description of this livestream another livestream that I did on it's called unfolding the mysteries of sheet metal where I go into a lot more detail about each of these commands so I'm not gonna cover everything again so I'm just gonna kind of keep continuing through here so you can see for the band conditions the bend radius right here is set to be whatever the thickness is but like I showed before we want to kind of simulate it almost like kinking or sinon itself so instead of having a pretty large Bend radius we want a very small Bend radius so I'm going to say point like zero one okay then we have our relief shape and you'll see this as we go through but we can do round we can do straight we can do tears in this case I'm gonna I'm gonna set it to straight and again you'll see what that means here a little bit I'm gonna leave the rest of these alone however I'm going to expand open my corner conditions here and expand open my to bend intersection those so this is where basically two bends that intersect what is it going to look like well again instead of round I want it to be square and that's just to simplify maybe the cutting out of this if we're gonna cut it out with like a laser cutter for example I don't want to have round corners I want to have square corners but then you'll also notice this relief size says whatever the thickness is times four well in this example I don't need to have it quite so big so I'm going to change that from four to two so basically what we did here is we we copied an existing material called aluminum and we gave it its own name called cardboard we specified the thickness and we specified the Bend radius that's kind of the key thing right here then we went through and said we want our reliefs to be straight and square and again this will make more sense as we start creating parts so I'll go ahead and save that and you'll see I now have a new material called cardboard so I'm go ahead and close that out okay so now the next thing I want to do is I'm in my sheet metal tab and the very first command is new component so whenever you're creating a sheet metal part you want to create them as a component so I'm going to say new component and you this should look pretty familiar you can give it a name if you want to so I could call this box but right here notice it says sheet metal component so I'm going to turn that on and that's gonna allow me to pick which rule I want to use and in this case we want to use the cardboard rule I'll say ok and I now have a new little icon it kinda looks like a folded piece of material if I expand that open we can see we're using the rule called cardboard and just like in regular fusion it's a it's a component so when I start creating a sketch now let's just do maybe on this top view it's going to organize my sketches my bodies the origin etc underneath this box component so I created a sketch let's go ahead and do a centered rectangle now this is important I'm gonna try and keep things as symmetric as possible because this box is pretty symmetric what's on the right side is kind of on the left side etcetera so I'm gonna create a simple a symmetric rectangle and according to my you know I took some measurements of the existing cardboard box it's about 10 and 3/4 in length by about 8 inches in height so I'm just going to go ahead and type in those dimensions and hit enter so 10 3/4 by 8 I'll finish my sketch and now I'm ready to start to create my sheet metal part and the cool command here is this flange command it's actually multiple commands in one now here's a cool tip if I just you know click on my profile and right mouse click that flange command is at about 4 o'clock in my marking menu so I don't have to keep coming up to the menu up here to do that so I'm just going to come over here and say flange and you'll see it gives me a preview what that looks like and I'll say okay and I now have a body's folder underneath my box component okay so let me go ahead and I was gonna close that up so now I have this rectangle 10 and 3/4 by 8 and I want to start folding the box now I typically do the most complicated stuff first and then work my way toward easy now these first two flanges are going to be pretty simple but the next ones after that is where it gets a little bit more complicated so I'm going to click on this top edge right mouse click and say flange and you'll see it brings up this flange menu now I like to start to drag and you'll notice we get an error every time you drag you'll get an error and the reason for that is because when it's too small it physically can't create the preview so it just says hey I failed to create that profile but as soon as you get far enough you'll notice that that goes away okay so don't freak out when you see that error especially when you're doing like like this preview that I'm doing now it's asking for the overall height and again according to the measurements it's three and a quarter so I'm going to type in three point two five it gives me a nice preview and I'm going to zoom up here and notice how small this little tiny radius is right here again that was because when we created that cardboard material we set the Bend radius to be point zero one so it's almost like we're kind of crushing the cardboard right there where if this was regular sheet metal you'd probably have a larger Bend radius there so you could use sheet metal for creating sheet metal parts cardboard plastic parts so you could actually heat plastic and bend it if you know what the minimum Bend radius needs to be for those kinds of materials you can use sheet metal for any of those designs now I'm going to do the other edge at the same time so I'm going to go ahead and control select both of those edges we can see how it's creating a bend for us automatically at 90 degrees at a height of three and a quarter now we're gonna learn about these Bend positions and stuff like that a little bit later but I'm gonna go ahead and change the height datum to be outer faces now again I'm doing some things here where you might be like well why did he do that definitely recommend watching that other livestream where I talk about each of these options here like the height datum the bend position etc but I'm gonna set this to be outer faces and what that's basically doing is it's saying it's gonna be three and a quarter from this bottom face to this top face here if I had it set to inner faces it's actually going to be three and a quarter from this inside face to the top face