360 LIVE: Fundamentals of Sketching

hello out there fusion 360 fans and welcome back to another fusion 360 livestream I'm your host Jason Lichtman and we have Brad talus on the keyboard for today's topic the fundamentals of sketching and I'm so glad I have you guys today to learn about the fundamentals of sketching because sketching really is the foundation of everything in 3d if you have ever struggled to make 3d objects you might want to look at your 3d modeling but if you riff but what I really meant to say is that if you're struggling to be able to make the 3d models that you want to make you should really look at your 2d sketching because 2d sketching is really the foundation of all things 3d I can't say that enough and so today's topic we're gonna be looking into that foundational skill 2d sketching we're gonna cover all the basics of every aspect there is of 2d sketching if you would like to learn more advanced 2d sketching capabilities or tips and tricks look out for my video next week on Tuesday that'll be at 9 a.m. Mountain Standard Time we're gonna change the time slot up but let's actually take a moment before we jump into sketching let's talk a little bit about where we're going with these live streams so as you've already noticed we are making this live stream from my home today and we have all of the Autodesk employees working from home these days we want to be able to give you as much great content as possible and so for the next actually I would say it's indefinite but doesn't mean it's forever it just means we don't know the end point for it but for the next little bit we're gonna be giving you more live streams than ever before and I have the feeling you're gonna really like where we're headed with this so let me show you just a little taste of where we're going with it let's bring that up on that screen and there we are so this is going to be the live stream scheduled for the next little bit and what you're gonna see is that Monday we're gonna have cam with Wayne and Devon on Tuesday you're gonna do we're gonna do design and engineering with myself with Tyler and with Wayne Wednesday is going to be electronics day with Edwin and Jorge Thursday is going to be Brad talus with his ongoing projects and Friday is going to be the cam with CJ and Al that's gonna be a little different format Friday is gonna be a little bit more of a hangout versus kind of more tutorial based for everything else but in general we're trying to give you as much great content as possible so look out for some really great stuff coming your way let's get that off the screen here and let's talk a little bit about sketching as I said that's going to be today's topic and we're going to start off with the very basics what is a sketch a sketch is going to be a 2d typically 2d can be three d actually but typically it's a 2d flat representation of whatever you're trying to draw but this isn't a hand drawing this is going to be a collection of vectors so vectors are going to be mathematical representations of shapes so just as a quick example here this rectangle that I just drew here has an equation behind the scenes that represents what this square is this isn't a bunch of little dots like you would think if you design something in Photoshop which would be a bitmap image editing or creating software this is going to all be vector based so a sketch is a collection of vectors B squares circles arcs or something much more complex and you can use that to turn it into 3d in a variety of different ways but like I said the sketching is really the foundation or the building blocks it get to the 3d stuff so if you're gonna create a sketch and let's go and delete this one right here for a moment you're gonna create a sketch what you need is to start off with something flat so you have three planes to start with you have this one right here I call it the right plane but if you look in the upper right hand corner you could see that it represents Y Z so between the Green and the blue there that'll be the right plane this plane right here is the Y X or X Y plane and then this one right here is the XZ or the top plane and you can create sketches on any of these planes but really you can create sketches on any flat object or face so it can be planes it could be the default planes that come in fusion or it could be planes that you create yourself using the construction planes you can see right here either way it would be fine just as an example let's actually go back here you can take it even further and you could actually draw your sketches on faces of objects you've already created so here I have what I call the geometric table it's a super modern table here and if you look at the very bottom we know that this is flat I can select it and if I right click you'll see that there's an option here for create sketch so I can actually create the sketch on this flat surface the same would also be true for the back over here let's do and you could see that there as well and also the tabletop but also includes in this case these three pyramids or triangle-shaped areas at the bottom so if you right-click on it you'll see create sketch but this one is not actually flat it might look flat at first but if you look at it from the side you'll see that there's curvature to it I cannot create a 2d sketch on a non planar surface or a non flat surface so when I right click here I'm not seeing the create sketch option so just know that you can create sketches on planes and you can also create sketches on faces but they do have to be flat now to get into a sketch there are two ways to do it either select create sketch and then choose your flat face or flat construction plane like let's say this one right here and now I mean the sketch on that right plane or you could actually right click on the plane or that flat surface let's go and do that so I believe we said it would be the XY plane select it first right click and say create sketch so right off the bat that's how you get into your sketches now once you create a sketch or start a sketch rather you'll notice that the tab on the very top here is now changed these are all sketch tools and I have a sketch palette on the right hand side with kind of like options generally speaking I would say that everything that you're gonna create is going to be up here actually realistically everything that you create is in the create drop-down once you've created it you would modify the geometry under modify and if you want to add constraints which we'll talk about in just a little while you would add them under this constraints menu here now if you're used to using Fusion from way back when you would recognize that these constraints used to be part of the sketch palette but they've been moved to this constraint area at the very top of the toolbar if you watch one of the really old videos on fusion 360 you might see those constraints on the right-hand side but just know that they are all now at the top so let's start off with the basics the basics are what you're going to create in your sketch and we're gonna focus on the create menu so let's go and start off a