360 LIVE: Advanced Sketching

hello everyone and welcome back to another fusion 360 livestream today we are going to be talking about advanced sketching techniques this is going to be part two of our two-part series on sketching last week we did part one about the basics or fundamentals of sketching today we're going to be doing some advanced sketching and I hope you're looking forward to it we have Brad on the keys and I'm Jason from the fusion 360 team at Autodesk and let's jump right into what the agenda is for today so on the screen right now you could see that I have a huge list of things we're gonna cover quite a few things my goal is to go through this exact list in order and after this livestream is done I'm gonna go and put this in the description with a link to the exact time for each of these items so if it turns out you're only interested in one of them you should be able to find them pretty easily but again this is going to be a lot of stuff so let's get right into the good stuff so we're gonna jump right into Fusion and we're gonna start off with the first item less is more and so we showed you at the first live stream about sketching about how you could actually create your geometry and now we're gonna try to hone in on the details of like getting better at it remember I told you last time that if you're having trouble or struggling in 3d it's possible or even likely that it all starts off with your sketching techniques so we're gonna try to get you incredible we're gonna try to get you to top level sketching and we're gonna hopefully use these techniques to get there so the first one is less is more so let's look at let's say this sketch that I have here at the beginning of this particular file by the way this is a vacuum-form package or part and there's actually a template so you can adjust it automatically and I open the wrong sketch let's open the right one and here you can see I have a sketch and it has some detail in it but what I'm gonna try to tell you is the first thing you should consider is that less is more the less you have the better because it's going to not bog down your system it's not gonna take as much time to calculate things like that I'm not saying to get a whole bunch of stuff that you actually need I'm saying to really consider what you need and what you don't and so this is actually a good example of bad practices so I have a model here that's clearly symmetric left to right and also clearly symmetric top to bottom and so ideally I would actually design this as a 1/2 and then once I'm done I mirror it or I actually design it in 1/4 and then I mirror it across and then I also mirror it below so just so you know you want to try to do less if possible and also try to design using symmetry to your advantage so try to design a half or even a quarter of your design whenever possible so the same design that we're gonna actually work on together I'll show you in another file and this is what I do recommend you put in here so you have just a quarter of your design and when you're done again you're going to mirror this across to the right side and then also mirror this down below but you don't have to mirror it as a sketch you can actually mirror the solid body that this is going to create and that would actually end up being far better for you so less is more and design as little as you have to right so 1/4 or 1/2 would be great the next one I want to talk about is dimensioning based on other dimensions so let's jump right into this particular sketch don't add up this sketch and right now you could see I have no dimensions in this model at all let's go and start to add some of these dimensions first thing we could do is we could measure the actual part that we're gonna be trying to fit in this vacuum-form tray and it looks like it's thirty seven and a half millimeters across I think I measure that incorrectly let's try that one more time measure from there to there and that looks like 38 millimeters actually so let's go and measure from here to here and this will be 38 but we want some clearance actually so we'll go and add so we'll say 38 and maybe add an extra millimeter of clearance and then left to right we're going to do the same thing go and zoom in here measure that edge measure this edge distance is 37 so it's a little different we'll go and measure from here here there we go and that'll be 37 and we'll add a millimeter for clearance perfect now what if for example instead of this being based on an existing part what if you wanted to model this yourself right this would be pretty straightforward I have this as 39 millimeters I have the other dimension is 38 millimeters and where it gets really interesting is that you don't have to just put in a dimension every time you can actually reference other dimensions while you're in the same sketch so what if I wanted these to be equal and I know that right now they're not equal and that's on purpose but if I did want them to be equal I could use some constraints like I could grab this equals constraint that we talked about last week and I could set this line over here to equal this line and that would make them equal in width but the other thing you could do is you could make the dimensions themselves equal so watch how we're gonna do that I'm gonna double-click this dimension and you'll see here that I have my input and I already kind of skipped ahead I put in an equation here that we'll talk about in a second but let's say I put in a number like this is 35 or 34 or whatever number you happen to want where it gets interesting is that if you highlight over this dimension you'll see that underneath my arrow it says D for the D stands for dimension and that D 4 is equal to 35 millimeters which makes sense because I typed in 35 but if I hover over this one you'll see that this one is d3 right and it says that D 3 is equal to 38 plus 1 which happens to be 39 now when you go to type in a value instead of typing in a number you can actually type in a dimension so you could type in D 3 remember this one over here was d 3 and I hit enter and it'll automatically make my correct number and you'll notice that it actually puts in a little FX the FX stands for a function if you remember way back when for math class and it says that this function is that d4 that's this dimension is equal to d3 and that's how it ends up being 39 so if I change this number from 39 to 45 let's say it's actually gonna go and update the other number as well that's where it gets really interesting now you don't have to just over things figure out what the dimension is and then inputted somewhere else you can also just type it out so let's go and delete this dimension and let's create it from scratch and I'm gonna go and drag this a little smaller just so you could see a visual change here in just a second alright so there we go so let's go and put a dimension I go from this line to this line click a third time to go and put in a number but instead of typing in d3 I'm actually going to go and just click on this dimension and it automatically grabs whatever the dimension number is which happens to be d3 and lets me put it in there so you can type in that value or you could just click on another dimension wherever it happens to be on your screen and it'll input it right in there so that's pretty awesome we're gonna take it a step further now is talking about dimensions based on equations and like I said I accidentally spoiled the fun a little while ago by typing in a number and then plus 1 for my clearance all right but you can do that not just by adding clearance but also by having equations based on those other dimensions if you want so what if this number here I want it to be equal to D 3 divided by 2 so whatever that number is on the left hand side divided by 2 plus some other number now if you remember from math class way back when there was that theory I believe it was called PEMDAS right per entity parentheses exponents multiplication division addition and subtraction right so that order is important and to help Fusion be able to do this easily I think using parentheses is a great way to do that so if I just type in d 3/2 plus 1 it could give me exactly what I want but if I want to just be safe I could go and put the d 3/2 in parentheses and now it's going to go and divide that dimension III which happens to be 45 divided by 2 and then in this case add 1 let's see what happens and it tells me again this is a function based on some other dimension or it's some other number or an equation and that the resulting value is 23.5 again it's based on this one so if change this from 45 back down to let's say 40 I'm gonna get a different results here which happens to be 21 so so far you've seen that we can dimension off of other dimensions and you can also put in equations and you can make these equations pretty complex if you want to just be aware that you can do that now where it's gonna get even more interesting at least in my opinion right is gonna be something called the parameters table so let's go and look what that parameters table is where I can find it and I'll explain a little bit more detail if you go up to the modify menu and you go to the very bottom here you'll see change parameters and I use this often so I actually added a shortcut to it and so I can get there by ctrl P on my keyboard we'll go and open the parameters table and this is what it looks like right now it is empty so nothing particularly useful in here but I'm going to show you how we can add stuff to this parameter table and then how we can use it from those dimensions that we talked about so let's go and add one here this is gonna be called let's say part with and I'm gonna set this to be let's say 50 millimeters then I'm gonna go make a new one here that's gonna be called part length and this one's gonna be called let's say 35 millimeters and then maybe I'll also make one here that's gonna be called part of thickness and we'll make that 15 now keep in mind that your name has to be oh and I spelled that wrong your name has to be one word it cannot have like spaces in it so if you do want to have spaces you could use underscores so it could be like part underscore thickness if you'd like and I will also caution you that if you like to type in you've probably seen in my other videos but you can type in a number and then in4 inch or you could type in mm for millimeters a regardless of what your units are you can type in whatever number it is and as long as you add that unit at the end it'll automatically put in the correct number but just be a little warning that if you have in your name the letters IM when you start to type in something later it might not be sure at least first whether or not you're whether you're talking about one of these parameters or in4 inch and I'll show you that and what we're talking about in just a few minutes so here I have part thickness we're setting that to 15 millimeters before I hit okay you should also know that we have a lot of different options for units like a lot of them not just for length or angles but we even have things like currency and current luminosity I mean there's a lot of really good stuff here so take a look at that in more detail when you have some time you could also by the way put comments here which help you but keep track of like what's doing what and things like that so I have a couple of parameters oh let's add one more let's add a gap let's go in here we'll call this gap and from before I had it as millimeters let's go and set it to be the same so I have this list of parameters the parameters are just things that you are going to reference on a regular basis so in this sketch maybe I want to have the dimension of this width to be based on the width of the part that's actually gonna fit in this this area so I could double click here let's clear out that original equation that I had and this is where I would just type in a number but instead of typing in a number we're gonna start to type in part so P a RT and you'll see that I have three options here I have to move a little bit my cameras in the way and I have part length as the option I'm going to say that this is length you might want to call this width but I'm gonna call this length and when I click on this it's going to put in that exact word and when