and just to be exact the overall height of the box was three and a quarter from top to bottom so that's why I change that we'll talk about this bend position a little bit later I'll go ahead and say okay and that's basically we're just starting the cardboard box now I could flip back and forth between the video and the screen or whatever but I'm just gonna kind of simplify things here but we're starting with the design of the box let me jump over here actually this might make more sense what we just did is we just created this wall here and we've created the the bottom here so we just created this wall now I want to create this folded over section right here and you can actually see it's getting kind of complicated in here but we've got multiple flaps that kind of fold into this area here and that's how this box you know stays together okay so that's what we're gonna do next so I'm going to click on this edge over here right mouse click and say flange again I like to start to drag just to get kind of a preview what that's gonna look like and using the measurements from the cardboard box this was 0.375 and so you can kind of see when I type that in and kind of jumped back a little bit and we're gonna go ahead and leave everything alone I'll say okay and then the next part I want to do is to basically create the part that folds down so I'm going to click this edge and say flange and start to drag if we can now see how we're basically kind of folding this cardboard over now I want this height here to go all the way down to here so I'm going to go ahead and click on that face and again you'll notice even though I clicked on the face it didn't go all the way down and that has to do with this height datum okay so I'm going to change that to be interfaces but notice what happens now it's actually intersecting with the model and this is bad okay we'd never want our sheetmetal stuff to physically intersect with each other and so I can see right here it's point I'm sorry three point zero nine eight let's go ahead and just take the eight off of there and now we can see that that lifted up just a hair off of that floor okay and this is fine because it's not intersecting and a later on I'll show you what happens if you accidentally intersect we're gonna create a mistake here in a little bit and you'll see how we're gonna fix that so I just removed just a little tiny bit off of that and again I'm just gonna leave everything the same and say okay so we just started creating this side now here's one of the tips that I highly highly recommend you do when you're working in sheet metal and that is to unfold it as you go through your design so I'm going to say unfold and it's asking for a stationary entity what's kind of you know staying flat so I'm gonna say this guy and then you can see it says bands and it's kind of highlighted a couple of our bends in green now I could do one at a time so I could click on any of these or I could say unfold all bends and this is what I typically have set okay and you'll notice that it laid out flat so this is good if it unfolds and lays out flat we know that everything is good okay so I check my work as we go through by unfolding to make sure this thing can physically unfold okay so the next thing I want to do is it's kind of hard to see on the box but there's some some holes right here so some slots that these little tabs fold down into and kind of are held in place like so and so we're gonna send you simulate that so what we basically just did is we just created this area right here where we we came across and then we folded it down again okay we'll play it on the jump around too much there but so what I want to do now is create those holes and this is what I think is so cool about our sheet metal is we can use regular modeling commands like for example creating a sketch and I'm just gonna kind of mock-up my design I want to put a rectangle kind of rec in here somewhere and maybe one up here I'll just kind of line that up do something like that now I want to be more precise so I'm gonna hit D for dimension and let's just make that one inch tall and let's make it one inch from the edge of the box because that's how it is on the actual cardboard box so you can kind of see how it's one inch tall it's one inch from the edge and I want it to be a specific width I want it to be a little bit wider than the cardboard itself because we won't be able to you know push that tab into this so I'm going to say let's just do maybe point zero two you can see how that moved over and I'll do the same thing right there point zero two and now you can kind of see this rectangle right here and you can see inside of that the piece of cardboard so we have a little bit of extra room there for it to slide down into so I'm going to do the exact same thing up here I'll just throw a couple dimensions on here make that one inch also the point zero two and the same thing over here now here's another neat little trick if I place my dimension I can just click on an existing dimension and it's gonna reference that dimension so instead of having to type in point zero two again I could just click on this guy and that one's gonna equal it okay so I'm gonna go ahead and say finish sketch and now I've got some rectangles here but they're kind of hard to see and I've shown a cool trick where you can probe through just by clicking and holding your mouse and I can grab that profile but unfortunately I actually need to grab about three profiles it's really kind of hard to see there so another tip that I sometimes do is actually turn off the body and now you can see just the sketch and the body is out of the way and now you can see sure enough there's this little rectangle here a larger rectangle and a little rectangle there well why is it split into three well it has to do with that piece of cardboard that got automatically projected so here's another neat little trick I can go back to my sketch and let's just click on those two lines and turn them to construction geometry and so now they're construction lines and this is all one profile now it's not being split by those other object lines so I can make much quicker and easier click these profiles hopefully that makes sense I'll go ahead and turn the body back on here right mouse-click and say either extrude or press pull it doesn't matter and then I just start to drag down and you can see it's taking those rectangles and machining it or cutting it through the material now how far well just click