360 LIVE: Creating HVAC parts in Fusion 360 Sheet Metal

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of fusion 360 live my name is Brad talus and from Autodesk and today I'm gonna be talking about how to create HVAC type parts where we want to unfold this flat but you'll notice that we're transitioning from for example from a rectangle to a circle and if I switch into a sheet metal really quick you'll see that sure enough we can actually unfold these and lay them flat so I'm gonna show how we're gonna go about creating this type of part now before I get started I wanted to let you know so we're having a live stream next week my buddy Wayne will be presenting about some of the enhancements in the manufacturing extension so he's gonna be talking about that but then we're gonna be gone for a couple weeks so I'm actually traveling next week that's why veins doing next week's presentation and then I'll be at a you and then Thanksgiving week so next week will probably be the last live stream for the month of November make sure you subscribe to our channel that way you'll be alerted on upcoming live streams but we'll start up again in December so I just wanted to give you a heads up on that okay so let's jump in in fact I think Wayne's gonna be on the keyboard for me today Aaron was pretty busy with customers so Wayne said he'd helped me out but he's actually on a call with customer right now so he'll hop on here in a little bit so okay so what I want to do is to create a part like this we need to transition from a rectangle to a circular shape and to do that we kind of need to deform the metal in the corners and I'm going to be showing how we go about doing this now I could do something like this starting with just a regular flat sheet metal part and adding bends like but that would be very very difficult and it would take quite some time so instead we're gonna kind of build the basic shape and then I'm gonna show you some tips and tricks on how to build this shape and one of our new commands in sheet metal which is convert to sheet metal so we're actually going to create this as a model instead of as a sheet metal part and at the end we'll go ahead and convert it okay this will make sense as we go through I hope so I'm going to make sure I'm in inches right now I'll go ahead and create a sketch and you'll notice I'm actually in solid I'm not even in the sheet metal tab so I'm gonna start with a rectangle I like to use the center rectangle so I'll click on Center rectangle and let's just make this like a four by six oops I hit my 3d mouse there so basically making it a four by six rectangle I'll go ahead and finish my sketch and then I want to create the round portion up at the top so to do that we need to create a construction offset plane so I'll go ahead and click on this little plane right here start to drag up and let's just go maybe I'll just say maybe like five inches in this case and what we just did is we created a construction plane that's five inches off of that other sketch I can now click on that construction plane all right mouse click and it shows me the commands that I can do and I'm going to use this create sketch so my piece of paper is actually floating up above that other rectangle you can kind of see that if I rotate okay I'll go ahead and create my circle I'm gonna kind of just line it up with the center here I just kind of put it somewhere there let's just say one point five for the size in this case and I can put this wherever I want in here but I'm gonna purposely leave it right about here that way we have basically four different angular phases to create this I'll say finish sketch okay so the commands that we're going to use is we're gonna loft so if I come in here and say loft in fact I'll notice the image kind of gives it away it goes from one shape to another but here's the catch you have to have like equal number of points in fact you can kind of see it in the preview if I hover over it it goes away you can kind of see there's four dots on that circle okay so here I've got one two three four but here I only have one so I'm gonna need to make some changes to this to use the loft command the second thing I'm going to have to do is I'm gonna need to break the rectangle I'm gonna have to kind of round over the corners and then basically break it into a couple of different segments and we're gonna loft those segments as individual faces you can kind of see I'm selecting them here and this is where the tips and tricks really kind of come into play okay so I got to go back to my first sketch and let's go ahead and let me go ahead and fill it the corner here so I'm just gonna use the 2d Phillip command this right here so I can select that edge and that edge and then it's asking for a size I'm gonna do something fairly small let's just do maybe like 0.125 and I'm going to do that on all four corners okay now as I was practicing this and in trying things out you can use the mirror command and kind of speed things up but I find that sometimes the mirror command can be a little bit touchy and so I'm gonna actually do everything on each corner just to make sure I'm getting the exact results that I want okay if i zoom up on this corner we can now see that we have this rounded section here and I need to split this or break it into a couple different steps because we basically need to kind of fold our sheet metal like I showed if i zoom up here you can kind of see how it's folded into a couple different steps so I'm not saying this is the the perfect way of doing it but I thought of a cool way of making exact steps here