I hit OK it's going to use whatever the value is from that parameter table and again it's going to show FX for function and it's based on that parameter table and I'm gonna do the same thing over here and this is going to be called part with there we are but we're gonna make this even more interesting we're going to add our equation as well so it's going to be part with + gap and then this one is actually going to be part length plus gap as well excellent and then lastly we're gonna go and put in a dimension for this fillit and we're gonna go with five millimeters for now something like that so the general idea here is that these dimensions are based on the parameter table and the parameter table gives you a convenient place for you to be able to make changes not just to this sketch but any sketch you're using later features that you're using patterns that you're using pretty much anything in your model so an example that I like to show people for parameters is a table not a parameter table but like a real table that you might use and I have one here that I really like to show people this is an Ikea style table that I designed here in fusion and you'll see here that this table has multiple components it has screws it has holes for those screws it has a whole lot of stuff going on here and if I go to that parameter table you'll see that I have a list of all the things I care about most for this table the thickness of the wood is one and a half inches in this case right now and I could set that to let's say three inches and in just a second my entire model updates the length is 61 inches maybe we'll make that 72 the width is 34 maybe we'll make that 45 and the height is 32 I like that I'll leave it so the idea is you have one convenient place that you can update every sketch in your entire model every feature in your entire model and you can reference this anytime you want you can remember you could put those equations in the dimension as you're creating it but you can also make your equations right here as well so you can make a new parameter that might be something like you know spacing or screws and the spacing for the screws could be based on the width of the table divided by some number of screws that you want you know plus some extra gap that you want or whatever that equation happens to be you can put that right here and then when we're doing patterns in just a little while I can reference this value or like the spacing of my pattern or whatever it happens to be cool so so far I showed you dimensions based on other dimensions dimensions based on equations dimensions based on parameter tables and let's talk about fractions so you'll probably notice that when you're putting in dimensions into fusion we use the decimal system so it's like 4.0 inches or 4.0 millimeters or 0.125 inches or 4 0.125 millimeters we're not really doing 4 n and 8th but you can so the way that would work is let's go back to our template here and wrong file this one there we go and if I want something to be based on a fraction all I have to do is type in an equation that includes the fraction so in let's actually give a better exam now this example is fine so if I want to go and change the width here and I want that to be 50 and 1/8 I would simply type in 50 plus and then I like my parentheses here 1/8 enter and that'll be fifty point one two five in decimal form but remember I can input this as 50 and 1/8 by turning and 1/8 into an equation of plus 1/8 so that could be pretty handy and this comes especially in handy when we're talking about using the imperial system for feet and inches or inches and fraction of an inch so let's go and look at a practical example where I definitely use imperial here you could see a floor plan and this is a floor plan based on a blueprint so let's go and turn on canvas and you could see that I have a full blueprint of a property that I might be designing or building or modifying whatever it happens to be and this is all to scale I've already calibrated this canvas which is great and let's say I'm in the sketch let's go and edit our sketch here and let's go and show our dimensions there are a lot of them and here for the record and I want to have a dimension from let's say this wall over here to right over here this edge and it says on the drawing 15 and 6 inches or 15 foot 6 inches I'm gonna again put this in the form that I want to see it for an equation so 15 ft 4 foot plus 6i n 4 inch write hit enter and that's going to give you exactly what you want all right so this is a great way to be able to do fractions keep in mind of course that it's still going to show you in decimal form because that's how fusion is based but you can input fractions so again this is handy for like 15 foot 6 inches this could also be handy for 15 foot 6 and an eighth of an inch I would just modify this to be 15 foot plus 6 inches plus 1/8 inches oh and something I have here in my equations wrong go and put this rent the season tank there we go something's a little funny here I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong but generally good I hope you trust me on this you can put in fractions at any time you want so it's 15 foot plus 6 plus 1/8 inches all right so that'll be an easy way to be able to get your inches and your fractions so now let's talk about some other ways you can have your dimensions and then we're going to move on to totally different topics that are still advanced sketching related let's go back to our tray example let's say I wanted to have dimension for a diameter right I'm drawing a quarter of this particular tray but I want to have a dimension for the total length so what I would typically think you know people that are a newer diffusion would probably try to do is they would try to use my example about equations and if they wanted this to really be 5 like the total length of the part to be 500 they would just say 500 divided by 2 and that's the like radius of this particular area of the part that makes sense there's nothing wrong with that but if you do want to have the dimension be a diameter what you would do instead is let's go and delete that diameter the dimension there is I'm gonna go and select this line and then this line and before I select the third time to actually put in my dimension I'm gonna right-click and I'm gonna go and see here diameter dimension as an option I click on that and just in an instant you'll see that the dimension is actually going from this line all the way across my center line and now I could type in the value for the actual diameter and it'll give that to me and this is very similar to just putting in the radius but I like visually seeing that this dimension is the correct dimension I don't have to have any equations in this case this is exactly what I want I'll do the same thing to the other side so we're gonna go and pick this edge and then this center line right click and then do diameter dimension and you'll notice that I have this going the wrong way so what did I do wrong the key is that you have to pick the center line first so let's go and do this one more time I'll hit escape to get rid of that perfect so click the diet the center line first and by the way it does not have to be a construction line but pick the center line pick the next line right click again and hit diameter dimension move the mouse for it to actually update the preview and now it's going to give you the preview and click that third time so that you can actually input that value but that was way too small of a number I think I put it in there let's try this again 250 there we go that's what I wanted so that's a great way to be able to get diameters that you might not have seen before now there's another dimension trick and then we're going to move on to other things and that's going to be tangent dimensions so let's say I have a hole that I need somewhere in this model and let's go and put it go and move this out a little bit and maybe I want to have a hole somewhere around here and I want to have a dimension it actually let's line this up nicely so let's go and put in a line something like this we're going to go and put this circle on this line we'll make this line construction and we're also going to set this to be a 45 degree something like that forty five-degree okay so now I have this the way I want it but I have I don't have my dimensions at this point so this is still free to move it's not fully constrained this circle is also not centered at least not yet and I want to maybe I don't want it centered maybe I just want to pick what the dimension is between this phillyd and the circle now the typical way you would do this is you go to your dimension tool pick the circle you pick the arc and what you're gonna get here is a dimension between the center of the arc and the center of the circle right and that was for the record here even picking the arc itself and the circle itself not that I didn't pick the center of each it automatically gives me the center now I could of course pick the center of each right I can go to the die at the dimension tool pick the center of the circle pick the center of the arc and it's gonna give me the same thing but again what I did a moment ago is pick the circle itself and the arc itself and it goes Center to Center I can dimension it along the like the angle here that you could see or academician it vertical or academician and horizontal but it's really Center to Center and what I care about is having enough material between these two things really so what I want is a dimension from this like point right here that doesn't exist at this point right over here that doesn't exist now you can achieve this using just regular geometry I can go to create point and I could put a point right over here close to this area and another point over here then I could use my constraint like coincident and snap it to this line do the same thing over here now I have points that I could actually put a dimension on like a dimension from this point at this point and now I get exactly how much material I have in between that's pretty cool but what's even better is saving myself time and not having to do all of that so I'm gonna delete everything that I just did so let's go and delete that point lead this point all right so now I'm back where I started let's try this again and we're gonna show you the trick for not diameter or tangent dimensions so I'm going to hit DMA keyboard for dimension and before I click on the arc or the circle I'm going to right click and I'm to choose here hick circle slash arc tangent you'll notice that the default is pick circle slash arc Center which is why it went right to the center but I'm gonna choose tangent I'm gonna choose the circle I'm gonna choose the arc and you'll see here it automatically is going to give me a dimension between them and this is going to be the closest point between those two objects so this is super helpful I use this all the time if you are newer to fusion 360 and this is a great trick a great tip that I hope you enjoy all right so we covered a lot of dimensioning tools now let's talk about some other things this is going to be a little bit more random of like what we're going to cover in particular and what we're going to cover the next thing on the list was setting up canvases now you've probably already seen that you can bring in a canvas you can calibrate the canvas so that it's the correct size and then you could draw on top of the canvas kind of like tracing an image that's already on paper but what you might not have considered is that you could bring in multiple canvases to make your life a whole lot easier when you're creating your sketches so let's go and look at an example so this example here is a Porsche or Porsche depending on the pronunciation you prefer and it's a 911 and that pronunciation should be correct regardless so I have my Porsche or Porsche and this was created using t-splines one of my colleagues tyler Kerkyra whom you've probably seen in a live stream just a few weeks ago and a few weeks before that Tyler designed this using T splines and this is a fantastic model I have to admit you know it still needs the details of the wheels and that you know a whole bunch of other stuff but from a general shape and form this is beautiful and how did Tyler