on the bottom face and it snaps to that bottom face and it sets that distance for you automatically I'll go ahead and say okay and I've now created those holes for where we want these tabs to be so the next step is to create the tabs and you're going to learn a little couple cool little tricks here so the first thing I'm going to do is kind of zoom up on this let's work on this front tab right here and I'm gonna click on that edge right mouse click and say flange now by default it's wanting to put a flange along that full edge so if I were to start to drag you're gonna see it's gonna try and put a flange along that full edge okay well we want to just do a little section so I'm going to click on there actually let me cancel out so doesn't remember things I'm gonna say flange I'm gonna change this and do a to offset now what this allows you to do is to actually create the tab wherever you want and what I typically do is I get it kind of close so you can kind of see I drag the arrow there I'll drag the arrow kind of over here okay and now when I start to drag my height you'll see that it's only putting that tab where these two offsets are now the other issue you see is it's going at a ninety degree angle and we want it to go straight down so I'm going to change angle to be zero and now it's actually basically adding some extra material to that edge now we want to be more precise so I'm going to go ahead and clear this reference and maybe click on this face here for one reference and this face here for the other reference now that is exact so it's not giving us any slop or anything like that so I'd like to basically drag this back a little bit to give us a little bit of extra room same thing over on this side I'm going to drag that back a little bit to give us some extra room and in this case let's just do maybe point zero two let's see what that looks like that gives us a pretty good gap there so I'll say point zero two and then the last thing is the overall height okay so we can kind of see that with this arrow here so another neat little trick is I can click on an existing face and it's gonna snap the height to that face so instead of having to do a lot of measuring or guessing or whatever you know where I'm like okay that looks close but it's not quite all I have to do is get near a face and click or an edge or a point and it's gonna snap to that face and you can see we have pretty good clearance all the way around for this tab okay so I'll say okay let's go ahead and unfold this really quick just to see what that looks like I'll say unfold all the bends and let's just click on that and we can see we've got a little rectangle and we've got this nice little tab it's gonna tuck down into that rectangle to kind of hold it together so I'm going to do the exact same thing on this other tab so I'll come in here and say flange and I'll do the to offset again I just kind of sort of get close just to give me a visual of what it's gonna look like I'll start to drag a little bit and actually while we're sitting here you can see the square reliefs it's kind of hard to move my mouse here but you can notice how they're square this was one of the settings we set when we created our cardboard material instead of them being round I told them to be square that's the result of that so we'll set this to be zero I'll go ahead and let's clear our references and just click one reference there click another reference here kind of see what that looks like then I I kind of drag just to make sure I'm going in the right direction I can see both of those are in the negative directions I'm gonna say - o - M - o - like that and then finally the height I'll click on that bottom face and boom we're done okay we've just created this area that's folded over that has the two tabs unfold again just to confirm yep it that means it's valid and I just cancel out of my unfold I don't have to undo or anything like that I just hit cancel okay so we've spent quite a bit of time working on this one side we've created some rectangular holes we've created a couple tabs etc and I want to do the same thing over here and you're probably going wow this is gonna be like a two or three hour livestream if he's going to have to model all this stuff well here's where it gets cool you can actually use regular modeling commands such as the mirror command and this blows me away I'll be honest I haven't seen other software that can do this as powerful as fusion so I want to mirror what we've done over here to go over here now in the mirror command we by default I think it's usually set to faces but let's go ahead and change this to change it to features and I want to mirror a couple of these feet so I want a mirror that slot and I'm basically working my way backwards I'm gonna mirror that I'm gonna mirror the extrude now you can't mirror the sketch I'm gonna leave that alone and then I'm gonna mirror that flange which is kind of hard to show but it's this vertical one right here you can kind of see how it's highlighted in blue and then I also want to mirror this little flange right here so we're actually grabbing more than half of our timeline and we're saying let's mere that what's the mirror plane well remember when we first started we drew a centered rectangle this is the exact reason why I can now just select this center plane like so and say okay and boom check that out I hope you guys think that's as cool as I do I mean think about how much time it would take to draw another sketch draw those rectangles dimension the rectangles bla bla bla bla bla we were able to smear existing geometry we're actually gonna do that quite often in this design so what should we do let's go back to sheet metal and unfold so I'm going to click on unfold ball bends it lays out flat so believe it or not even though we mirrored this geometry over here it still recognizes that as sheet metal geometry and unfolds it so Erin's probably gonna say if you thought that was cool give a thumbs up I totally agree I I think that's pretty pretty snazzy myself okay so let's continue on now I'm going to in fact I'll jump back to the video here we've created the bottom and these two sides now so now I want to start creating the the front of this box okay and to take a look at this I'm gonna unfold a little bit kind of hard to unfold this guy but it's basically just a rectangle with some flaps on it that fold underneath those plans we've just created hopefully that's not too loud I apologize okay so what we're