new file like this and we're gonna go and create a sketch we'll try that other approach so this time we'll do right-click create a sketch and now I'm in that sketch menu and here under create you have all the different shapes that you might want to start with we call these primitives so I have lines and you'll notice that there's a letter L next to it that's the shortcut to make a line keyboard shortcut that is rectangle has a letter our circle has letter C and even dimension which we'll talk about later is letter D so these shortcuts are all meant to be as intuitive as possible so that you can just focus on creating and not worrying about which button does one now when you start off with something like a line you'll notice that you're just picking where your first point is and it actually tells you next to the mouse what to do and then specify the next point like that and if you keep going you're gonna be connecting a whole bunch of these lines together just like that cool let's go and do that again I'm gonna go and start there from scratch I'm hitting l4 line this time and this time I'm actually gonna drag this instead of dragging it at an angle I'm actually gonna drag this nearly horizontal and you'll notice that a little blue icon shows up just the left of my mouse and it's telling me that if I click again it's going to put this point here but it's gonna apply a constraint and I told you later we're gonna talk about concerns in more detail just want to give you a little bit of a heads up it's all gonna tie you in together so I can create a line that's horizontal they can create a line that's vertical another one that's horizontal but here's really the key until I connect everything together I have what's called an open sketch or an open vector once you connect it together like this you'll notice that when I let go now it changes color on my screen now I have a little bit of like a blue hue inside of my my sketch and when I move my mouse over this region it's going to highlight the perimeter in black and that's telling me that I have a closed profile just so that you're aware closed profiles that's what you need to create solid models so everything that's under this solid modeling tab over here all require closed profiles just like you see on the screen but surface modeling which is a little bit more advanced that could be done with those open profiles but if you're newer to fusion and you're newer to sketching then you should definitely stick with closed profiles and the solid modeling tab for making 3d geometry okay if I select one of these lines and I hit delete it's gonna go back to open again right and you can actually see this white dot here is kind of telling you that you have an open area of your sketch so let's go through again those primitives so line is super basic let's go back to sketch there it is so line is super basic rectangle also basic and you'll notice right away that I have three different kinds of rectangles and for some people that could be really confusing but they're really all just rectangles don't stress out about it the difference between those rectangles is just how you draw the rectangle so in the two point rectangle I pick a corner and then I pick another corner and it's the opposite corner and that's what it draws with a let's go and grab the other kind of rectangle three-point rectangle I pick a corner I pick another corner and then I pick a third corner right in that case it also wound up with a horizontal box but the cool thing with the three-point rectangle is you can also make angle boxes really easily pick one corner pick another one that's not horizontal to the first and now I can make a angled rectangle or twisted rectangle so to speak the last rectangle let's go and find that one too is the center rectangle and that one's as simple as the first point that you pick is the center of the rectangle and then you're picking a corner of the rectangle you'll notice however that there are some differences between these three rectangles let me get rid of this one so we don't have too many rectangles to come here so this one here it was the two point rectangle this one that's now going to be in the middle that's the three point and then this one here is the center rectangle and although they're all rectangles you'll notice that these little icons those constraints that are all the way around here those are a little different and this one also has this dotted line through it which is called a construction line but at the end of the day don't let this kind of stuff confuse you because if you just want to draw a rectangle pick any of those three methods to draw a rectangle he'll give you a rectangle the same is true by the way though for other shapes so circle actually has five different kinds of ways you draw circles but again they're all just circles arcs had to draw an arc there are three different kinds of arcs you draw polygon there are three different ways you could draw the polygon as well each of these different shapes probably has a mic you know multitude of ways you could draw it but really they're just the same shape so it's really your choice on how you draw now let's get to the next topic I want to talk about or at least focus in on for a second is going to be something called the construction line those are the dotted lines you see on the right hand side here with this particular rectangle you'll notice that when I hover over this first rectangle it highlights the outer edge and everything looks good the second rectangle does the same and the third does the same as well but let's go and add a line that goes across each of those rectangles and I'm actually going to just draw a big line that goes across all three so I'm gonna go and draw a line like this and I'm gonna draw it at an angle and you'll see here that I now have that line that goes across everything and the interesting thing about this line is that when I hover over that first rectangle now I actually have two different highlighted contours I have the top and then I have the bottom same is also going to be true for this rectangle in the middle top and bottom and then top and bottom for the rectangle on the right as well what's happening is that fusion software is the calculating all the different closed profiles that can be made out of the geometry that's on the screen and that line that's going across everything is splitting everything into two halves the top and the bottom that's why you can select the top or the bottom of each of these you can select both halves holding ctrl in between you could actually select multiple of these you could actually just have only the top halves or maybe it's only the bottom halves or it's everything I'm just holding ctrl to be able to group things together but what if I don't want them to actually be split into two but if this line that I'm using and that goes through the middle is kind of just helping me to be able to make the right dimensions or something like that so in that case you're going to want to turn this line into construction geometry select a line and then on the sketch palette on the right hand