actually create this well let's go and look inside his model here in his canvases and you'll see that he starts off with a side view picture from the internet pretty straightforward but he also brought in a top view and he also brought in a front view ah there we are now the reason he brought in all three views is that depending on what he's designing on this vehicle he might end up wanting to make a sketch from the front or he might want to make a sketch from the top or he might want to make a sketch from the side right it all depends on what he's doing if it's a wheel he might be designing it from the side so that he gets the shape of the rim if it's the headlight he might be designing it from the front and if it's the roof or sunroof or something like that he's probably gonna design it from above so what he did here is he brought in three totally different images he calibrated he brought him in to the correct plane rights of the front in this case is on the y z plane the right is on the XY plane and the top is on the XZ plane in this particular case so he brought in each of those canvases and then he calibrated each one and then he positioned each one so that they line up with each other right so the idea is that if I'm looking at this from the front the very top point right here should be the same as the top point from the side view right and that should be true with pretty much everything in this and it doesn't have to be perfect remember that the canvases are really just trying to give you a backdrop so that you can help draw and your drawing should be the most accurate thing out there but just know that having three canvases like this is a great way to be able to design your parts especially when you're doing things like reverse engineering this is a great example of that so that is bringing in three different canvases the next thing we're going to talk about is bringing in files from external sources in particular 2d files or 2d vector files not canvases canvases are typically bitmap images right they're pictures made up of dots vectors are going to be files that have lines and arcs and circles all the kinds of things that you would create in your sketches in fusion now you could bring in three different file types or actually there's probably more but the three main file types for bringing in to fusion for 2d vectors are going to be DWG which is the AutoCAD or Matt that's a incredibly popular it's almost generic at this point because a lot of other places are using it but it is an AutoCAD format from the start you also have SVG which is pretty popular and then DX F which is pretty popular and each of these three file types comes in to fusion in a different way and I'm going to show you what those are and then I'm going to show you my personal recommendation for the best file type to choose and the best way to bring it in so let's go and start off with the data panel and the data panel is where you go and you upload new files and so you can go and select new files to bring in and we're gonna go and look here at my list here and you'll see that DWG is in the list right over here and then if I scroll down here I'm not seeing I do see DXF and I see the DWG so those two are there but I don't see SVG so if I want to bring in a DWG I could do that here I want to bring in a DXF I could do that here but I cannot bring in the SVG file here all right so just a word of warning so to speak on that you can also do the same thing via the file open menu so if you go to file open and you go and say I want to open something from my computer you're gonna see the same file types right over here as well so you're gonna see the AutoCAD DWG file and you're also seeing that you see the DXF file but you're not going to see that SVG now there's another place that you can bring in files at least for the 2d vectors so that'll be under insert and here you're going to see a slightly different menu you're going to see insert SVG so this is the only place you're going to be able to bring in your SVG but you're also going to see insert DX f and DX F is both here and also under the file open or that data panel now depending on which of these file types you choose and which format you like which method you use to bring them in you're going to get slightly different options so if you go to the file open or the data panel and you just bring in the DX F or the DWG you're not going to get any options it's just gonna go and import it and for any file type that is unitless like you know NS tl file or SVG isn't on that option the XF option at the XF file format or maybe a obj format the units that fusion uses by default is going to be centimeters so a one by one box that's a like a mesh file that's an STL or a DXF it doesn't know if it's a one by one inch one by one feet one by one millimeter and if you use that file open method it's going to just assume it's centimeters and that might not be correct for you so my personal preference is to always use for DX F and s VG's whenever possible or like bringing in files I like to use this insert menu and let's go and look at SVG and let's look at the XF let's go and start a new file here I'm gonna go and say insert an SVG it lets me pick a plane to show here and it lets me bring an SVG from my computer let's go and grab one and here I have a sheetmetal part as an SVG and you could see that sheet metal part right off the bat it gives me some options here for like the position of this like left to right up and down and a rotation it also lets me scale this file right off the bat if I want to and it lets me flip the file in this case it's symmetrical so it won't show you anything different and vertical and again it's symmetrical and it does let you have this option here for control point frame which is going to help you be able to make some changes to your more organic shapes and I'll show you a little bit more about that when we go and insert our DXF in just a few moments but these are the options and you'll notice that at no point here did it happen to ask you what the units are so it is making an assumption on the units and you can scale this here but if you want this to be truly exactly the right size right off the bat then I do recommend you use the XF as your import option let's go and take a look at that I'm gonna go and hit OK you can see that I have my sheet metal part I can use this for a variety of different things but in this case we're gonna go and do this again using DXF as our option let's go to new design insert yeah except this time I'll choose a plane I'll choose a DXF itself and let's go and grab this one right here and now you're gonna get similar options but more options my favorite thing are options so you're gonna see right off the bat that it asks you what the units are this is important because you might be designing this in inches you might be designing this in millimeters might be designing that original DXF in feet so you choose whichever units you were using so I might have been using millimeter and it'll rescale this file accordingly it does let you change that X position or that Y position just like the insert SVG but here's some other cool stuff it lets you do it lets you see layers and this depends a lot on what like where this DX F is coming from and whether or not fusion is going to see the layers and how it's gonna see or how it's going to interpret those layers but here you can see I have multiple layers and let's turn off most of them for a second so we could look at them one by one this is the outer profile like the overall shape of my file the next one is internal profile so any kind of cutouts which in this case happens to be holes and some holes on this sheet metal part this Bend is going to be the centerline of my bends and then Ben extends happens to be the start and the end of each of these bends now depending on what I'm trying to do with this particular file I might not care about the bend extents maybe all I care about is the centerline of the bend so by unchecking this box I just don't have to import it right it just makes it easier for me I could also import it and then go into my sketch and delete it but instead I just don't have to bring it in at all which is pretty helpful and now I could go and say okay and I have my sketch and I could turn this into a 3d model pretty quickly and easily I could also by the way edit this model so I can go into this sketch by editing the sketch and I can go and drag this line wherever I want you'll notice that this line is not connected to the top and bottom and the reason is because this line does not have any constraints whatsoever right all these constraints that I taught about week about equals and coincident and horizontal and vertical and all that stuff none of that is in here right now so if you want that to be the case if you want to have constraints you would have to go and add them so in this case let's go and undo my move I might add a constraint for example that makes the top of this line coincident with that circle maybe the very bottom here is going to be coincident with that circle or arc and then I could also add a vertical constraint to this line now when I go and I move this it's actually going to well in this particular case it's actually going to try to move this circle because I didn't constrain the circle or that arc so this is good or bad depending on what you're trying to do so another trick is that you can fix any of your geometry that you want and there is a constraint for fix and you'll probably notice that in my last video I didn't talk about this constraint at all in my opinion the fixed constraint is a little bit more advanced so I saved it for this week so what I could do here is I could actually choose to fix this arc well notice that it turns green the green is telling you that this is fixed then I can go and do the same thing with this one and because I added my constraints to the line between now I can actually move this line left to right and it's gonna move based on the constraints but it's not gonna mess up those arcs because those arcs were actually fixed and we're gonna talk a little bit more about the fix constraint in just a little bit but this is one of the handy ways you could use the fixed constraint as well as you know add additional constraints to be able to move this around now if you like this data you don't want to accidentally move things around and mess everything up like this because this could be really annoying if that's not what you exactly wanted to do when you import a DXF or any other imported geometry what you might want to do right off the bat is actually select everything in that imported geometry right click and hit fix or use that constraint from the constraints menu and now everything in here is fixed and I won't accidentally move any of this geometry none of it's going to move by accident so that's another useful use of that fixed straight so remember though that when you bring in these imported vectors they could sometimes have problems they are not always perfect surprise surprise right so let's talk a little bit about imported vectors and what happens with them and we're gonna start with a pretty commonly brought in vector or at least a vector that's brought in from a common program so let's use Adobe Illustrator as our example I'm gonna go and bring up Adobe Illustrator and here you can see I have the same exact file that you saw a moment ago and this right now is an AI file and we're gonna go and save this as a DXF because remember I just said just a second ago that I recommend bringing in DXF files now the way you do that in Illustrator is you go to export as and then you choose here and so you could choose DWG if you did want to bring in a DWG file but I'm gonna choose DXF because that's my recommended and I'm gonna go and overwrite this file that here that says AI to DXF and we'll go and bring that one into future now before I go and show you what it looks like in fusion oh and by the way here it's going to ask you your scale remember DXF is unitless so this is telling you when you save the DXF what units are you essentially it's not exactly assigning it but like setting it so that it's correct so in this case it's the scale is 1 inch is going to be one unit this is going to be really the one by one box that