gonna do now is click on this front edge right mouse click and say flange now I'm gonna go ahead and start to drag so you're gonna see an issue okay notice what's happening here we can kind of see how it's interfering with these bends that we just did and that's no good okay the reason for that is notice the bend position is set to inside so it's too far it's trying to bend and make this flange be on the inside okay well because it's doing that it's interfering with that other geometry if I set this to outside we can kind of see that that looks a little bit better but let's zoom up on here it's gonna be kind of hard to see but this face is still touching this face right here and that is no good we cannot have those touching so I'm gonna say a jacent and you see it kind of media zoom up there so you can kind of see what's going on here I'm gonna say outside you can see where it's at and notice it actually says the flange is intersecting the body it'll probably result in being able to unable to unfold or flatten so that's outside then I'm gonna say adjacent and you'll see that it offsets just a little bit what does that mean well let's take a look at the side here and I'm gonna zoom up so it's basically instead of having this face be touching this face it's doing the bend and then creating that face so let's go ahead and change this to outside you can see how that's touching and the bend is right there and we say adjacent it basically comes to here and then does the bend and then folds up and this is exactly what we want we want a little bit of slop in our design okay so I also want to control where the ends of this flange are so I'm going to change this to be symmetric and I'm gonna start to drag and we can kind of see what that looks like and again if i zoom up here we can see that the square corner reliefs well I want this cardboard basically to end at this edge so I'm gonna go ahead and click on that edge and notice what it did it actually changed the distance and so it snapped to that edge let me do that again I was out here notice we're at like four point three all I have to do is hover over an edge or a point it really doesn't matter I'm gonna click on that face and it snaps to that face and because it's symmetric it's the same on both sides and then finally I'll do the height and again I'm just gonna kind of drag up how far don't want to go I want to go basically up to this edge right here so I'm gonna go ahead and click right there and that gives me a distance of I'm sorry a height of three point zero nine eight okay now I want this to be just a little bit below this edge because I'm gonna fold in here we're gonna basically fold this edge in and I don't want it to interfere so instead of point I'm sorry three point zero nine eight let's just knock that point eight off and you'll see that that drops down just ever so slightly okay I'll go ahead and say okay and we now have that front edge now what we're going to do is create those panels that kind of hold into these rectangular regions right here so let's just zoom up a little bit I'll grab that edge right mouse clicks a flange and again I like to personally drag just to kind of visually see what that's gonna look like and we can kind of see how that's folding in and we have a little bit of clearance here we've got a little bit of clearance there and the reason we have that clearance is because of this adjacent Bend position if I were to say inside obviously that would not work if I were to say outside it looks like that would work but it's it's touching right there which is still no good so I'm gonna say adjacent according to my measurements this flap which you really can't see right now goes back pretty far about three and a half inches so I'm going to type in 3.5 we can see a nice preview of what that's gonna look like so you can kind of see how far back that goes and we'll say okay now here's a neat trick I just did this one edge and I made you know I typed in some distances and a lot kind of stuff I could say okay and do another flange or I could come over here and ctrl select that other edge and do both at the same time which is what I personally recommend we're kind of doing these two pieces that are the same so I'll say okay what should we do well let's unfold let's confirm that this is still okay so I'm gonna say unfold all bends and there you can see what we just did we just made these two panels that you see right here and here I'll go ahead and cancel out there we go we're back to where we were pretty cool I think okay now we've spent some time making the front with some flanges or whatever you want to call them I want to put those on the back so let's jump back to our solid tab create a mirror again making sure we're set to features and I usually work backwards so I know I want that flange there and I want that flange there and that's about as far back as I need to go I don't need to do this mirror anything like that so I'm gonna select those two features what's our mirror plane that guy and boom we just created the back of our part go back to sheetmetal unfold and it unfolds okay so we know that everything is good so far okay so the next thing is to start working on maybe bringing something to finish the back here let's start working on this top and again it comes across and it folds down and it's got some flaps that fold in around and all kind of stuff so that's what we're gonna do next so I'll click on this top edge right mouse click say flange and again we're using basically the same command over and over and over again the flange command to build this box I'm gonna start to drag and I instantly see a warning which kind of makes sense it's interfering with this existing geometry so we're gonna have to figure that out so I probably need to offset that a little bit so let's do a symmetric edge now you'll notice there's a four different kinds and again I cover these in that unfolding the mysteries livestream but basically symmetric allows it to move in symmetrically on both sides so I'll do the Hat real quick and then I'm going to click on that face to snap to that face now I've mentioned before we don't want to touch but I was able to reference that face and you can see it's a distance of five so let's make that a little bit smaller let's go like four point nine seven and you'll see how that kind of hopped in just a little bit let's go back to five we can see that it's touching and so I'm just gonna kind of knock a little bit off let's just say four