side choose direction it'll turn that line into a dotted line and now that line still exists it still has exactly the same size and dimensions everything else but it's not going to split your model using that line so if I go back to that first square now it's highlighting the entire square the middle one doing the same and the third one doing the same as well so a construction line is still a line that's useful it just doesn't split the model into two halves okay the best way to do to get to that is to select that line and then hit that construction button and if you would like to save even more time the keyboard shortcut is the letter X what our X just like that so select the line on your screen and hit the letter X and it'll switch it from a construction line to a standard line or from a standard line into a construction line that easy so this gets really useful for when you're trying to be able to create complex geometry and you want to be able to have dimensions from one thing to another so as an example let's say I have a picture frame I'm designing something real simple like that so I'm gonna go and create a quick sketch I'm gonna go and create a rectangle and maybe I'll use that Center rectangle here I can specify the size of this particular image this is going to be maybe five inches and this will be maybe a three inch by five inch I am in metric right now so let's actually change this since we're using inches right okay so now I have a three by five image and maybe I want to actually be able to make like matting that goes around this for the picture frame so maybe I'm gonna go and create another rectangle go and make this rectangle like that and then I want a rectangle for the frame itself and maybe I want for example this matting to cover up some of this picture so now I could do is I could put a dimension from the picture itself to the matting like this is how much matting is actually covering it maybe I want it to be like 50 thousandths we'll do the same thing over here perfect and then maybe I want to have the frame around all of this be about two inches we'll go and set that as well perfect now at this point I have a lot of different clothes profiles in this particular design if I move my mouse over this region you could see that I could select this area here I could select the area in between the two I could select a smaller area and I could use all of this to make a 3d model pretty easily but the key here really is that I want to be able to three to extrude this region lust this region and I can select both of those holding ctrl and I can extrude it and that would work just fine but if I want to save myself the time from having to select those multiple things every time I can instead just take the size of the picture itself it'll selected there to select the whole loop which is a great trick and then I hit the letter X to turn it into construction and now I only have to select this one thing I don't have to hold control in between so the construction geometry is a great way to be able to model things easily and I'm an analogies guy so I'll give you an analogy that I like to use I like to treat construction lines like scaffolding on a building so if you're building something or you're trying to replace the facade of some building you would put up all the scaffolding so that you can get to the right places and fix that building and then once you're done you're not actually gonna have the scaffolding part of the building it's really just like a construction tool to get there so use that construction geometry to be able to make whatever you'd like well so far what we've covered is how you can create your sketches like the two different ways you can create it what you can create it on which is anything that's flat right regardless of what the angle happens to be if it's flat you could draw on it and then we also covered the primitives which are the basic shapes you could start with and then also the construction geometry which is something you'd want to turn on or off to be able to split up those objects but we're not done we're going to get to the modifiers we didn't really look at those yet so the modifiers are gonna be the things that take existing shapes and modify them right the only one that I would say there's also a modifier that I don't ever see in this list is the delete button you can use the delete button anytime you want so if you want to get rid of let's say this construction line that's right here select didn't just hit the and it'll just go away same thing for this one as well but what if you don't want to get rid of it what if you just want to trim it so in this case let's actually go back to the last example where we have those boxes if we want to trim this I can go and use the modify trim and it'll zoom in here if I want to get rid of this section here there are two ways you could do it I'll show you each way so that you're familiar with it way number one is to highlight over the area you want to get rid of it'll preview in red what it's going to remove and when you select that it's actually going to automatically remove that region and you'll notice that what it did was it trimmed until the next intersection was something else if I undo that and we go back to the trim tool it's automatically trimming from the end here to this intersection that you see here and if I highlight over this region it'll trim just this region again it's just using that intersection now another trick if you want to be able to do this really fast is actually to click off of the line that you want to trim or the object you want to trim doesn't have to be a line and drag through the object you want to trim you could actually just drag right through and it'll trim anything that it crosses so I'll show you that in action a little bit faster over here so if I wanted to trim let's say this line and then this line and then maybe want to trim this one and that one and this one and I could wind up with some pretty interesting geometry really fast again that's just clicking and dragging around and it's basically like you know running around by scissors I guess when you were a kid they probably told you your parents probably told you not to run around with scissors right to be very careful about using scissors so if you just click on the individual lines it's like being very careful and snipping exactly what you want and if you click and then drag it's like running around with scissors just be very careful just like you would in real life if you had to run around with scissors so be really careful but if it is very fast infusion to be able to trim quickly so that's the trim tool now you don't always want to trim maybe you actually want to extend something so under modify you'll also see the extend tool it's the exact opposite of trim it is similar though in how it works when you highlight over a region it's going to show you in red what it's actually going to do to extent and what it's trying to do here is similar to before where it was trimming to intersections it's actually trying to extend to intersections as well so you can click here and it'll