and that is to actually use the polygon command and check this out I'm going to use circumscribed polygon okay then I'm going to change to this option - construction because I want to make sure I'm not creating my object lines I'm kind of just using this for reference so I'm going to go ahead and click on that construction option and now anything that I draw will be in construction and check this out as I start to move you can see that it's going to create a circle with in this case six edges circumscribed around it and you can see that the construction lines so I'm gonna go ahead and change from six to twelve and you can now see how there's more lines and then all I'm gonna do is kind of come down here and you can kind of see a snap to the end of my horizontal line in the beginning of my curve okay so you can kind of see I picked the center point of my Filat and then I'm just gonna click right there and let's zoom up and see what happened so it created this construction line polygon for me and now these lines are intersecting there and there so I basically have three segments I have one segment that goes from here to here one segment that goes from here to here and another segment that goes up to here but you'll notice that this is all one line right now so what we're going to do is we're going to use under modify there's a command in here called break and it basically breaks the object until the next I don't know transition or intersection whatever you want to call it so watch what happens when I do this I gotta say break and I'm just gonna hover over this curve and you'll see a red X appear right there okay so what it's basically saying is I can take this segment and break it where it intersects or where it touches right there so I'm gonna go ahead and click and now you'll notice that this little segment it might be kind of hard to see is only from here back to the starting point so we just broke that arc now same thing if I come over here you can kind of see as I hover over it it's one big arc that goes from here all the way up but as I hover over it it's going to break at that point now unfortunately it also broke it right here but that's okay we can we can deal with that and then you'll notice that this segment is only from here to here so again I'm not saying this is the way you have to do it I just thought this was a quick way of creating a polygon instead of maybe I could have done some angular lines and rotated them every 25 degrees or something like that but here I just used existing geometry this polygon geometry to break that corner so a little repetitive I'm gonna do the exact same thing a little bit faster this time in this upper right corner so I'll say polygon circumscribed polygon make sure my construction is checked which it is and you'll notice it only has six edges so here's another tip if you didn't know this I could type in 12 but if I click this little down arrow it remembers the last numbers that I've used so the last number I used was 12 so I don't even have to type it in oops I was a little bit off on that one so I'm gonna make sure I do that correctly so circumscribe that I'll click again using this little down arrow I'll say 12 and then make sure I move straight up then once again I'll just say break and it's gonna break at those little red X's and there we go I now have three separate segments so you can kind of see I've got this one segment right there I've got this segment right here and then I've got this segment right there okay now like I said I could probably mirror this but I just want to make sure everything is exact expression when I'm using my loft command so I'm just gonna recreate this in each corner and it goes pretty quick once you kind of get the idea of what you need to do so I'm just gonna break and break call a lot good and then come down here and do one last one real quick so I'll do my polygon excuse me I'll click there and click down there okay unfortunately it looks like Wayne is having issues getting logged in so there might not be any answers on your chat until the end I'll try and take some time to review those I apologize so let's come in here and break a lot of my coworkers are at the SEMA Show in Las Vegas this week so we've been pretty crazy busy okay so I've done all four corners I kind of need to do the same thing up here so I'm gonna edit that sketch and this will actually go a little bit quicker but I'm gonna draw some lines that go straight across like so and maybe a line that goes up and down like this okay just for just for reference and shortcut I can select it and hit the X like an x-ray on my keyboard and it'll turn it into a construction line so you can kind of see just hitting X on your keyboard instead of having to go over and select it from the sketch palette okay so this is all one object well I can come in and do the exact same thing I'll do my polygons circumscribed polygons I'll set the edges to 12 and let's just go up to the top for example now here's here's a mistake I just made you'll notice that it came in as object lines and I really want those to be construction lines so I'm going to undo do that again but make sure I hit construction this time okay so there we go we can see it looks like a construction I'll go to the top and then I'm going to split or break all of these segments so here you can really kind of see it's gonna go from there to there and then it's gonna break to that segment there so I'm just gonna kind of walk around and just click on all of these and like I said I think this is a pretty fast way of doing it I could have used angular lines