point nine seven or I could do even four point nine eight it really doesn't matter in this case okay and then let's set the the overall height here I love referencing existing geometry so I'm going to click on that face and we get that result you can see that it jumped to the correct height now you'll notice it says bend position adjacent now I'm gonna purposely make a mistake here I'm gonna change this to be outside and notice what happened we I'm gonna it's hard to highlight but watch right here adjacent looks good we can see both of those edges there's a little bit of a gap there but let's go ahead and set this to outside and when I do outside let's kind of look at it from again I'm Kyle zooming in here so you can kind of see what's going on let's do a jacent you'll see that that's sitting up a little bit higher right it's kind of hard to see but that's sitting up higher than that edge there I want it to be flush so I'm going to change this to outside but now it's intersecting with this other geometry and let's pretend I didn't realize that I'm gonna go ahead and say okay and it'll actually accept that now I'm gonna test my work I'll come in here and say unfold I'll do my stationery entity and say unfold all bends but notice the result that I got and this is the exact reason I typically unfold after I do a step or two to confirm did this thing that I just did cause problems and in this case obviously it did okay so how do we fix this well the cool thing is I don't have to undo I can just go back to my plans right here and I could change it to be adjacent but I want to keep it the way it is so let's do some timeline magic I'm gonna drag my marker before that flange and you'll notice it goes away because it hasn't happened in time yet then I'm gonna zoom up here click on this face right mouse click and I want to press this face down a little bit now I'm gonna over exaggerate but notice even though I only selected one face it's actually grabbing all of the faces that it needs to to move that flange down now I don't need to move it that far but I do need to move it in the negative direction which we can see right there so let's just go maybe point zero one should probably be far enough like confirm my notes yeah point zero one and so that basically just moved it down ever so slightly I'll say okay so we've moved that face down now I'm going to go forward in time and there's my flange that was recreated and it's still set to outside instead of adjacent so we were able to go back in time and just move this face down ever so slightly to make this work so hopefully you think that's cool I love the fact that I can do that to go back and make changes so okay now I want to let me see we want to start creating the this side I'm sorry we want to create some that comes down over this front piece of cardboard and that will allow us to create the side so I'm going to go ahead and and kind of zoom up here click on this edge and say flange I'll start to drag and we can kind of see what that looks like now I know from experience that outside looks like it makes it touching that other face which we don't want so let's set that to adjacent and the reason that was set to outside is because it remembered the last bend position type that we did so this time I'm going to say adjacent you'll notice how it kind of added that little bit of extra area there and I want to go ahead and tell it how far I want it to go now I've been clicking on faces but you can also click on like points or edges and stuff like that so I'm going to click this point and you'll see that it set the height to that point right there instead of all the way down to the bottom we set it to be right there now why right there well we're gonna fold some cardboard into this extra little opening here and if I had gone too far down it would clash with this other geometry so that's why I said I want to go to right there and that is perfect I'll say okay so what we're about to do now I'm not going to show the actual cardboard box I'll come over here what we're about to do now is create this flange here so we just created this folding down part but you'll notice that we actually need to come to the left a little bit before we do our fold so another neat little trick I'm going to click on this edge right here and create a flange now if I start to drag we're gonna get some major issues right it's gonna try and fold in well I want to add the material to the left so instead of an angle of 90 let's set it to zero and you can see that it's actually adding material to this face so instead of like doing press pull or anything like that I can just add some extra geometry using the flange command now how far do I want it to go well I want to basically line up with this existing face so let me kind of drag back a little bit I'll click on that face and you can see how it snaps forward and it lines up with that face I really love the the snap capabilities where we just click on points click on faces etc okay angle is 0 I'll just leave everything else alone I'll say ok then we'll go ahead and click on that edge flange I like to kind of preview so I'm going to start to drag and we can actually see what that's gonna look like and sure enough it's going there's a little bit of space between there there's some space between here so we know that that's gonna look ok it looks way too far looks like there's some space between there and there so that looks good and we have a little bit of space right here again I apologize for the flashing when I hover over faces or whatever okay so this tab that we're creating I need to now specify the height of that and it's again it's actually fairly large 2.5 and I'll say okay so what should I do let's unfold now I've been clicking on the bottom face as the stationary entity I could click on any face it really doesn't matter let's just click on this top face but the key thing is to make sure it unfolds which it does and here is that tab that we just created ok now what's neat about this and the actual cardboard design its rounded over because this is basically what gets folded in to close the box and you don't want any sharp edges but I can't really see that new flames that I just created so let's go to unfold but this time I'm gonna uncheck all bands and my stationary entity let's do this front face and you can see it highlights all of my bends in green so I'm gonna go ahead and just click that one Bend and you can see that it unfolds just that one and I'll say okay