I talked about earlier like you know the one by one unit we're saying this is inches so that when we import it will also choose inches right let's go and look at something in particular now this is going to be important because we're going to talk about the circles when they come in to fusion so if you look at this circle in Illustrator you'll notice that it has a point on the top a point on the bottom upon the left and a point on the right and the reason is because even though this looks like a circle isn't actually a circle looks like one it's not this is actually a spline that has handles and those handles are at the top bottom left and right and it is done in such a way that it looks like so if I go into this thing here called direct selection tool it is showing me a center of this circle but I can also select this point here you'll see this handle shows up and I can twist the handle and now I very much don't have a circle I can also instead of twisting the handle drag this point up and again I very much don't have a circle or I can move this over slightly to the side and again I very much don't have a circle I can basically warp this into a variety of different like crazy shapes so even when it looks like a circle just keep in mind it's not a circle so when I go into fusion and I go and I import it we are going to have some problems let's go and take a look at that new design insert DXF choose a plane choose the DXF file that we just made the AI to DXF we're gonna choose our units just like we talked about and we're going to choose inches and maybe I'm gonna keep everything maybe I care about everything and I'm intentionally by the way ignoring this control point frame thing we're gonna look at that in just a second I'm going to say okay let's go and edit our sketch now if i zoom in here this looks like a circle right but again this isn't a circle now this looks like a circle enough that I can go and extrude this and I'll have what probably again looks like a circle but you'll notice that there's a line on the side right there's a little bit of an edge break and you'll also notice that if I go into the sketch and I look at this and I kind of hover my mouse all the way around this when I get to the right hand side in this case you'll see a point right over here so this is again not a circle right fusion is not reading it as a circle but it looks like one which means that if I'm trying to make another circle that is concentric to this one you know maybe oh let's fix this in place so that it doesn't move on us there we go and I draw a new circle and I want these to be concentric concentric isn't even an option right because you have to make two circles concentric and this smaller one is not a circle as I mentioned so one of the tricks that I like to use and this is I think it would be helpful to all of you is to recreate the circle in Fusion and this is annoying that you have to do this at all but it is true and it's just based on the way that the file you know that vector was created in Illustrator so the way that I like to do that is first I fix the original geometry next thing I do is I add enough points to the geometry so that I have three points total let's go in it we already have one you could see that one right over there I'm going to say create a point and I'm going to pick one right over here and let's say one over here and I'm also going to fix these because I don't want those moving on me by accident and now I have three points I can actually delete the original circle if I want to but I'm going to show you I'm gonna leave it in place so that you can see it so that you you can see that this is going to be accurate alright so now that I have those three I'm gonna go and say coincident I get to pick this point and the circle this point and the new circle this point and the circle and this is where it's gonna be cool it's gonna all of a sudden be the right size and now I have what looks like a circle right but this one actually is a circle it has a center point and everything fusion reads it properly but one thing that you're gonna want to do at this point is you're gonna want to delete the original because what you don't want is for there to be some sort of my new tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny difference between and when you're extruding you're grabbing part of the true circle and part of the not true circle so normally I would delete the original circle first and then I don't have to go and bother deleting it after right because it when you're selecting here you have to wonder to yourself are you selecting the original circle or are you like the pretend circle are you selecting the true circle we just drew well here's another trick and you know what this wasn't in my list but now that I just thought of it we're totally going to add it to the list so you'll see that in the description as well but when I select and hold a menu comes up that not a lot of people pay much attention to but it's great and this is gonna let me pick things that are harder to pick so I can pick an arc in this case I could pick a profile which I think is like the bigger sheet metal part or it can pick a control point spline which apparently has degree 3 and this is the imported circle from Illustrator right the arc is the circle I drew and the control point spline is the one from illustrator and now I can select it you know visually I still can't tell what I selected but I know what I selected because I chose it correctly and then I could hit delete and now that one is gone and I'm left with the true circle that I drew in fusion and now all I need to do is delete these points and if I want to fix that circle in space I select the circle and I use that fixed constraint and now that's not going to move as well or I could put dimensions now the old slight alternative to what I just showed you is going to be as follows let's go back a little bit okay so here I'm at the point where I use the coincident constraint on these two circle two points I didn't do it on the third yet now I might go and just delete that original circle right up I do have one problem so in this case I only added two points I didn't add three this one is actually going to disappear once I delete the circle so in this case slight very slight change in my plans I am gonna add a third point of my own and we're gonna go and fix that we're gonna go and add a coincident we'll delete this one there we go here's what I probably let's start from scratch because this is getting confusing and I don't want to confuse all right so this is the original circle exactly how it was let's go in to add three points this is really what I should have done from the beginning add three points lock them down in position so fix them in space perfect now you can go and delete the original circle you don't need it you have those three points draw a circle the coincident constraint with all three of these points now it's exactly the right size guarantee it now you could go and fix the circle itself and then go and delete those points now that sounds like a kind of a convoluted crazy way to get to here and it kind of is but this is a great way truly I promise you a great way to be able to turn your control points blinds that look like circles into actual circles that are useful this is exactly the way that I do it personally now the other thing that I want to show you is the option that I didn't show you that we didn't I intentionally ignored with that control point frame option so let's go and delete this sketch what's going to lead all this stuff let's import our DXF one last time and now we're going to show you that option that we didn't pick let's go and choose the same exact file the AI to DX F we're gonna make sure that the units are correct and they'll be inches oh and by the way heads up based on the list that I have and the fact that we're already 45 or so minutes in this is definitely gonna be a long video but I hope it's gonna be action-packed filled with a lot of good stuff and then you enjoy alright so we're gonna leave all these options the same this time I'm gonna turn on this button here this is control point frame and we're gonna say okay here's where it gets really interesting let's go and edit our sketch and zoom in on those circles remember fusion interpreted that circle as a control point spline because it is right go back to illustrator and you could see that this is a spline with a bunch of points that you can control right actually in illustrator it's more of a Fitz blind but here I have what they call a control points blind what it added are these these construction lines around the circle and what this is going to allow you to do if you want to is pull on any of these that you want and you can start to do those kinds of manipulations that you saw an illustrator right you can warp this into funny shapes so this is another interesting way to be able to modify your geometry this is true for the circle example that I'm showing you but this would also be true with a variety of other different shapes that are arcs or at least look like arcs in Illustrator that are really control point splines you could change those shapes really quickly and easily by turning on that control points blind control point frame option when you bring in your DXF file so this is a great example of that now the next item that I wanted to talk about is going to be lock and unlock we already talked about it a little bit but we're going to talk about it a little more so let's say you're designing something right so let's start from scratch for a moment here we're gonna go and create some sort of shape here I'm gonna go and draw let's start off actually will go with vertical line we'll go with a horizontal and we're gonna go and draw some sort of angle in between this is super simple I'm just trying to make this basic for us now if I want to change the angle here I know that I can go and select this corner and I can drag this in and it's going to just go and drag it in for me and it changes the angle and part of the reason that this is happening is because this line at the bottom and this line over here those are already constrained this one's vertical the first one was horizontal and they're both locked into this corner but what happens if I have another triangle like this one that's not as constraint so let's go and put in this guy and if I drag this one it still does move right and it changes the angle but I'm sure you've already experienced this that there are plenty of times where you go and grab a corner like this and what really happens is the entire line moves together right so another example let's actually just go like this I grab the line right if I grab the corner it will change angle but if I grab the line itself it just kind of moves in right but that's not necessarily true if maybe the top is constrained so let's try that let's go and put in a dimension for this vertically some number like that now if I drag this line it kind of freaks out it doesn't want to move at all right if I grab the corner it changes angle that's what I wanted let's delete this other stuff we don't need all right so if I grab this corner and I drag it in and changes the angle but if I drag the line itself it doesn't do that so here's a trick that you might want to use so if you draw a line and you want to be able to move that line but have the angle change but you're not ready to put in like dimensions to this corner or anything like that all you have to do is fix the corner and you could always undo that later not a big deal so right click on that point and say fix or as a reminder click the fix constraint and then choose the end point doesn't have to be the line itself that you choose it could be the end point now that you've done that now you can actually go and chain and grab the line and you'll see it pivots based on that corner because that corner isn't going to move so if I have some sort of picture in the background and I know that this is going to help me line this up now I could go and line this up exactly where I want and then once I have that good then I can go and unfix the corner I could put in my constraints however I want to put them in or I could actually fix the line itself pretty handy all right so that's a great way to be able