360 Live: Fusion 360 and Furniture Design: Parameters for Production

like that so and then and then jonathan's jig i'm gonna make fit my table saw nice so we'll start with that after your intro and stuff so love it just wait for it can you all mute yeah cool hey there we go we're live awesome um hey everybody how's it going hopefully uh everybody's getting settled in uh i have to mute myself uh hear myself multiple times um so thanks for for joining i hope to see some of the folks from yesterday in today's live stream uh let me stop sharing so you can see jonathan and brad's faces so we're back again for day two of the furniture design and manufacturing workshop so just a reminder for for those who are here yesterday and maybe just a little update for those who are here now uh this is a week long and this the whole opportunity for us is just to speak candidly and pragmatically about how to use fusion 360 in furniture design and manufacturing the the topics we'll cover range from yesterday's which was like basic jigs and fixtures and joints and assemblies and what are good workflows with using outsourced parts today we're actually going to dive deeply into parameters for production so we're going to be covering some pretty complex stuff in here today but we're going to try to approach it um really reasonably and and pretty basically but jonathan and i will be on chat fielding all the questions that come through i'm going to show you what you can end up doing with parameters but as we walk through just know the demo we're going to have to demo it from a perspective of some of you are advanced parameters users some are intermediate and some are probably beginners so we're hoping that we capture everybody but with that said don't worry about you know asking super hard questions we'll figure it out if we don't know it and and if we do we'll let you know so again my my co-hosts today are are jonathan and brad i'm assuming maybe some people weren't here yesterday so we're going to just do a really quick intro uh of each of us and then we'll just dive right into it so i'm trent i'm your host all week long uh my background is in architecture furniture design and manufacturing i actually own and operate a san francisco based furniture manufacturing business called lahoma furniture and essentially what we're working on is consumer-driven manufacturing so our clients configure our componentry how they want it and then we actually automatically update our manufacturing process through our network cnc machines i've been making furniture for maybe 15 years now and love it uh you know i i really do focus on the business aspect i think that this week is going to be really important for businesses who want to you know maximize revenue and maximize throughput minimize waste but i think it's also going to be really good for the hobbyist people who are building things in their garage or people who are wanting to scale their business that's the intention so you know i'm really excited to chat i'm going to actually have jonathan introduce himself and then brad will follow up with you and then we'll just dive into it yeah so i'm jonathan odom i my background is covers a lot of different ground i've done manufacturing film special effects exhibit design architecture product design so furniture just i've kind of had my hand on anything having to do with making things um spent several years at instructables making content there now i'm on the fusion 360 team as a community manager and that means a lot of different things and one of them is workshops like this my name is brad talas i've been in the cad industry probably 25 plus years now basically woodworking is a hobby of mine so i did a lot of furniture design loved working with wood i also used to turn alabaster stone on my lathe i built my own scene cnc machine in the garage in fact you'll see an example of that here in a little bit but just basically using fusion to help me produce parts produce furniture designs and you'll get to see that today awesome thanks brad so i i see a couple folks from yesterday i'm super excited um again ethan athen not sure uh looks like uh michelle or michael or sorry i'm i'm from oklahoma so my pronunciation of anything outside the midwest is pretty bad uh but okay so parameters i'm going to tell you real quick what we're going to cover today um in regards to what we were talking about yesterday so yesterday we got some really good questions about using formulae to reference other formulae or using things in production parameters is complicated but it's completely manageable it's completely manageable i think the best way to approach parameters is to think about it from a building process so when i'm looking at this piece of furniture that we build for la homa i started from kind of the base like what do i do you know what is my base going to look like and so i started parameterizing there everything grows off of one another and everything is referenced off of one another so i always like to put it in that context when you're using parameters for your production runs think of it like you would if you were just making a cut list and work through it step by step and by the time you're done you have everything figured out and everything is linked so this is one of our production pieces and i'm going to go ahead and take off the drawer faces so you can see now i will be honest i'm going to show you some of our parameters here and it's going to change everything's going to work and down in the bottom right here you're going