now I can work on this just like it was regular modeling so for example I'm gonna click on this whoops this edge right here and say fill it I'll start to drag so we kind of get a visual preview what that looks like and again according to my measurements it's two and a quarter I'm sorry two and a half my back this next one I'll zoom up here I'll go ahead and actually I'll say add a new selection I'll click on that edge and what this is allowing me to do this is a neat trick I don't know if you know this or not but you can actually have multiple different size fill it's in one fill it feature in your timeline so this is actually a 0.5 for the size so you can see we have two and a half and 0.5 and I'll say ok and there's only one Phillip feature in my timeline but if I were to edit that I could come back and change either of these and and I like it's almost like grouping them together and because these are both kind of on the same tab that's why I did them both at the same time so I was able to unfold this tab add my Philip's to it and now I'm gonna say refold faces and it folds it back in there I think that's pretty cool guess what we're gonna do because we spent the time doing that let's jump back to solid say mirror what are the features well I'm not gonna mirror the folds of the unfold so I'm going to do the fill its and that flange and I need to make sure I grab that little flange where I added some extra material which was that guy there not that one there so I'm gonna grab those three select my mirror plane now I've shown this multiple times but I can't click on my mirror plane well I just click and hold for about a second and now I can probe through you can see the top face the inside face there's my origin the inside bottom and the outside bottom it's like a laser so I'm gonna pick on that guy there it gives me a nice preview I'll say ok and let's just zoom up on here take a look let's unfold let's do all the bends and it unfolds so so far so good we are doing very well here ok ok we're kind of on the the last legs here it's kind of hard to see but let me jump in here there's actually let me unfold a couple of these guys real quick so I'll make this stationary and I'm just gonna unfold this bend here we do so notice it it gave me an error there so I had to unfold both of those but now we can kind of see how these tuck in where these other flanges are and then there's a like say okay so it's not highlighting there's this guy which is actually tapered which tucks down and kind of holds the box together also so that's what we're going to be creating next is this kind of this tapered section so I'm going to zoom up here and click this bottom edge now I'm going to show you a neat little trick let's say I accidentally click this top edge and say flange and when I start to drag it's obviously going in the wrong direction well you can hit flip right here and you'll see that it actually flips it in the opposite direction okay so if if you can't select the edge or whatever you can use the flip now I personally like to try and click on the actual edge that way I know my measurements are correct and everything like that so I'm gonna grab that edge and say flange okay and start to drag now it's really hard to see what's going on right now everything's kind of hidden and folded in and of course I get a phone call sorry about that so I'm going to cancel out of this and we're gonna use a neat little trick I'm gonna go under the inspect menu and say section analysis I'll click this front face and this is gonna allow me to slice through my design and I can actually slice back and see inside the box I'll go ahead and say ok and now we can see everything inside the box so now when I create click on this edge and say flange and I start to drag down I can very quickly see I have an issue and that is because it's set to adjacent well I want this to be more on the inside so I'm going to change this to inside and now we can see that it's creating that bend on the inside and I have enough clearance I also can see how far down I want to go so I'm going to start to drag and let's just click on that bottom face but again I can see very visually that there's something wrong there and so that is like 3.09 so let's just set that to let go I don't know let's just try 3 and see what does that give us yeah so that actually gives us enough slop right there I could come in there and say like 3:05 and get that - whatever I want that to be but I'm just gonna leave with three for now let's just leave at three and then finally I don't want it to do the full edge because it's probably going to run into some stuff here so let's change this to be a symmetric edge and I'm going to turn off my analysis now and we're still in our flange command and sure enough I can see something going on here so I'm going to start to drag this back and now we can see that that cardboard is folding inside the box instead of clashing through geometry and stuff like that so I'm just gonna click on for example this face here and it snaps to that face we're at the exact same distance so you can see how clean were able to create this geometry so symmetric I snap to that face for the the length of this and then I was able to snap to the bottom face the inside bottom face for the height of it and offset that just ever so slightly I'll go ahead and say okay and let's put that on the other side I'll say mirror what's the feature well it's basically just the single flange mirror plane we'll click on that same mirror plane say okay and we should see it on this side now which we do let's try unfolding all the bends it does so we know that this is good okay now according to the cardboard box that I have those flames is that we just did actually have some angle to them again it's kind of hard to see while this is folded so I'm going to unfold I'm going to unfold all of the bed I'm gonna pick on maybe this bottom face so we've just unfolded all of those bends and I can actually work on this in this flat mode so check this out notice it says refold faces we're gonna come back to that but I'm gonna jump over to solid and I want to add some draft what's the plane I'm gonna click this little tiny rectangle here and then I'm going to click that edge and it remembered you know what I had last but I could say five I could say ten or whatever in fact I could add in both of these edges at the same time or faces I should say there we go I'll do the same thing on the the other side here so I'll grab that