extend to the next intersection that it sees and if you'd like to continue extending you could just click again and it'll keep extending as much as you'd like right so if I want to go and extend this one I can go and do the same thing here and extend that until it matches that's like a quick and dirty on extent all right very similar to trim you also have here brake and brake is interesting brake is actually going to split the object into multiple parts so as an example here let's look at this line I have the line it is going through an intersection right here but you'll notice that this part of the line on the right-hand side of the intersection and this part of the line on the left-hand side of the intersection are the same line the brake tool is going to help you split it so you use the brake tool highlight over the line that you want to split like this region right here and you'll actually see the highlight and so when I select that trim now I have a line right over here and a separate line over here that I could then modify differently like I could change the angle at this point and warp things and things like that that's the brake tool again it's just breaking geometry into multiple parts sketch scale is going to be like a scale tool but it only works in the sketch environment there's a different scale tool for 3d geometry then there is for 2d so sketch school sketch scale is the scale tool just for 2d and the way that works is you select an object like let's say this line here choose a point that you want to use for reference for like the position or the scale like this corner right there and then using this arrow you can actually warp in in this case the length of the line or in the case of let's say the rectangles actually let's go and grab let's say this one here we'll go to modify sketch scale choose a point then that arrow and now you'll notice here that it is yeah it kind of yelling at me or warning me that it's select sketch points or work points as a reference scale so it's asking me where I want as a reference and you'll notice that it's not actually letting me pick the geometry that I'm using for the scale itself sorry that I'm trying to scale so in this case I'm gonna go and pick another piece of geometry that's outside of it and then now I can scale relative to that all right so that's generally speaking how that works these numbers that you see here by the way are going to be between 0 & 1 and you can't use 0 because that would make this infinitely small one is a hundred percent zero is like zero percent right but it's not possible so 0.5 is going to be 50 percent or like half size so to speak that's how scale works and offset is a great tool but it comes with some challenges so be a little wary of that let's go and look at how offset works so here I have a basic rectangle this could be like the picture frame example that we talked about earlier and if you wanted to go and make an offset or like a frame around this you could go and make a rectangle you could set a dimension between them you'll notice that I'm going to end up having to set two dimensions one over actually four one over there one over here one over here and one on the bottom as well now I can make these equal to each other and I could also set these up to be parameters those kinds of details will be covered in the next lesson on sketching the more advanced sketching but the key that I want to get to at this point is instead of having a bunch of dimensions what I can instead do is use this offset tool select the jam chair I want to offset and it'll automatically give you an even offset all the way around whether you're offsetting in or out doesn't matter it'll give you an even offset one thing to know is that you can use the flip button to reverse the direction which is just adding a minus in the offset position and then you can also turn off this chain selection button if you don't want it to be the entire perimeter so uncheck that and actually then re select what you want so in this case maybe I only want three sides and then I hit okay and it's going to give me the offset on only those three sides instead of all the way around so the chain selection button is great but typically you're gonna want to use that before you actually select your geometry all right let's move on we have move and copy this is gonna be a great way to be able to say you know what this object that I have is already great I want to make a copy of it or I want to move it so I'm gonna go and turn on the create copy button and I can also move this and I'll have a copy of whatever that geometry is I could put in exact values and I could also choose variety of different ways to position the new geometry so that's just a quick way to move and copy now just a little bit of a spoiler for when we're talking about 3d sketching which will be the next lesson is the move copy command also allows you to be able to move geometry in 3d as well so there's just a little teaser I'm not gonna go into the details yet but I can select let's say an individual point let's grab that point right there and I could use the translate command and I could actually move a point in space and you'll see that now I ended up actually with a 3d object or a 3d sketch instead of 2d but just be aware that that is possible excellent and that is the modify command thanks let's go back into our sketch we're not done now change parameters this is a great tool again this is something that we're going to cover in the next lesson for advanced sketching but just so you know the parameter table is a list of values that you can use for all your dimensions and things like that and you can make these very complex you could have like crazy equations and things like that but these parameter tables are fantastic especially when you end up with a model that is like a parametric model that's editable where you can change the length or the height or the width really easily this is the best way to do it we'll cover that in the advanced sketching lesson next week on Tuesday so here I have my sketch and so far I've shown you all the basic tools to create the geometry to turn some of the geometry into construction lines to add modifiers to that geometry so now let's talk a little bit about dimensions alright because we didn't really talk too much about them so whenever you're creating a sketch you're going to notice that the lines or circles or arcs whatever it happens to be are going to be blue by default as you start to add enough information to them they're gonna turn black and one of the ways that you can make that happen is by adding dimensions let's start from scratch we're going to go and start with basics actually we're going to design something I've been making too many blocky things let's make a bearing flange as our example so I'm gonna start off by drawing a quick circle I'm using C for a circle on my keyboard shortcut and we're gonna go and draw a circle at the origin so at the very center of my world just like I predicted and I explained it earlier my circle is blue alright so there's not there's no dimension to it there no constraints