to kind of define all those points but now you can see I've got a whole bunch of separate segments okay now I'm ready to start building this thing so to go from one shape to another we're gonna use the loft command and undersurface so I click on my little surface tab right here under create you'll see we have loft okay and it's gonna ask to go from one profile to another so I'm going to zoom up and let's just click this first circular segment right here so I'm going to click on that guy and then I'll zoom up here and you can see I can click on and I need to be careful you'll notice it allows me to click a point I want to click on that edge and watch what it does it'll take that small radius and loft it up to this taller radius up here and again it's going to be just repeat now you'll notice when I said okay my gets his run away I'll just expand those open turn them on and let's just use the loft command so I'm gonna do the exact steps a little too close I'm gonna do the exact same thing now here's what I was talking about you'll notice that it's actually split into two separate segments so let's say I accidentally just clicked that one segment and then I came up here and we'll click this other segment you'll see that sure enough it'll loft between the two but I want to make sure that I select all three of those so you can kind of see now it's going to grow between those and we have a nice small to large transition I'll do the same thing again making sure I click the little arc we're actually gonna click to the point here in a little bit whoops little zoomy I'm sorry okay so I've just created this corner you can kind of see how it's angled back a little bit to this circle because the circle kind of sits back a little bit so I'm just gonna do the exact same thing like I said unfortunately this is going to be pretty repetitive and let me just kind of zoom up here grab that arc there now you'll notice this time it leaves an opening and we're gonna come back to that here in just a moment but I'm gonna repeat my last command and again I hope you all know this if I right mouse click I get this marking menu and you'll notice this blue radar and this black line well this is what we call a gesture and so if I were to right click and drag straight up it's gonna repeat my last command if I were to drag to the left it would do an undo okay so for example I'm not in any command right now if I just right click and drag straight up you'll see that it repeated the loft command it's a real fast way of running the same command that you just did over and over again okay so you'll see me you'll see me use it quite a bit as we're as we're doing this I'm gonna make sure I grab that little segment there and that little segment there I'll say okay drag straight up grab that segment and that arc there okay so now you can see that we've built basically one side of this and this is what we call a surface there's no thickness to this whatsoever it's almost like a piece of paper okay now I'm gonna use the loft command again but this time I'm going to pick on this straight edge right here and if i zoom up you'll notice I can go to edges etc or I can go to a point so I'm just going to click on that point and you can see that it's gonna loft from that edge up to that point and we basically kind of sealed the back or the side of our part there okay so again let me just quickly generate these lofts for you and the cool thing about this project this is something you can do I don't need to attach a file or anything like that you can build this yourself using the dimensions than I used i just did a 4 by 6 and i think an inch and a half for the circle okay let me make sure i get the curve and that segment there say okay i'll drag straight up to repeat my loft command and finish whoops little too far I'll do this guy and this guy up here I'll say okay and I'll come down make sure I grab all that which looks good and then I'll do one last one here and then we can kind of join everything together so again like I said a little bit of upfront time to do this and again we're just going to simulate how this is going to work okay so I'll use the loft command just to fill in these other places I'm going to go ahead and click there and there in fact you know what I might even turn off my sketches actually but that top sketch I'll turn off just so it's not in the way I'll use my loft and I'll click there and yeah so notice it's not catching to a point it's trying to catch to an edge so I do have to have that sketch turned on to catch to that particular point so let me go ahead and do this guy and that guy and then finally I'll do this back edge and at that point right there okay so we now have this shape and I'm gonna go ahead and turn off my sketches I don't need those anymore but you'll notice that it's Hollow and it's thin-walled and if I were to expand open my bodies you'll notice that these are all individual faces we have a whole bunch of them looks like sixteen faces okay I want these to be all one face so I'm gonna come in here and use the stitch command I want to stitch these faces together so I can say stitch and you'll notice it allows me to click one face and then I can click another face and you'll see that green line kind of highlights and that shows that that's a valid stitch if I were to say okay that those were stitched together so you can see body one went away right and it's right there as two faces are stitched together I'm gonna undo back okay so here's we basically need to stitch all of these together there are individual pieces of fabric and if we wanted to join