face as my plane that face as that and that guy I'll say okay and I want to round these off a little bit so I'm gonna say fill it let's just do maybe like a half inch fill it on these corners here so instead of sharp corners they're nice and rounded and again I'm gonna do all four at the same at the same time so I'll grab that one grab this guy say okay and I just modified our cardboard box while it was laid out flat I'll go back to sheet metal I'll say refold faces and it's gonna put it all back together and if we were to inspect this again let's just do a section analysis on this face and start to slice through we can actually see sure enough that that tapered box that we created that tapered flange I should say pretty cool okay I know we're at the top of the hour I've got a couple more things I want to show so this is gonna go a little bit longer but hopefully you're liking this you'll definitely make sure you're adding comments in there if you have any questions and I know is actively answering those if you like these kind of videos make sure you thumbs up or add comments we do read them and that's what makes us come up with these types of ideas so okay so the last thing we need to do here is there's a tab in the very front that kind of holds this whole thing together and I need to create a hole down here let me just show you what I'm talking about let's refold these faces basically we're gonna create this little tab that folds in and holds the whole box together so that's kind of the final thing so I'll go ahead and let's go ahead and unfold this box again so I'm gonna go ahead and I'll just unfold one more time let me go unfold the stationery all bends and I'm just gonna create a sketch so create sketch I'll zoom up a little bit our four rectangle I like to do the centered rectangle and I just I just want to get kind of near what I think is the center here and you'll kind of see how it snaps automatically right there and let's just do Oh a two inch by three quarter rectangle so I just do a rectangle on that face I'll go ahead and click that half that profile and say extrude how far I'll just click on that bottom face say okay and we just kind of punched a hole through here now we don't have punch commands or stamp commands in our sheet metal yet but you can basically create any shape you want and use it as a punch okay and that's what I'm basically doing there and I could always come back and change the size of that rectangle you know we could make this to be four inches wide and it will punch through and that's kind of the cool thing about this so I'm gonna go back to two - and I'm gonna say refold the faces so I punched was flat we're refolding it and I must have missed I must undo too far sorry oh I see why I got you just a second okay oops let me go ahead and finish my sketch it was actually part of my extrude I'm going to I'm going to just go ahead and do both of those guys and say okay and refold the faces and there is that rectangle okay so now all I need to do is create that little tab so I'm going to say flange and again I don't want to fold the whole face this is symmetric so I'm going to go ahead and say symmetric and let's just start to drag this over a little bit like so and start to drag in and we can kind of get a visual reference of what that looks like okay now I want to be more precise for this offset here so I'm going to go ahead and click on that face and you can see how it snapped right to that face but again it's a little bit too far I don't want them touching so let's just crank that down just a little bit let's do maybe like 0.97 let's try 0.98 0.98 works that looks pretty good and then the height that mytab is 0.5 I'll say okay and we've now created that tab now to save time it's actually tapered but you've already seen that where I would just come in and unfold a single Bend like so and then I would just taper and fill it with those edges so I'm gonna skip that for now just to kind of speed things up here and that is pretty much it let's unfold the whole thing and make sure it unfolds and it does and so this is what our final product design looks like and if I were to switch to the camera that's pretty much what this guy looks like unfolded so you can see all of the little really close up you see all the little tabs and everything like that okay so we were able to recreate that cardboard box using sheet metal okay let's finish this guy up I want to create an appearance here so I'm going to do a for appearance and I actually have cardboard that I've created myself if you want to learn how watch our rendering livestream I think it's rendering tips and tricks and so I'm just gonna drag cardboard on there and you can see it kind of simulates what cardboard looks like with a specs and a lot kind of stuff so just makes it look a little bit more realistic especially if I were to do a rendering okay now I'm I'm really bad at showing how to model stuff and then that's it right and we've actually had a lot of comments about like okay now that you've made it or designed it how do you actually manufacture and that's why we did the four-part series creating this bottle opener where we went from design to actual manufacturing so I'm going to do something similar with with this cardboard box I want to show how you could create a drawing of it and how you could actually cut it out like on a laser cutter for example so to do that we need to create what's called a flat pattern so I'm gonna say create flat pattern and notice how simple it is what's the stationery face I'm gonna click the bottom face and say okay and what its gonna do is it's going to kind of lay it out flat like we've unfolded it but notice we're kind of in this flat pattern solid now this is what's really cool we've designed this box to fold together according to the software where we weren't having faces intersecting with each other or what so for example this tab here we gave it a little bit of extra spacing to fit down into this rectangle now let's say we actually want to force this down into there so instead of giving it a little bit of slop we actually want to move these phases so I could say press pull I'm gonna grab both of those phases and drag and you can see that can actually make these tabs a little bit wider and I'm just gonna do this one I'll say press pull I can also make it longer and I'm over-exaggerating so you can kind of see what's going on here so I just modified this flat pattern but watch what happens when I say finish