or anything it's just a circle whenever anything is blue in fusion you can actually select it and you can drag it to make it bigger or smaller anytime you want you can move it around typically you can change the size a whole bunch of stuff can change when you want to start to lock down the size you're gonna want to add a dimension the best way to do that is under create sketch dimension or the shortcut is the letter D on your keyboard I'm gonna go and pick the circle diameter and I move off to the side and then I select and it's gonna ask me or prompt me what size I want to have that circle and we'll go with 50 millimeters for now and you'll notice like I explained earlier that the circle now turned black and black now tells you that it's fully defined so let me explain with fully defined means fully defined means that everything in this circle is defined it is fully defined you don't have to guess what you want so in this case it knows that the circles position is centered on the origin the diameter is 50 there's nothing else you need to know about this circle it knows everything let's go and make a rectangle around the circle and you'll see how we're going to go and add dimensions to that one too so let's go and draw our Frek tangle I'm gonna go and draw a quick rectangle like so we're gonna go and put in a dimension the width of this rectangle is going to be let's say 100 the height of this rectangle is going to be let's say 75 and you'll notice that my rectangle is still blue not fully constrained and as a result of that I can select any of these lines and I could drag this rectangle around I can move this not fully defined now there are a couple of ways you can lock down the position and I'll just go and show you the easiest way I can take a corner like this and just drag it on to the origin and it'll snap into place and now I have my line work or my rectangle in this case also black all right it's fully defined as well and the reason that in general engineers like me end up liking fully defined sketches is because if you end up making a really complex model the last thing you're gonna want is to accidentally drag something a millimeter or two or five millimeters off to the side and have your entire model blow up on you so a fully defined sketch ensures that you're not going to accidentally move things around and therefore your models less likely to blow up generally speaking I like fully defined now a lot of people out there don't like fully defined sketches those people tend to be designers and artists because they like the ability to be able to drag things around and make it more freeform until they're happy with the way it looks visually then maybe they're willing to lock it down now you don't have to lock down all your sketches but I do want to explain what it means when you have a fully defined sketch by the way there's a good way to know if you have a fully defined sketch if you look under your sketches folder and you look at the sketch that you're editing if a little tiny red icon that looks like a lock symbol shows up that means that the sketch is fully defined that's what that icon mean if you don't have something fully defined let me go and undo that the position that I when I drag the rectangle now I have it back to where it was I have my lines or blue and you'll see that the sketch symbol instead of having the red lock has a tiny pencil the pencil means it's not fully defined so again it'll switch from a pencil to a lock as soon as you end up with a fully defined sketch like I just perfect so I added my dimensions between the width of my rectangle and also the height of my rectangle but I want to go and place this somewhere and I want to place it exactly in the center so now we need to start talking about something called constraints and by the way at least in my opinion a dimension is a form of constraint it's a way to constrain the geometry you're constraining it via a dimension it could be a width it could be a length it could be an angle it could be a diameter it could be a radius it could be all sorts of different things but it's still a way to define and constrain what you're going to get now there are other types of constraints that are more geometric based and those kinds of constraints are going to be under the constraints folder right over here and we're gonna go through each of these one by one and show you exactly what they all do and how to use them and I'm gonna start with the one that I want to use right now and we're gonna start with the actually let's start with let's make some centre lines actually and we're gonna tie it all together with what we've already learned so I'm gonna hide the origin because I don't need that I'm gonna go and draw a line I hit L for line and I'm gonna draw this line on purpose Brook it and I'm gonna hit escape to exit the line tool I'm gonna do that same thing again I'm gonna and by the way if for all of you that are on the keyboard with Brad right now this is the same method that I've seen Brad used quite a few times as well if you draw your line and you draw too close to horizontal it'll automatically add the constraint for you but if you want to make sure that you're more deliberate about putting in that constraint yourself then intentionally draw your line a little bit crooked like I am and then you could apply that constraint and be confident that it's the exact constraint you want so let's go and apply our constraints the first thing I want is this line to be vertical and I want this line to be horizontal and you'll notice that there is a constraint here that says horizontal slash vertical it does both and the reason it does both instead of just horizontal or just vertical is that you might actually be looking at something crooked like right now I'm looking at something straight on front to back but what if I want to twist my view slightly right what if I look at this from the side this one I said we wanted to make vertical but in this angle it kind of looks like it should be horizontal so the horizontal slash vertical tool is going to snap to whichever one is closest to right so whether it's vertical or horizontal doesn't matter so if I select a line like this blue line and I choose that horizontal horizontal constraint select horizontal slash a vertical constraint it'll go and snap it to be vertical and you'll notice an icon shows up right over here in the middle of the line and that icon looks like part of this icon here at the top half let's go and do the same thing for this line I select the line choose the horizontal slash vertical constraint I get this icon right over here next to my mouse and that is the bottom half of that icon those lines just snap to be horizontal and vertical now just like I talked earlier about construction I actually don't want these lines to split up my geometry like this it's actually going to make my life harder so I'm going to select that line and hit X for constraint for construction the same thing here as well and now I have exactly what I want and I have those those Center lines now there are a lot of different constraints you could use