them together we them were stitched them together so I'm gonna say stitch and I'm just gonna do a crossing window now notice what it looks like it's yellow and dashed and that's because I went from right to left if I went from left to right you'll notice it's a selection window it'll only select whatever is inside that window but if I go this way it's gonna select anything that's inside it and anything that it crosses so you can see that I was able to select all of those faces those bodies I'll say okay and now it is stitched into one and for some reason okay I'm not sure why sometimes this stitch does that where it gets rid of my line so I might have to do this one at a time let me just try this really quick I apologize guys um makes make sure yeah I don't know man I do not know why it's doing that it worked perfectly in my multiple times I pried this out and every once in a while it would get rid of those lines and I'm not 100% sure why it could be because of my tolerance or something like that let me try making my tolerance go really small see if I get no let me try that again I'm not gonna spend too much time on this if it doesn't work I'm just gonna keep moving forward not 100% sure why it does that to me sometimes I say okay you know so it's it's not gonna do it I don't know why guys and it might have been because of the sketch and this is exactly the reason why I said I don't like to use mirror because I want to make sure everything worked correctly and sure enough it did not so there we go right okay I'll just do a small transition I'll stitch these together it'll still work but the flat layout will look a little bit different so I might have maybe not caught to the right point or something we'll see okay so now I have this one body you know what I can do is come in here and say thicken I want to give it some thickness now so what are the faces I'm going to go ahead and click on that one face and I can specify a distance so you can kind of see as I start to drag it gives me some thickness there right so you can kind of see that well I want to go let's just say point zero five and right now it's going into the part maybe I want it to go the other direction so I'm going to say - point zero five so that way the inside stays you know four by six for example on the inside of the circle stays one and a half so we're adding material to the outside now I'm giving it a distance of point zero five now this isn't a rule like a sheet metal rule you'll see that here in a moment but I am giving it an equal thickness so I'll go ahead and say okay and now we actually have a physical body okay we still have you can see we have our surface that we used but it's now thickened into its own body okay what we're gonna do now is if I were to try and unfold this there's nothing to unfold - we need to basically create a rip through the part because it's gonna be laid out flat and then it's gonna be bent and folded together and maybe it's gonna be welded along that rip so I'm going to just physically machine a rip in two here so I'm gonna create a sketch and I'll just do it maybe like on this front face right here I'm just gonna draw a rectangle I don't really care what size right now I'm just gonna do something like that actually I lied I do care about what size let me go like this and I'm going to tab over and I'm gonna make the gap thickness basically the same thickness as my material so I'm going to say point zero five and then I'll go ahead and click so I don't care about the height of it but I did care about the width I want it to be point zero five and then what I can do is I also want it to be centered so I'm going to use a constraint I'll use my midpoint constraint and I'll say I want that line centered on that point and you can see how it moved it up it's perfectly centered and it's the correct thickness okay now when I said okay it looks like it went away and I get this question quite often I create a sketch and it went away well notice I had turned off my sketches the eyeball is crossed out well if I click on that it'll turn my sketches back on and I can turn whichever sketches I want on so just this guy whoops way too far let's go ahead and extrude this now you'll notice where it's sitting I can extrude this direction but I need to go in two different directions two different distances so I'm going to change from one side to two sides and what this does is it brings up another arrow and I can drag a particular distance in that direction so I'm basically making sure I'm cutting all the way through the front sheet metal face you can kind of see that here I'll say okay and we now have a rip that goes down through the part you can kind of see as I rotate how that looks like it's going down through the part okay here's where the magic happens now I want to turn this into a sheet metal part so I'm gonna go over here to sheet metal say create convert to sheet metal okay what's the source I just have to click on this now you'll notice a couple things happen here what it does is it detects the thickness of this object and it says that it detected it's point zero five inches thick then it brings up my library and it tries to find an existing material that has that thickness now unfortunately none of these do you can see I've got point one two five point O six two five or whatever and so you'll see it says no thickness will be changed to point zero five so I can come in here and say is it stainless steel is it aluminum is it steel so in this case I'm gonna say aluminum so I'm just going to click on aluminum and right here it'll say thickness will be changed