notice the box is correct so the flat pattern is almost like you know a representation of this that we allow you to go in and make some changes to if necessary now hopefully that's not confusing but I find this extremely powerful like I said you know Fusion is its zeros and ones right things can't clash they can't intersect or whatever so we had to design this so everything works smoothly but now I can come back and make those tabs just a little bit wider make them a little bit thicker or whatever I want to do and it's not affecting my design it's affecting what's gonna actually get cut out okay so that's what the flat pattern is for almost like two representations and you'll notice right here it says flat pattern and when I click on this activate flat pattern it switches into my flat pattern tab I could export this as a DXF if I wanted to send it to some other software or whatever to cut it out on my machine so I'm gonna go ahead and finish this guy out and let's create a drawing so I'm gonna go ahead and say drawing from design I have to save it I'm gonna call this cardboard box and it's gonna create a drawing now it says full assembly well I only have one part so I'm just going to click on that component and notice it allows me to give it a representation of the folded model or of the flat pattern I'm gonna do the flat pattern let's do maybe like a D sized drawing I'll say okay it's gonna create my border for me and then you'll see a flat pattern representation tied to my cursor so I'll go ahead and drop that there I can see the the different style I'll go ahead and say okay and there is my flat pattern representation if I were to click on table and again I'm kind of going through pretty quick because a lot of this stuff is covered in other live streams but let me make this little bit larger I'll say create a table and I'll just drop that here and we can see that it's now going to number all of these bends and it tells me what direction what angle and what radius they need to be so we can kind of see all of our point 0 1 because that was our minimum Bend radius I could come in here and say base view let's do maybe northeast isometric and I want that to be shaded or something like that and so we can actually show like what it would look like folded up in our drawing now you can't really see all of the edges or whatever so let's go ahead and edit this guy and make our tangent edges visible and now you can kind of see what that would look like ok so that's how you bring it into a drawing but let's say we wanted to manufacture this so I'm going to switch to manufacturer and notice under models we have a cardboard box and then we have flat pattern so right now it's assuming you want a machine this as a solid well I'm gonna activate my flat pattern and now you can see it looks something like this and again I'm gonna fly through here I'm gonna specify my setup I'm not teaching you actually how to manufacture this but I'm showing you that you can so I just created my setup and I want to do some kind of cutting what's the tool we're gonna let's use a laser cutter in this case so I'm gonna come down here and pick on my laser cutter so you can see a really small kerf right there what's the contour I'm just gonna go ahead and click on that part there and you can kind of see how it kind of highlights everything in blue and I'll just say ok and it's going to create the tool path to manufacture that so let's go ahead and simulate this really quick so I'll just go ahead and hit play let me speed this up a little bit you can see it's going through and cutting all these rectangles first and then it's gonna come out and do the profile all the way around and if i zoom up here we can actually see that it's cutting all the way through so you can kind of see that ok another cool thing with that is I could edit that tool path and under I think it's actually on geometry yeah I could even add in tabs so I could specify how is this thing going to get held in the cardboard so I could say let's put a tab here maybe one over here one here and one here and it's actually going to add those tabs in there automatically so you'll see when it creates the toolpath let me zoom up here you can see how it's gonna lift up and go across and just leave a little bit of material there we'd have to cut with like an exacto knife or something like that and then lastly I could duplicate that profile let's edit it and notice the cutting mode says through I'm gonna change that to H let's jump over to my geometry let's just clear out the geometry and I'm going to zoom up here and I can now let me just look at the top here I can select that I want the the laser to basically you know H where these fold lines are going to be so it makes it easier for me to fold the cardboard so I'm just gonna select those three edges like so and let's move that guy up above so it's gonna H first and then it's gonna cut it out so let's go ahead and simulate this so you're gonna see it's gonna kind of go along here and just etched those guys and then it's going to go through and cut the rectangles I'm going to jump to the end so we can see that sure enough a cut all the way through here but you can kind of see these light green lines is where I just basically itched the cardboard to allow it to fold a little bit easier okay I know it went a little bit long on that one hopefully you found this useful I think sheet metal allows you do a lot of things so not just sheet metal you can use it for packaging you can use it for cardboard you can use it to create complex shapes so there's a quite a few youtubes out there YouTube videos I should say where people want to like wrap text around the cylinder and you can actually use the sheet metal module to do that so with that I want to thank everybody for your attendance I hope to see you on a future livestream and have a good rest of your day thank you you

Channel: Autodesk Fusion 360

Views: 35,072

Keywords: fusion 360, autodesk, design, engineering, mechanical design, mechanical engineering, industrial design, product design, software, CAD, CAD software, Computer Aided Design, Modeling, Rendering, 3D software, Autodesk fusion 360, cloud based CAD, CAD in the cloud, cloud, Free CAD, Free CAD Software, Autodesk CAD, cloud manufacturing, free CAD program, 3D CAD solution, photogrammetry, computer aided design, free software, 3d modeling tutorial

Id: OD0aSWm2L30

Length: 75min 44sec (4544 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 11 2019