to see some errors pop up those errors are actually referencing these surface spaces so this face is actually from this surface that i created you can't really parameterize complex organic surfaces like this that well you can but it's really tedious and really really difficult and so i just wanted to call that out because as we go through it you'll see a couple errors pop up understand that i know that those are known errors just like in the building process you know that you're going to have x stock for x parts but there's this always this maverick right like there's always this one thing where you're like i'm not entirely sure and so parameters helps you get there but just keep that in mind so i'm going to go ahead and say i use a lot of shortcuts so i just hit s to bring up the shortcuts and i'm going to change parameters now when i do my parameters for all my pieces i actually have hundreds of parameters in my model parameters because remember fusion is a parametrically confined software so anytime you dimension something or give something a number it logs it but the cool thing is is that you can always go back to these favorites and so when i go to change anything on this but ethan had a question it was ethan yesterday about kind of linking formulai to formulai and so i wanted to just hit that real quick so let's say we had a sketch and we have this sketch and basically we wanted to mention actually i'm going to do it this way we want to dimension this now historically if i applied in a dimension to this it would change in that parameters dialog box it would become part of my model parameters so i'll just go ahead and do that real quick i'll just define that and say that that's that's the definition so if you go in here now you see that i have this sketch and i have this parameters now one of the most recent updates has actually gotten us to where we can do name parameters in canvas so if i hit d for dimension and i want to dimension this i want to call this overall length and i just want to say it equals 6 inches and yes i'm using inches sorry again from oklahoma got to deal with it um so then let's come in here and say i want my overall width to be it is case sensitive by the way we're going to do overall width equals three so these are parameterized now so when i now open up my parameters dialog box i'm gonna go ahead and close model because you'll just see a bunch now i have these favorites right like i know that i'm always going to want to reference these because i gave them a name so let's say and this is directly speaking to ethan's questions yesterday so let's say you've done a a base right like and you want to start referencing other things off that base if i come in here and do parameters again let's say just to keep naming conventions super rudimentary overall length 2 equals overall length divided by two and that's going to give you that so you can kind of guess here that if i go into parameters dialog box kind of reposition this if i change this to four it's going to automatically change this to two now one of the things i want to remind everybody at this phase parameters when they're not constrained can be completely unruly so one of the most valuable tools for using parameters complexly in a complex situation is doing things through constraints so let's say for some odd reason i always wanted those aligned i used the collinear constraint to align this line off of this line now if anything changes with that then it'll always be co-linear so if i change the if i added overall width to to this what is that overall length one you know let's just say plus one now sorry i gotta do this [Music] because it's case sensitive so basically now it's gonna be that right so essentially what we're going to do so it's always co-linear now when you get even more complex if we do the dimension we're going to do overall link 3 equals overall length 1 you know i don't know plus four or sorry plus overall length two close the parentheticals now and i think that this was the question athen had yesterday is like what happens when you start getting referenced formuli can you make formulai from other input data so here kind of back to where i was talking about earlier when we're getting to sorry i'm getting crazy with my clicks so now you can see here that like overall link three is this formula and the reason that this is super powerful is that when we actually get into really complex parameters with this you can see i have like my short support for my you know base depth support is the shell depth minus two inches or whatever like as i'm in there i'm making aesthetic changes i'm making manufacturing changes or whatever i want to be able to reference pre-identified things and what that helps me do is keep my favorites list short and searchable and easy to navigate so this particular one now a heads up this is a big file i have a whole old computer and i'm double streaming so this is going to take a second to calculate but let's say i have a customer they call up say hey we love the credenza but you know we we need it 62 inches we go ahead and say hey no problem we go in we make the order and then we're going to do 62 inches and what you'll see is this is going to shrink but when it shrinks pay attention to the overall drawer links the center spacer the you know everything that goes together is all going to kind of switch together right so all of a sudden i've just parameterized this whole thing based on a customer's request for a 62-inch long credential now that's cool you're