to point zero five now here it's kind of grayed out but it's really cool I should have picked a thickness that I already had like point O six to five but when you actually for example if this is 0.06 to five it would find it in my library and it would select that automatically for me it's really kind of slick so all I had to do is click on it and say what material whether it's aluminum or stainless or steel I'll say okay and now notice the icon for the body looks like a folded sheet metal part okay also notice that we now have a rule called aluminum and it says convert and the reason it says convert is because it it figured it out from the model in fact if I were to view this rule we can come in here and verify that sure enough it's point zero five thick okay okay so it says it's a sheet metal part well let's see if it is so I'm gonna come in here and say unfold I'll just click on a flat face and notice it actually unfolds it I'll say okay and like I said I was hoping to see the edges over here so we'll pretend these are rolled and these are more kind of bent or whatever but you can see that it actually creates the correct shape here I could cut this out on a water jet or a laser or plasma or whatever and fold it so I'll come back and say refold faces so that the key thing here that I wanted to show was that you can start with a model that isn't even a sheetmetal part in this case we used loft and we kind of went from one shape to another but you could even start with like a soccer ball shape right with all those flat faces and then you have to make sure you have an opening in there somewhere and you could unfold that to a flat sheet metal part okay so let's take this kind of to the next level I want to create some some flanges that come down off of this and maybe will help attach it to a rectangular duct work for example so I'm going to just kind of zoom up on here I'm just going to click on this front edge right mouse click and you'll notice it says flange okay so again this is that marking menu thing I was telling you about I could just drag down to the right and it's gonna run the flange command so as you get more proficient with the product when you start knowing where where these are at like presspull is at two o'clock you could just right click and drag to press pull at two o'clock okay okay so I'm in the flange command and notice if I start to drag this it's going to you know bend that for me at ninety degrees okay however I want it to go straight down well what is straight down if I look at it from the side I could rotate this and try and get close you know I might have to zoom up here but I want to be exact okay now that looks close but if we zoom up here you can kind of see it's an angle so how would I figure out what that should be okay so I'm gonna show you sorry it rotated way out of space I'll show you a neat tip so I'm going to go ahead and click on that edge and do my flange I like to start to drag just so I can kind of see what it looks like okay then in fact I'm gonna go ahead and start to rotate it just so it's going kind of in the right direction something like that what I want to figure out is what is the angle between the angled face and a flat face well you'll notice I don't have a flat face on this design so check this out I'm going to under angle I'm gonna click on this little down arrow and I'm gonna say measure ok and you can see my cursor has a little ruler so I'm gonna click in my screen and what this is gonna allow me to do is then select things okay so I'm gonna click on that face there and then I want to measure it against something flat well I could turn on my origin and there's my origin so I can measure the angle from this blue face to that face there and you can see that it actually changed my result and it says it's 25.49 degrees well that's going in that direction let me change that to a negative 25 and now we can see that sure enough it's going in the correct direction okay I'm gonna do that again I know that was kind of kind of lengthy and talky there so I'll do the same thing right here okay I want to know that direction so I'm going to turn my my origin on so you can kind of see it I'll say flange I'll start to drag what's my angle so I'm going to click that little down arrow next to the angle and instead of typing in something I could use the last one which I should but I'm gonna say measure and you notice what I said earlier when I said click in the screen because like right now if I click nothing happens and now that I've clicked it allow me to select something so I'm not sure why we require you to do that but basically you're you're saying okay in a measure so I'm going to measure that to that and it figured out the angle but it's going the wrong direction so I'm going to go in the opposite direction the negative direction okay now how far down do I need to go well I can start dragging this and I can actually click on an existing flange and you'll see that it looks a little bit longer than that guy okay so I nagged it to that point well the reason is for this height datum and I have a really cool livestream all about sheet metal but the height datum and bin positions mean but if I go to outer faces you'll see that that lines up okay in fact I'm gonna make this an even height let's just go point five and I'm gonna do the same thing for this one cuz I don't think I paid attention I'll say point five I'll do outer faces on that say okay yeah there we go so now they're the same height okay so same thing now this is a different angle so I'll click on that edge flange start to drag do my