to rotate things and be able to freeform it you could also use the Move command we'll talk about that again later but I think the fix command is underutilized in like you know how you use it and this is one of many ways that you can use that and I think a great way so let's talk about another use of that fixed command right so let's say I have two lines I have one like this and I have one like this and I want these two to actually meet each other right at the moment those two lines let's delete all this other stuff here those two lines are not constrained and if I try to do let's say coincident constraint between them it actually moved the line that's not what I wanted at all so maybe I'm gonna go and try to extend all right that's probably something you might try I go to the extend command and I extend that line then I go and extend this one that actually does give me what I want so that's a great way to do it but depending on how complicated your sketch might be you might have to do multiple extend commands until it gets to where it needs to be then you might even overshoot it and then have to trim back basically it could end up being a lot of steps so here's another technique using the fix command and I think this is really helpful so I'm gonna go and grab this line right here right click and say fix I'm gonna go out grab this line right click and say fix now I'm gonna go and use that same coincident command or coincident constraint and I'll pick these two points and it can't move the lines it can only extend them because the lines themselves were fixed and now that I have what I want I can unclick unfix that line and also unfix that one so depending on the circumstances you now have more options of how to be able to achieve the same end result can you use the extend command absolutely but now you can also see how you could use the fix command and also in this case the coincident unstrained to be able to extend your geometry without moving it you didn't want to move it so that was the lock or unlock command we covered it by the way in a lot of different ways at this point I hope you enjoy that now let's talk a little bit about slice so let's go and use a different model because we don't have anything on our screen right now that is useful for this let's clean up our browser a little bit and let's jump to a 3d model and we're gonna start talking about drawing sketches on a 3d model this one is still not interesting enough for me at least right now so let's go and grab something else here perfect so I have a table that I think we're going to use for a little bit perfect okay so this table is a pretty geometric table it's pretty cool I like this and we're gonna go and draw a sketch in the center plane so let's go and find that that's the XY plane and we're gonna go and draw a quick sketch on that XY plane and I am interested to see what's happening here on the cross-section and in this particular case the cross-section happens to be flat but there could be a cut out on this back side that maybe is important actually let me just go and make a quick cut out and then we'll be able to give you a proper example let's go and draw some sort of cut out and we'll go and make this taper so now we have a cut out okay let's do the skin we're gonna go and draw a sketch on the right view but I can't see the cutout at all at the moment it may be something I'm drawing right now is dependent on what's happening in the cutout so what a lot of people are gonna end up doing is they're gonna create a cross-section right you exit out of your sketch temporarily you go to inspect yep inspect you're gonna go to section analysis you choose the plane that you want it creates a section view and then now you could go and create your sketch and you could see exactly what's going on here now this analysis tool right for the cross-sections is really handy my favorite part about it is that you can leave them for a long time right I could actually have multiple cross sections so if I have another plane like maybe this one over here I could also make a cross-section of that plane there we are and then now I have one and you can name these of course we'll call this two thirds and we'll call this mid plane now I have the midplane and I have the two-thirds plane and I could toggle back and forth between them and I can have as many of these as I want but what I really care about is when I'm sketching I want to see the cross-section of wherever I'm sketching so here's a cool trick I'm gonna turn off my analysis tool here we're gonna go and make a quick sketch on that center plane and you'll see here on the right-hand side in the sketch palette there is a thing here is a slice and there's this check box and a lot of people don't bother to like try out to see what all the checkboxes do but this slice tool is great because it'll give you a cross-section of whatever plane you are drawing on right now right away instant you could turn this on anytime you want right so you can see it or not see it and this makes it really handy so now I could start to draw some sort of geometry maybe I want a whole that's gonna go through this particular table and I want it to be dependent on this particular area now I could see it but keep in mind that right now I'm just seeing it I can't snap to it so I am gonna still need to use projected geometry to be able to do that and we're going to talk about projected geometry in just a little bit but the slice command in general is really useful and I wanted to give you just a taste of it we'll come back to this and we'll talk a little bit more about projected geometry in a little bit let's talk about control and when I say control I don't mean like being a control freak I mean using the control command while you're sketching so let's say you're in a sketch and let's go and use this example let's go back to our tray for a moment I have my sketch and everything is looking really good and maybe I want to add some more geometry to it so let's go and do that so we're gonna go back in here and I'm going to start to draw some new geometry I'm gonna hit l4 line and I start to draw and you'll notice that as I'm drawing a little icon shows up just above my mouse and that icon happens to be the same as this horizontal slash vertical constraint icon and it's telling me that it's gonna go and give me that horizontal slash vertical constraint you'll see here just like that it shows up right over there if I continue my line you'll see that as I go horizontal it's gonna give me in this case not a horizontal constraint but instead it gave me this perpendicular constraint so what it's doing is it's giving me additional constraints as I'm drawing and sometimes I like that it's actually really handy if it if it gives me what I wanted but if it doesn't happen to give you what you want you can actually avoid creating these snaps or creating these constraints by holding that ctrl button let's go and do the same thing again and this time I'm gonna hold the ctrl button so I select the first point of the line as I go down here it's showing me that it's gonna create that constraint but if instead I hold ctrl now even when I go pretty close to vertical it doesn't show me that it's gonna snap anything and then when I go horizontal here again it's not showing its gonna snap anything and if I try to make this actually snap to this area if I'm holding ctrl again it's not gonna snap if I let go of control and then I hover over this area it shows that it's gonna snap to this region and the reason I'd like to do that not always but sometimes is again if it's gonna give me a constraint that I'm not happy with I'm gonna have to go and delete it anyway instead I hold ctrl and then it doesn't apply that constraint and then I could just go and add the constraint myself this one's going to be horizontal / vertical this one's going to be the same so control is your friend to be able to not snap things that's a great tool alright let's continue we also have a move command and I said earlier we would talk about the move command let's go and do that right now so if you go to modify you'll find the move copy command and keep in mind it will move stuff or also copy it right so let's go and give ourselves an example so I'm gonna start off simple I'm gonna go and draw a circle something like that and I want to go and move this somewhere else we're gonna go to modify move copy select the object you want to move you'll see here that there are a lot of different move types the most commonly uses free move which allows you to go left to right up and down both at the same time and also rotate and a circle isn't gonna look any different when you rotate but you can rotate you can also choose just translate which will let you move just left and right at one time or just up and down the free move like that square option where I can move diagonally is not going to show up here right or I could choose to rotate only and I also have these options for like point-to-point which is great I could pick like this point right here and I could pick a place that I wanted to go like here and it'll just snap to that position which is really handy but everything I'm doing here is gonna be for geometry that is not fixed or unfixed cannot move fixed or unfix geometry so let's go back let's go back to that other example I shouldn't have actually closed it I suppose we're gonna go back into our DXF we'll just bring in this one right here alright so here I have my geometry if I did what I recommended right I'd go into my sketch here and I'm gonna go and select everything right click and say fix and if I try to use that move copy command and I try to select this geometry you'll notice that none of this is selectable it cannot move it if however I take some of the geometry whatever it happens to be like this one and I unfix it now I could go and take that and I can move it somewhere else so if you're having trouble moving geometry the first thing you should look for is geometry is the fix or unfixed constraint that might be preventing you from being able to move your your objects the other thing that would prevent you from moving your objects are gonna be constraints depending on how many you have and what they are so let's give you an example here I have that circle and we're gonna go and lock the position strained between actually let's just go in this circles the funny real circle let's go and draw a real circle and I'm gonna go and put in a dimension from this edge to here and I'll also go and put in a dimension for the diameter now you'll notice that I have enough constraints to keep this constrained left to right but it can still move up and down if I go and I use that move copy command and I select this circle and I try to move it left or right this manipulator set will move left or right but the object itself will not move when I hit okay you'll notice it did not move at all if I go and grab that circle and I move it up or down it will move but it's the constraint is still overruling what you could do in the move copy command so keep in mind if you're having trouble moving something that you might have too many constraints or dimensions or something like that like fixed constraint or dimensions or constraints that are limiting your ability to actually move it so if you truly want to be able to move it the best way to be able to do that is just to get rid of all your constraints just like that go back into that move command and now you can move this wherever you'd like to move it cool now let's also talk about 3d and this is where it's gonna get really interesting the move copy command will let you actually move things not just in 2d on the plane itself but it will also let you move in 3d so if you rotate around here like this you'll see that those manipulators are not just in like the X and the y they're also in the Z I could actually move this up in the Z direction and now I have a 3d sketch and to be clear that is true even though this 3d sketch button or checkbox is not turned on what I want you to think about for this 3d sketch checkbox is whether or not when you're creating something it's going to allow you to create 3d geometry but the Move command will still allow you to be able to move things in 3d so let's actually take that further we're gonna go and