here so the one that I'm going to show you to start is the midpoint constraint we're going to do these a little out of order actually let's yeah we're gonna we're going to do these out order so if I want to use let's say a midpoint constraint one of my favorites by the way the midpoint constraint is going to lock down whatever choose to the midpoint of the second object so in this case I pick the point on the very top of this line and I pick on this horizontal line and it snaps them together so now you'll notice that I now have everything centered I still need them I could move this up and down but I can't move it left to right so everything is already constrained that's great it's exactly what I wanted but let's also lock this down vertically now I could do the same thing again I could choose this midpoint constraint choose the end of this line and then this line and it would do exactly what you'd expect it's going to snap this exactly where I want it but I want to show you another way to do it because like in most cases with fusion there are lots of ways you could do the same thing so under constraints you'll also see one here called symmetry and the way symmetry works is you pick the first two lines you want to make symmetrical then you select your symmetry line or your centre line last so let's go and do that I pick the very top line the very bottom line and then this center line and it automatically gives me the same result the only difference is that the symmetry constraint did not force the end of this line also be on this vertical line over here so there are a couple of ways I could do that and one of them will be another constraint I can go and select the end of this line and there's a constraint here called coincident and I could select that and this line and it snaps and it makes them coincident coincident means they take up the same place they coincide in the same exact position right so you can make points end up on lines you can make end points also on lines and points on arcs any number of cool thing so another example will go and show you is if I drew another line here and I wanted that to snap to this circle I could draw it like this select that point select the circle holding control and hit coincident now another cool trick that I think will help you is that you can select the constraint first and then the objects you want to constrain or you can select the objects and then the constraint now there are pros and cons of each and I'm gonna tell you what those pros and cons are if you select the objects first the filter box will will show you only the ones that you can actually do so if I select this point here and I hold control and I select the circle we go to our constraints you'll notice that many of these are grayed out like midpoint is grayed out collinear is grayed out symmetry curvature perpendicular parallel tangent horizontal vertical all of those are grayed out the only ones that are reasonable at this point are coincident equal I'll admit I don't know how equal makes any sense here but coincident definitely makes sense and I could then choose the coincident constraint so it just it's making it a little easier for me to pick the other method where you pick the constraint first is better in a slightly different scenario which is maybe you have lots of different objects you're trying to achieve the same result on so let's actually give another example let's go into another sketch here and let's say I drew a bunch of circles lots of circles I want to have these all be holes in some plate so I'll draw a quick plate and I want these holes to be the same size now one of the ways I could do that is I could select all of these circles I'm holding ctrl 6 select all of them and I can hit the equals constraint and it would just go and make them all equal but what it's doing in the background is it's creating an equal constraint between two circles at a time so it might be this circle and this circle then this circle and this one and then this one and that one or maybe it's actually this circle and that one then it's the original in this one the original and this one you don't have any control over how that's working so another way you could do this is you could go and choose the equal constraint first then choose these two circles then choose these two circles then choose these two and so on what it's really doing is it's continuing to use that equals constraint until you're done until you decide you're done if you're gonna do a lot of the same constraint over and over again I would recommend you actually use the constraint first and then select whatever the objects are with their pros and cons so let's look at the list again right we started by showing you horizontal and vertical I also showed you the symmetry constraint I also showed you the coincident constraint and I just showed you the equal constraint but we're not done there are quite a few other constraints here tangent is one that I really like so tangent is going to allow you to make an arc and another arc or an arc in a line be able to be tangent to each other so just barely touching so as an example here I can go and use tangent select the circle select this line and now you'll see that they are perfectly touching now this might not be an exactly practical case that you see here but I'll show you one that is practical but let's say you wanted to design some sort of slot so there is a slot tool so if you go back to those primitives you'll see that I have five different ways you could draw a slump but if for whatever reason you wanted to draw that manually you could just go and draw a rectangle draw a circle like that draw another circle like this over here and then I can go and apply that tangency constraint so this line and that circle this line and the circle then I'll do the same thing over on this end just like that and now what I might want to do is delete these lines and I also might want to trim my sketch these are exactly the same tools I've already shown you but now they're starting to come to life right I could trim this as well trim this zoom in trim that area right there and this one and now I have a slot created manually so the idea here is simply that the tangent constraint is a great way to be able to make things tangent it's not just for like circle and squares to be nice to next to each other but it could also work for arcs as well so just one more last one if I wanted to make an arc here and I wanted those two just barely touch each other again we're gonna go and use that tangent constraint perfect so let's go a little further equal we've already shown will make two objects equal parallel we'll make them parallel so if I have two lines like this and they are not exactly parallel use that parallel command choose those lines and now they are going to be parallel to each other our particular is pretty straight forward as well if you wanted this line to now be perpendicular to that one choose that perpendicular constraint choose those two lines and now you have the perpendicular constraint now the same is also going to be true for concentric that's going