measurement from so I click on the screen I'll click there and this time I'm gonna click the other plane that plane there notice it's actually a totally different number the other one was like 25 this one's 24 so I'll say negative and I'll do my point five for the height okay so that's how you're able to get exact angles to do this okay okay now I could I could do the rest I'll just do those really quick so we can caps that was a measure I want to do the flange command so I'll do that instead of having to measure I'm just gonna come in here and say - the 24 and the 0.5 but I do need to make sure the the back one it's at a slight angle if I look at it from the side you can see it's at an ever so slight angle so I'm gonna have to measure this one okay so I could come in here do my flange start to drag measure one more time I'll say measure this flat face against that flat face it's only about one degree one point three three degrees so I'm gonna say minus one now let's do the point five okay okay so now I have this particular shape one thing that I typically do is I'm working with sheet metal parts and I should have done this as I was going around but I like to unfold every few steps just to make sure that this part is still manufacturable and it looks like it is so it looks like we're good there every once in a while you'll do something and it'll cause sheet metal to fail and it won't unfold maybe you kind of destroyed a Bend relief or something like that using an extrude command or something so I like to unfold every so often just to make sure that it's still a valid sheet metal part okay okay so that's basically the extent of this now what's kind of neat is I could come back and make changes so for example this plane I put way up high I said was five inches let's let's move it down to like three inches say okay and hopefully that'll update and sure enough you can see that it did okay so I could come back and make changes for example to my my sketch let me turn on that other sketch so I can kind of see it I could move this circle you know to the center here finish my sketch and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't but in this case you can see sure enough it did it really kind of depends on how you built it and so I can come back and make changes to this and all that upfront work that I did all of these lofts that I did still work which is really kind of cool okay okay now let me I'm gonna go ahead and show you another tip if you didn't know this I have all of these lofts in fact I'll even select these stitches I could right-click on this and say create group and what that's going to do is really simplify my timeline so now you can see that there's like these three little icons and if I hover over that you can see there's all my lofts inside that group so same thing with here I could group together all of my flanges if I wanted to I can even come in and rename those if I wanted to rename that group so I could call it tabs or something and now if I hover over that you'll see that it's labeled tabs so kind of a cool way to simplify your timeline okay sorry I just glanced over really quick I saw Ron said hey you could probably like 3d print this use it as a fan shroud or something like that for your 3d printer now notice the the angles changed because I changed the size so I would have to go back and remeasure but that's what's really cool about let me find that flange that's this guy right here so all I have to do is say measure the angled face with the flat face and give me the the difference of that and now it's straight up and down again so that's what I love about parametric design okay again I'm not saying this is how you would design HVAC equipment honestly I wish we had some functionality in our sheet metal that did these folds for you and maybe that'll be down low on the roadmap for sheet metal what I was showing here is just a process like if you had to do something like this there is a way it's not the fastest way but there is a method to doing this and that's why I really wanted to show this hopefully you learned some tips and tricks with this I'm gonna pause for a second I'm going to glance at the chat I apologize Wayne wasn't able to join in so I was going solo today again make sure you watch his livestream next week and then a quick review will be off for a couple weeks for those observant ones of you you'll notice I have a new toy in the background I'm actually going to be doing a review of this printer and maybe how I would go from a fusion design part right to the printer because I know we get a lot of questions about you know I bring in an STL and it's the wrong size and all kind of stuff so I'm probably gonna do a little series on 3d printing so run hopefully that helps you out there so let me go answer the chat really quick you guys could stare at me I don't know if there was anything glaring if um and I don't want to waste your guys's time what I'll probably do is go through the chat and if there was any questions in there if it was really important put it into the comments of the video once the video is out on YouTube and I try and respond to all of those comments in the underneath the video so if you have a question about this particular process please feel free to post it up there just wanted to say thank you see you on future live streams and remember with fusion 360 you can make anything thank you you

Channel: Autodesk Fusion 360

Views: 33,189

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

Id: oGwn6SsyPwA

Length: 46min 35sec (2795 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 07 2019