select everything that's in this geometry here I'm gonna go and unmix it and I'm gonna go back to that move command and you'll also notice that you could even move points so I think I missed selected let's try that again bad point right there and I could go and move this up and based on the constraints so you're gonna see with the rest of the sketch it's actually going to go and manipulate the geometry based on that so you could move things in multiple directions and you can move them up and down and again the 3d sketch checkbox is not turned on but if you are choosing to move in this Z direction it will create a 3d sketch out of your 2d sketch so that's how a move works the only thing I don't think I showed you is that you can select an object and you can hit this check box for create a copy and then when you go and move it's actually gonna create a copy and move the copy so that's another thing to keep in mind as well the move command is fantastic and remember if you have scenarios like that a triangle that I was showing you earlier where I have let's say a line like this and I want to be able to rotate it I what I showed you earlier was fixing a corner and then being able to rotate like this the other thing you could do is you could use that move copy command select the line itself choose to rotate and you are going to have to choose an axis of rotation and unfortunately you can't pick an axis that is like the point on the line itself so in this case I would pick let's say the z-axis and I can rotate that sketch as well but I don't in mind you know just my personal opinion I don't think I have as much control over there like the pivot location as I do by just fixing the pivot location and using that so that's why I like the fix command for it the alternative if you really wanted to is you could create if you go to let's see here if you go to like the solid geometry tab under construction you could create an axis that is you know straight it's like parallel to the z axis at this point and you could use that axis for the rotation but then you're adding a whole bunch of extra steps and I don't really care about the axis in the long run I just care about you know getting the geometry that I want which is why I like to do the fix the corner and then rotate the line around where you know drag the line until I'm happy with it and then unfix it but if you did want to you could select the line use the rotate tool select an axis and then you could also rotate that line wherever you want so that's the move command a little bit about patterns all right so let's go into our tray example all right so here I have a tray actually let me show you the finished one and you could see I have a pattern this is a linear pattern you take this shape and you pattern it across to the side and then down and you'll have whatever shape you want now if anyone has ever had problems with the pattern command I have two tricks for you that I think you're gonna like let's go into this example here where we were just starting out let's make this all way bigger so we have some room to play here oh let's put in our dimensions and we're gonna use that same trick for our diamond oh let's go we have to go over sketch I mistake let's go and add it tangent dimension from here to here as well we'll set that like ten millimeters it's looking pretty good let's go and drag this to be way bigger oh we forgot a diameter up wrong one let's get rid of that try again there we go now we have a fully constrained sketch here and we're gonna go and add quite a bit so we'll go with like 1500 we'll make that way longer this will be like a thousand way bigger okay so now I have room so let's talk about patterns first thing is that if you don't have to do a pattern in a sketch I don't recommend you do a pattern in a sketch you can if you need to but just so you know the amount of resources it takes to be able to do a pattern in a sketch is a lot more than a pattern of a feature or a pattern of a body so I try to limit my use of pattern sketches but if you want to do it you can do it here's the trick you go to rack rectangular pattern choose the objects you want a pattern like this square thing I'll just go and select the whole thing just like that perfect now you'll notice that I have these two arrows and sometimes people get confused about like which direction is which so the key is that when you go to the direction instead of using the default I like to pick it myself but you don't just pick one direction you pick two directions if you pick just one direction the potential is that the second direction is not the axis that you think it is so right now I'm picking the X and I did not pick a second thing and I have the feeling for this one it's actually going to be correct yeah it's it's going correctly and that's fine but if you've ever had the case where it's going the first direction is what you wanted and then the second direction is like up out of the screen and that's not what you want it at all the reason is because when you go to pick your direction you can pick two directions at once and I do recommend you just do that from the beginning so let's go and do that I'm gonna go and select this edge and I'm holding ctrl and I'm also selecting that second edge you'll see here it says to selected that guarantees that this is going to go in the two directions that you wanted in this case left to right and up and down and then you can select whatever you want for your extent or your spacing or everything else so the trick here it's the two tricks that I was really referring to is number one if you don't have to pattern in a sketch don't that's the trick and number two is that if you are gonna pattern in a sketch while we select both directions that'll guarantee that you always get the directions you want and keep in mind that the directions do not necessarily have to be perpendicular to one another so let's go and cancel this for a second we're gonna go and draw some sort of bunny direction like this and maybe I'm gonna go and pick an angle between this and we'll set that to be like 15 degrees well we're gonna go and select this rectangle and we're going to say create a pattern we're gonna select for a direction this edge and this edge now I'm gonna be able to go this way and I'll also be able to go that way right so you can pick two directions they do not have to be perpendicular to each other but again I always picking two directions you can set this to be zero as your distance or you could set this to be zero as your quantity but generally speaking I think it's a good practice to Oh quantity can't be zero I'm sorry distance can definitely be zero but I do recommend always picking two directions so you have three tips there try not to pattern sketches if you don't have to try to pick two directions and then what was the other one I already forgot the other one I'm just gonna move off too much this is this is a lot of stuff to go in one live stream alright so we covered quite a bit there now there are two different kinds of sketch patterns you can do right you can do your rectangular pattern like I just showed and your circular pattern circular pattern is absolutely perfect for you know circular or parts you know like anything that you're gonna end up doing like a like a flange you know circular flange or something like that pretty common the other thing you can use circular patterns for is trying to get something that is on the opposite corner so like if you wanted something that is mirrored across and then down but you don't want the top right corner you could actually also use a circular pattern so watch this we're gonna go and grab this rectangle the center point in this case might be like this point right over here and we're gonna say let's go all the way around but I don't want three I just want to and that'll give me this corner right over here and before you guys start typing in that I could also have put in a line over here and set this to be midpoint and I could set this to be whatever the correct angle is here I probably picked wrong let's do this again should be here it's probably 45 but it might not always be 45 the key though is that you could get a very different result if you're doing the mirror across versus re versus circular pattern across because if you remember circular pattern is actually rotating around versus mirror it's direct mirror so depending on your application I do urge you to consider a circular pattern to be able to get something across like that and still have the orientation be exactly what you want I think that's really helpful as well so that covers most of patterns but there's one more pattern left and I'm gonna put you guys to the test so if you go here you could see rectangular pattern and you can see circular pattern can anyone on the screen right now see the pattern on a path maybe probably not you guys are probably scrambling to look for it right now well pattern on a path is incredibly useful but you will not find it in the sketch palette I'm still gonna put it in this video because I think it's helpful for when you're creating sketches and everything but it is not actually in the sketch toolbar so if you want to find that you're gonna have to go to the solid modelling menu create and if you go to pattern you're gonna see here pattern on a path and this is incredibly useful especially for things like stitching holes so let's give you an example we showed you quite a few times this sheet metal part that we started to butcher in this example and I'm gonna show you what it looks like in 3d so let's go and grab that and not this one let's go yeah this one let's say instead of making this out of metal I wanted to make this out of paper or cardboard or leather or anything else and I want to be able to actually stitch this together instead of welding it together well one way you can actually do that is using pattern on a path and so let me show you the example that's already done pull that up and this is what it looks like with some holes in it best way to create this is using the pattern on a path approach so the way that I did this was I unfolded the sheet metal part just like that I created a quick sketch let's go one step forward there we are so I create created a quick sketch where I projected the geometry of the overall shape I then use an offset actually hide the body for a second I use an offset so that I have this quarter inch from the outside edge I also made a little bit of a change here so that there would the hole wouldn't end up being on the very end here so I have this overall shape right then I create a quick sketch that shows the actual hole that we're gonna go and create that's the all right over here and then I extrude the hole out of my body let's go and show that let's high my sketch so at the moment I only have a single hole and then what I did was I do pattern on a path to actually be able to have this go follow the path itself and then I used a circular pattern to be able to mirror this across all four corners because this part happens to be symmetrical remember the pattern tool actually works better when you use it not in the sketch when you pattern features and things like that so in this case I'm doing the pattern on a path which I can only do in 3d then I did the circular pattern which I could do in 3d or as a sketch and I prefer to do it as a 3d let's go and look at that pattern on a path for a second what you'll see here is again the feature that we're gonna be patterning is the whole feature you'll see that right over here in my timeline and then the path is the sketch that I created the key here are a couple of things and I want to set you up for success I'm set setting this up as extent and so this distance that you see here needs to be the length of the actual sketch like the path and then the next thing is that I picked the quantity of how many holes I want here and I could set this to be anything I want here and I do have this check box to turn on or off certain holes that I want or don't want so if I don't want these ones that are too close to it let's say this bottom I just uncheck those and hit OK and that's giving me exactly an updated path the trick though is you do need the length of that path and if you put that length in correctly this is a great way to be