to be for two arcs or circles let's go and show you that so if I have two random circles and I want to make them concentric again I could choose those circles and they'll automatically be concentric relative to each other it doesn't have to be a circle to a circle it can also be an arc so here's an example because an arc is really just a partial circle so let's go and choose concentric arc and the circle and those will also be concentric just like that the same is also true with multiple arcs as well so let's go and do that one more time we're going to go and make another arc and we'll go and select those two and by concentric constraint and in this case they're overlapping each other quite a bit but they are indeed concentric collinear is going to be four straight things right to make them the same line so if you have a line like this and you have another line and you actually want them to be the same line select both of those and then choose the collinear option and they will be the same line right this is the it's like doing parallel but then also coincident together but if you wanted to be able to do this more manually you could go and let's angle that a little bit I could make these parallel right and now they're slightly off from one another then I could use let's say this line and this point and make them coincident and now this is essentially the same thing as collinear right but it's another way to do the same thing and lastly we have one for curvature and this is going to be for G two surface continuity this is like ultra smoothness so if you let's try to make this simple without getting too crazy if I have a box and I go and I add a fill it to it like this this transition from line to arc is called G one continuous or G one curvature it's a smooth transition but not as smooth as a G to smoothness write as light bounces off of the this geometry in particularly the 3d model that this would create it bounces off a little funny so curvature is a constraint that you could use mostly with like splines and kind of more advanced shapes to be able to make those super smoothness but generally speaking these constraints plus the dimension tool will allow you to fully define all of your geometry so that you can create anything that you'd like and that's really the key now these icons that you see here next to the lines those are the constraints themselves if at any point you're not happy with one of those constraints simply select the icon and hit the delete button righton to be clear that's not don't select the line and hit delete because that will delete the line select the actual constraint and hit the delete button and it'll delete for you once it's deleted the geometry itself isn't fully defined anymore and now you could go and modify it so once the horizontal or vertical constraint isn't there now we could go and pick an angle for that geometry you could do some pretty cool stuff here so the key really is start with the primitives that you like or a rectangle circle slots arcs whatever it is you want you modify it using the modifiers oh and you know what I completely forgot to show you fill it before I showed it a moment ago but a fill it is going to automatically create fellated corner right it's adding an arc in the corner for you automatically you're gonna go and modify the geometry until you're happy with it and it's going to be a collection of modify modifiers constraints and dimensions to be able to make everything that you want and so let's look at an example of a sketch that I created for project so here I have a tray and here I have this tray and you could see here I have my sketch and in my sketch I have dimensions I also have construction geometry and I have something else that we haven't talked about and you'll notice that I have this magenta line work in here and if any of you haven't seen the magenta line work the magenta lines are projected geometry so that's geometry that's from another sketch or a 3d model that you're going to use in this sketch so let's give you a practical example and we'll show you how this works I'm going to show you two scenarios of projected geometry so let's say you start off with a new design and we're going to go and create something like that bearing flames are we started with right so we have a circle we have a rectangle and I'll make this a little easier on me this time we're going to add fileted corners just like this and let's make this quite a bit smaller No fine and that's looking pretty good so now I have this geometry and I didn't even turn it into a 3d model yet it's still just a sketch but maybe I want to start to make another sketch and I want to have the positions of everything correctly so let's maybe make a construction plane so I'm gonna make an offset plane and we're gonna make this higher up in space maybe a hundred millimeters taller and we're gonna create a sketch on this plane now for this particular sketch we're gonna end up using the position of those arcs because I want to line up maybe holes through the model and I want to line them up right here so what I could do is I could actually project geometry from the first sketch into the second that's what the projected geometry is you'll find that under create project and then there's the project button and there are a variety of other projection tools and we'll cover those in the advanced sketching class next week on Tuesday but for now we're gonna stick with just the project button at the very top there are two options here specified entities which is really just you saying I want to pick exactly what I want to project or there's the e option for bodies which will take an entire object and we'll cover that in a moment for now we're going to go and use this purple option I'm going to choose that arc I'll choose all four of those arcs and I'll hit okay and what it now did is it projected the geometry on the plane that I was actually sketching so it's the same arc that you see down below but it's elevated by whatever the height is of that plane and you can see I have the arc itself and I also have the center so if all I care about is the center points I could make this all match up all I have to do is draw my circle or whatever it is my hole is gonna be and I'm drawing it at him like a like an angle like we're looking at angled I could also just go and look at this from above here I'm gonna go and set some constraints so maybe I want all four of these to be equal to each other and we can make that much smaller here we are I can go and put in a dimension for those circles maybe make this 25 millimeters something like that and I could now use this later to be able to make my cut now if something I project it happens to go through this alright let's go and project the center line from the last Alaska now I have this pink or magenta mind going across oh and by the way let's hide the original sketch so we were just looking at this new one again just like we were showing in the original any line that crosses another object is going to turn this into profiles I have this left half I have the right half if I don't want that to be the