able to create holes for stitching or for any number of other things and again I'm including this in our tutorial about advanced sketching but just know that this isn't actually a sketch tool but it is there all right we are an hour and 20 minutes in and we still have alright a bit more for different things on our list and I'll tell you what they are we're going to talk about project versus intersect which i think is commonly confused we're going to talk about intersection curve we're going to talk about project to surface and lastly we're going to talk about 3d sketching so I hope you still have some energy left and some concentration left we're going to jump right into project vs. intersect so let's go back to our table example now if I were let's actually delete some of this extra stuff we don't need you don't need that and we'll suppress this for now okay so if I want to go and create a sketch that is on the center plane all I do is pick my center plane that would be the XY plane great a sketch and if I want to be able to see this as like a slice model again I could turn on that slice tool pretty cool now most people end up using the project tool under create project P for project you probably notice that there is this purple option and and then also the gray option perfect the purple option lets you pick specific things that you want to project so if you want to project a point you pick the point it'll end up being a point on your sketch plane you can also pick a line I'll actually pick a different line so you can see it separately you could also pick a face and it will give you the projection of that face onto the plane that you're drawing all right so let's go and look at what we have I'll hit OK I'll hide the body for a second we have a point and we have two different lines and again these are based on the vertices the edges and then also the faces that we selected let's go back here and sew and edit this again we'll show let's delete all this and we'll go and look at the other option the one for project a body now projecting specific end B's is helpful if you want a very specific thing but if you are trying to project the entire object you don't want to have to go and select all of these edges and everything else that could be very time-consuming the project bodies option is a great way to not have to do that so let me actually clear my selection choose the bodies option select anywhere in the body I want it okay and now it has the entire body now this has to actually two benefits number one is that that was really fast I didn't have to select a whole bunch of stuff I just selected one thing the second benefit is that this is actually more robust than selecting a specific object or robust meaning that when I change my table design I change the height I change the width I change whatever it is I want about this table it's less likely to fail later on in my timeline why you may ask the reason is because when you end up projecting an edge or a vertex keep in mind that that edge or vertex may not exist based on the changes that you've made so maybe you make a cutout in your design and now that cutout eliminated that vertex it doesn't exist anymore so what do you think is going to happen with your projection of that vertex it's going to fail there's it doesn't know what to project anymore because that thing doesn't exist but what's likely to stay no matter what you do is that body because after all that body is something important to you you're designing the table the table is still gonna exist or is very likely to still exist so projecting a body is way more robust than projecting a face or an edge or vertex and I try my best to always project bodies if I can there are plenty of times where I intentionally project just one thing but I know while I'm doing it that the trade-off is that it's less robust so keep that in mind the other thing you should know about project is that what it's doing is it's giving you a silhouette so right right now you could see I have the silhouette of our table right but if you remember I ended up at suppressing a extrude cut through our model so let's actually go and let's hide our sketch for a second let's turn on our suppress feature here we are so now I have a cutout and if I go and I look at that sketch of what we just created you'll notice that the sketch itself doesn't change that's actually kind of surprising at first because I have a cutout here why is the sketch not changing based on it well the reason is because the project tool is actually projecting a silhouette of the overall outer perimeter of whatever that shape happens to be and so it actually doesn't see this cut out because that cutout isn't there if the cutouts stuck out it would end up including it it's actually do that I'll show you what that looks like there we are we're gonna go out and we're gonna change this to join and now you could see that the projection includes that area but the cut in it did not see because again it's really the silhouette that is looking for now you could get a very different result though if you're using the intersect command so let's actually go and put this back to where it was so this is the cut and we're gonna go and we're gonna also go and take that midplane and let's go and grab xy-plane create another sketch here let's turn on our body there we are and this time instead of using the project tool let's go back to the project or include folder and we're gonna choose intersect and this one is in my opinion even more useful than the projectile I probably use intersect more than I use the projectile even though I think for a lot of people it's the other way around I really like the intersect tool so again I can select any edge or vertex that I want so it's actually high let's hide the original sketch the last one that we had all right so let's only show the new one if I pick this face it's going to show me the intersection between the sketch plane that I'm on and the face that I selected and that is going to end up with a line in this case if I pick a vertex it'll in this case give me a vertex if however I pick an edge over here out here in 3d space guess what it's gonna give me big fat zilch because guess what this edge does not cross the plane that I'm actually sketching on which makes sense right so keep in mind that the intersect tool is really just giving you the intersection and if you're choosing specific edges or an error entities to be able to intersect choose wisely because it's going to give you or not give you based on you know what it can actually achieve but if we clear that selection and I use the bodies which is remember what I told you I always recommend I'm gonna go and choose that body and hit OK and now let's go and hide the body and show the sketch this one actually includes the cutout and the one before doesn't alright so the one before with the project tool is giving me the silhouette and the one with the intersection is giving me the actual intersection so to me this is incredibly valuable and incredibly useful I recommend you actually go to the projector include and come up with a shortcut that you should use for yourself right eye is typically for inspect so maybe choose something else maybe it's a control eye or something like that like I'll pick and now for now on control eye is going to be the yeah intersect tool so that's pretty handy let's take it a little further actually so we're gonna go and create another new sketch and show our body we're going to say create a new sketch pick a plane and this time we're gonna go and use the include geometry so project and we're gonna choose include 3d geometry and what include 3d geometry does is it's like it's like a projection in place it does not move it it's kind of also like an intersection in place but it's not intersecting anything it's really just intersecting itself it just so I guess more like a projection but it's the key is that it's in place it does not move so if you use the include 3d geometry and you pick something that's on the plane that you're drawing on its gonna look exactly like the intersect tool would or like the projector would nothing super special there let's go and undo that one for a second let's do that same thing again but this time we're gonna go and pick an edge that's off in space that's not in the plane that we're sketching so if I choose this edge over here or I choose this edge over here or choose this vertex over here go and show you what we have let's hide the 3d model and what you're gonna see is stuff that are not in the actual plane so if you could see here this is the plane that we're drawing on the XY plane and the rest of this stuff is off at a distance it's off in space now keep in mind again that the 3d sketch button was turned off but yet it created 3d geometry and it's because the include 3d geometry only does one thing it creates 3d stuff so regardless of whether 3d sketches turned on or not it still will do exactly that so include 3d geometry is great for being able to like highlight an edge in exactly where it is so that's really handy for a variety of reasons but like this is one of them if you want like a more organic form or more aesthetically pleasing form I'll go and grab I think one more example of this and then I think we'll move on to the next topic so let's go with like consumer products I think there was a cool leaf lower we're going to use real quick so let's say I'm trying to do something with this like plastic housing and I want to go and create some sort of like lofted I want to gonna make a groove that goes across here and I want that groove to be nice and smooth now I'll admit like you know the edge transition here is does not look ideal for what I'm trying to do so we'll probably make our own so maybe I'm gonna go and say create a sketch choose a plane you always have to choose a plane regardless of what you're doing and like what where the 3d sketch is actually gonna be we're gonna go to create project include 3d geometry and I could choose this edge here and this edge and again it's actually going to just go and project those in space exactly where they are now I could go and say create a spline and I'm gonna make a spline between this point and this point but you'll probably notice that I'm having trouble snapping to these two different places and this is where the 3d sketch checkbox really comes in handy because remember 3d check the 3d sketch checkbox is gonna allow you to be able to create three like a 3d sketch of your own so now that I turn that on I can snap directly to the ends of this spline of those two splines or arcs with it there oh I'm miss selected to try it again bill one more time I can select the end points of those splines and hit enter instead of escape on my keyboard then I could also go and apply constraints and make those tangent and make this tangent let's try one more time perfect and this is a nice smooth transition between the two now I could go and create let's say a construction plane along a path and I'll go and turn this on set this - that's a zero I can go and create whatever my groove is gonna be draw this not make that in 3d actually let's just draw that in 2d make whatever this size is oh and let's rotate around so we could see it nicely make this maybe one to five inches and then I could go and do assert like a sweep across this and let's go into a sweep of this particular profile along this path perfect all right so that's the general idea I just wasn't visible I actually will turn that back on let's do it one more time Adie create my sweep my profile my path rather there we go and that on and now I have my profile wrapping around this particular body so the point here is simply that the include 3d geometry is a great way to kind of project in place exactly what's already there and then one you could use the 3d sketch to actually be able to link them together and make a smooth transition this one happens to not be very pretty I'm not happy with it but generally speaking this is exactly where you're going to do and that's a great use of again the include 3d geometry now let's go back to the table example and let's talk about the other two options that were there let's go and show our body here here we are we're going to delete a bunch of this stuff we don't need there we are there we are perfect okay so next thing I'm going to show you is going to be the under in our sketch tools I let's make another sketch create reject reject a surface you've ever wondered what this does you're about to see so projected surface is going to take a sketch that you've created and project it onto the face that you pick so in this case maybe I'm going to pick this face of the table I'm gonna go and choose the curve itself and you'll see here that I have two options I have a long vector which is going to you pick a vector like in this case maybe it's the vertical direction like that and it's going to project this shape onto this particular face directly up now this is actually very similar in this particular case to the intersection curve let me show you why and then we'll go back to projected surface so let's hide this result for a second so exit out of that for a moment suppress it there we go so if we go back and we say create a new sketch we're gonna go and say create project intersection curve this is gonna let me pick the curve itself and then the curve or face you want it to go to this is automatically going to be normal to the sketch and you'll see that this shape that just showed up is nearly well is actually identical to this one that you see here so let's toggle them back and forth this is the one that I used in the first case this is the one in the second case and they're exactly the same the difference though is that the first tool that I started to show has way more options for how you could actually create it let's go back here if you notice when I was doing my project let's actually go and delete this for a second we'll do it one more time create project project a surface let's do this one more time so I'm gonna choose this is the face I want to project it on to this is the curve right you'll notice that even if with a long vector I get to choose a different direction so I could choose some sort of funny like angle and it'll project using that angle whereas the other tool the projected surface is only normal to the sketch so already I get a lot more control here of the direction that I want to use for the projection I love that but in addition to that I also get to choose closest point instead of a long vector and closest points really interesting because it's kind of like wrapping the sketch around now this is not just to warn you right now this is not a true wrap sketch feature so if you're trying to like put text on a cylinder this will get you pretty close but this is not exactly what you're asking for in that case but this is gonna be pretty close this is gonna allow you to say you know what I want to take this sketch and I want to wrap this onto the surface using the closest point and when I hit okay I get a similar result but what it's really doing is it's taking like this portion of my sketch and actually like twisting it based on the proximity of that sketch to the face you know whatever's closest so you can get some pretty wild and crazy results here if you never played with this particular tool I hope just seeing it in action even just a little bit is going to give you a good taste of what you could do so again remember those tools I just showed you are all under this projector include drop-down the project tool is used a lot by a lot of people intersect should be used a lot more I hope you do use it the include 3d geometry is going to project geometry in place and then project the surface and intersection curve are very similar I in my opinion intersection curve is kind of like the more basic of the two and projective surface is much more advanced and gives you a lot more control over exactly how you're projecting and things like that so those are some pretty cool tools the last thing that we're going to talk about and I'm only gonna touch on this for a couple of minutes because we're already at I don't know an hour and 40 minutes in and you guys probably need a breather after all of this but we're gonna talk a little bit about 3d sketching you probably already watched tyler kirk eras video i'm 3d sketching a bumper for a atv and there was a fantastic video i'll put a link in the description so that you can watch that as well but let's talk a little bit about 3d sketching and you could have 3d sketched for a long time in fusion but the capabilities were a lot more limited than they are today and the way it would work is you would create i'll tell you how it used to work is for a comparison we would create a 2d sketch you would draw let's say a rectangle then you'd use the Move command just like i showed you earlier pick a point and then move it in space and if you wanted everything else locked down you would actually go and you'd lock down those positions so let's actually go and do that real quick let's go and grab let's say these three corners there we are now now we'll go and move just this corner right here and I'll move this up in space oh we have some constraint stopping us let's go and fix that this guy this guy tried one last time you would move this up in space the problem is you wouldn't be able to constrain that position and now with the new update that we have in fusion you could not only create geometry in 3d you can also like without having to use the Move command to actually move it around you can actually create it from scratch in 3d you can also go in dimension as well which i think is really helpful so you can now go and dimension this in 3d too which i think is amazing right so a couple of words of wisdom in doing this let's start from scratch so we have our sketch if you want to create your model in 3d and sketch in 3d turn on the 3d sketch toolbox once you do and you pick whatever it is you want to create you'll see this triad things show up here and the Triad allows you to be able to change like the orientation of where you're designing so you can rotate this in a variety of different ways and basically though you are drawing on a plane you just have to choose which plane you want to draw on and the orientation of that plane and then you go and draw your line and you can put dimensions on that right away and word of wisdom again best practice is to put dimensions on right away this will make your life a whole lot easier as you're doing this so go and put your dimensions on right away and I'll cancel that one then I'm gonna go and draw another line so this time we're gonna go and draw from here as soon as I click there again I get that triad I can choose the direction of that triad and then I can go and draw in that direction as well and I could keep going I can keep going in any directions I want whatever it is I'm trying to do again I do recommend you go and put your dimensions in as early as possible so that everything will update nice and easily for you and not kind of break or blow up on you now one of the coolest things about the 3d sketcher that I've seen here as compared to other software that I've used in the past it's probably the philic command you can fill it in 3d really easily inside fusion and that used to be very difficult for me to do in other software so play around also with that Phillip command this is a great way to be able to make smooth transitions with you know like tubes and and other things that you might be creating and this is a fantastic way to do this again the 3d sketching is incredibly powerful and you could use it for so many different things so like in this particular case maybe we're gonna go and use it to sweep something right so I can go and draw a profile sweep through this and I have a tube kind of like in Tyler's video also you can use it to create lofted geometry Tyler used the same example I'm about to show you you can go and create a quick sketch and as long as the 3d is turned on you can go and draw let's say a vertical line and make different segments just like this then you could go and draw different shapes in this case maybe it's going to be a circle right over here maybe it's going to be another circle right over here and then this will be a bigger one and then this won't be a much smaller one and so what used to take multiple different steps of creating different planes and creating sketches and different planes and projecting other sketches into that new sketch so that you get all the dimensions right relative to each other I could do all of this in one place so I could pick my dimensions to be this will be 50 this one here will be 85 let's say this one here is gonna be 25 I could pick my height between them we'll make that let's say 35 we'll make this 25 and again you'll see that my sketch is becoming fully constrained in just a matter of seconds now I could go and do let's say a surface loft or maybe I'm gonna do a solid loft and I could loft between this profile here to this one at that one and I could also change my end conditions and everything like that I could also go and shell this out and give myself a uniform wall thickness and now we have a beautiful vase or a beautiful part all of this was done though with a single 3d sketch a single loft in a shell command and that is absolutely phenomenal using the 3d sketch tool play around with that tool as well as all of the other tools I've shown today again we went through a giant list just to repeat that list for you so we could summarize here we talked about how less is more you could design half or even a quarter of your design if possible you can make your dimensions based on other dimensions or based on equations based on items from your parameter table those items are parameters of course you can make your dimensions based on fractions or even feet and inches or feet inches and fractions you can make your dimensions based on diameters you can make them based on tangent conditions and then the rest I would say I'd group together is kind of a random smattering of fun stuff but you could see that setting up three canvases as underlays for each plane can be really helpful inserting DXF as opposed to DWG or SVG whenever appropriate can be very helpful you also can see that bringing in vectors from other file programs like illustrator and others I'm not picking on illustrator illustrator is a fantastic program can yield some problematic issues and you can redraw on top which was using the fix constraint I think is our option you can also edit using the control point frame option that lock or unlock is handy for a variety of different kinds of changes but keep in mind that they do prevent you from being able to move your items using the Move command I showed you how to use slice in your sketches I showed you how to use control to avoid snapping or to avoid adding new constraints I showed you how to use the Move command both for 2d as well as 3d moves I showed you how you can make different types of patterns including one that's not exactly in the sketch tools but I think is really helpful I showed you the differences between project and intersect I showed you intersection curve and what they do I showed you project a surface and what that does and lastly I showed you 3d sketching as well we covered a whole lot of different things today and I hope you take what you learned today and use it remember that sketching is the foundation of all things 3d so if you can master sketching I think you're gonna master the really important building block to get to everything else and it's going to set you up for success in building your 3d models so just remember that with fusion 360 you can make anything it's just a matter of time patience and effort I hope that you enjoyed this livestream thank you very much for Brad for being on the keys today and thank you for watching I hope you have a great day you

Channel: Autodesk Fusion 360

Views: 39,388

Keywords: fusion 360, autodesk, design, engineering, mechanical design, mechanical engineering, product design, software, CAD, CAD software, Computer Aided Design, Modeling, 3D software, Autodesk fusion 360, cloud based CAD, CAD in the cloud, cloud, Free CAD, Free CAD Software, free CAD program, 3D CAD solution, computer aided design, free software, 3d modeling tutorial, manufacturing, 2D Sketch, 2D Sketching, 3D Sketch, 3D Sketching, Sketching, Vector Sketching, Jason Lichtman

Id: wOQydMGSq9w

Length: 107min 44sec (6464 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2020