case I can select even that magenta rejected geometry and I could use the construction goggle and now I have that as construction geometry so that might allow me to be able to make some sort of geometry between these two reliefs you could also do the same thing with these arcs I'm just selecting them and hitting the X button on my keyboard and now those are construction geometry as well so this is a case where you have a projected geometry from another sketch and by the way they don't have to be on different planes so you can have all of this be on the same exact plane you could just work in one sketch plane for everything and just have a sketch that represents the holes you're going to drill through this model a separate sketch that's going to represent like the ribs you want to put on this model a separate sketch that's going to have all sorts of other things right one of the keys here is some people think that you should put absolutely everything in a mintue in your model into one sketch and I would say I don't exactly recommend that if your sketch is too complex it could slow down your performance quite a bit so don't feel like you have to have everything in a single sketch because you could always reuse something you created in the first sketch in another sketch like I'm showing you on the screen right now so here's another example you can also project geometry from the model itself from a 3d model let's go and grab our table example let's go and create a new sketch we're going to create a sketch on the centerline so let's go and grab our XY plane create a quick sketch and I'm gonna rotate this around so you could actually see this a little bit more clearly the plane that I want you to see is this plane and we could go and look at that a little bit better there we go there it is and I'm gonna go and make a projection of my model so I hit P on my keyboard that's the shortcut I'm still under that purple option for specified entities that allows me to pick do I want to project this flat face do I want to project this edge which by the way is looks like it's gonna give me exactly the same result right but I'm selecting two different things or I could say you know what I want a projection of the whole object the whole body and that would be this white option here this white solid body I can select the object and it's going to create a silhouette of that object and when I hit okay I have a magenta silhouette let's hide the body for a second it's actually hide all the previous sketches as well and here you could see that projection and it is a closed profile I can extrude this I could do all sorts of things with it and use this now one thing to keep in mind with projections that I haven't talked about yet is that projections are limited in your ability to extend them or to trim them so if I end up drawing a line that goes across this table and I want to trim this particular magenta line it's not actually going to let me do it will it let me trim the new geometry that I create around it absolutely so I can trim this edge and this edge and now I have a line that just goes across the magenta areas but I cannot trim the magenta line but keep that in mind that's really important you also cannot extend those magenta projected lines as well so let's go to modify and extend and you'll hover over one of these magenta lines like this one and you'll notice that it's not going to give me any preview or extending this line so just a little trick if you do need to extend or trim this line is you can make this a projected sorry it was already projected you can make this a construction line by hitting that X button then you could draw a new line in its place like this using those same constraints like I showed you earlier like this one collinear and now I have a new line that is representing the exact position of the original but this one is extended and I can drag this river I'd like that's one way to achieve it but cannot extend and you cannot trim any of those projected geometry to talk a little bit about like big-picture so far so this is a complex topic that's why we're doing a live stream all about like the basics to start right you start off with creating sketches let's talk big picture so there we are so you create your sketches on any flat face it could be a 3d model as a flat face it could be a plane it could be the default planes it could be new planes you create that sketch and then once you create that sketch you're creating a bunch of geometry rectangle circles arcs lines they're all vectors they're all mathematical based you can modify those lines you create by extending them by trimming them by adding dimensions to them by adding constraints to them and once you end up with the geometry that you want then you're gonna turn that into 3d so when I talked earlier about how sketching is really the foundation of all things 3d this is why right if you have trouble creating the 3d geometry that you want take a look at your sketching practices you're having trouble sketching it's not going to be a big surprise you're gonna have trouble with BD modeling as well all right so really focus on that foundation how'd that Foundation be strong so that everything else that you're building on top of it is gonna be rock-solid as well right your sketching is going to be something that you're gonna have to work on your practice practice makes perfect and the best way is actually to model things that you've already modeled and remodel them over and over and over again you'll get better and better at them every single time you do is keep in mind that it's always a combination of those dimensions and constraints to be able to get the geometry you want whether it happens to be a table or it's going to be a bearing flange or a medical device or a 3d printed part for your own home anywhere and everywhere is going to involve some sketching so I urge you to practice your sketching and if you liked what you saw in the today's video please make sure to like this actual video there's a like button should hit that like button share this video with other people as well and if you also liked what you saw this week then stay tuned for next week Tuesday thee I don't see the date in front of me but next Tuesday at 9:00 a.m. Mountain Standard time we're gonna be back with another live stream on sketching this one is going to be advanced we're gonna cover everything from 3d sketching to all the different ways you could project geometry there are several other ones I didn't show you yet and we'll cover some more complicated geometries like splines house blind handles work and a whole lot more so stay tuned next week it has been my absolute pleasure to talk to you today about fundamentals of sketching and don't forget if fusion 360 you can make anything thank you so much for your time today you

Channel: Autodesk Fusion 360

Views: 24,779

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, 3D Sketch, 3D Sketching, 2D Sketching, Sketching, Vector Sketching, 2D Sketch, Jason Lichtman

Id: wvp5dO-2Q88

Length: 62min 40sec (3760 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 31 2020