probably like yeah that's you know that's fine like length and width that's cool but this is where parameters start to play a massive role in customization for your clients let's say i have a client who hits us up and they're like hey and these are the errors again based on the based on that wavy drawer front like don't fret so basically let's say a customer calls us up and is saying hey we want to do a run of your credenza for wholesale we want you know 15 and we want five at 62 5 at 82 etc etc etc or however you do your business maybe this is just an industrial or interior design company calling you up specifying for a new project they're working on but then they say but we don't like the four inch drawers for the top two all right that's fine we can come in and make the top one six like whatever that is and you'll see now this is going to move that did you see the middle and the bottom were associated to that top so now i can come in and start just being super progressive with how i make these changes now obviously you know parameters are bumpers and sometimes you can break those bumpers right so obviously there are something like if i wanted to make that bottom drawer an inch well that's going to break right like no one's going to have a one inch drawer you might have a one inch drawer face for like a pull out cutting board or something but everything is confined so therefore there are limits but those limits are pretty hard to hit if you set your files up properly so now what i want to focus on is all right so we've we've dug these links we've changed our drawers we've got everything dialed in and customer calls us back up and says hey the 10 inch brass you know spacers on the bottom are cool but we really want them to be you know eight inches well we'll come in and we'll just say okay i want these to be eight now before i do this i want to show you something so our shell so this is where the spacers sit you can see kind of here that i've modeled everything when i go in here and change this all of a sudden those are going to move and if i show the shell again and go back to the parameters view you can see that that spacing is different and you can see when i co these are the that's that surface that i have in there but you can see so when you over constrain these things things can break but when you build constraints on top of constraints efficiently especially if you're focusing on referencing other constraints you start to get this kind of networked model that's just like if you made it by hand like if i were gonna sketch all this out on a drafting board i'm gonna i'm gonna do it the same way right so that's that's really the one thing i want you to take away from today is that parameters can be used in an incredibly powerful way but look at them like you're building a piece of furniture in your shop with your hands in a sketchbook and a piece of paper you know a pencil or whatever you know that the value here is that you can have the consistency and repeatability in manufacturing and you can start to cut down on your label labor of actually you know working within like interior design firms or architecture firms or whatever and and i've seen parameters used you know so much more complexly than this on really small things and really big things and for a lot of us industrial designers who started out you know you might be really used to grasshopper right parametrically confined things you know this is an opportunity there where you can start to get some of these kind of workflows with this parameters dialog box so i'm going to quit sharing i'm going to kick it over to brad and he's actually going to show you how you can actually start to build out uh uh you know case work or something like that from the get-go so brad you're gonna take it away and i'll jump into the chat and field some questions sure i'm gonna go ahead and share my screen i'm actually gonna start out with since this whole series is about like furniture design and jigs and fixtures i'm just going to show a couple i've been working on so this is that cnc machine i was talking about that i built in my garage and i'm just going to kind of scroll through here's a prime example so you know this the local school asked me to build some podiums for them and i the first time i did it was all by hand i didn't have my cnc machine i didn't have fusion i was cutting things out on the bandsaw i was hand routering which was really scary with some of these small parts and a couple of the teachers were like hey how the top broke off and i was like man that's awful so when they came and asked me to build another 12 for another school i modeled it in fusion and you'll notice i even did some simulation like if a teacher is putting their elbows on this you know what does that do and then i used the cnc machine infusion to actually create these jigs these hold down jigs so i didn't have to use the band saw in fact i was like well i i need to chamfer these edges i even used the cnc machine to chamfer the edges didn't even have to touch it with sandpaper what took me two months the first time i was able to complete in two weeks using a fusion 360 and a cnc machine here's another example we ripped the carpet off of our stairs my wife wanted to put these wooden caps on there now these aren't cheap and as everybody knows there's not a square corner in a house so you know all of these had weird angles i'm like how am i going to cut these to fit perfectly because i don't want any kind of a gap so i modeled up this jig cut it out on my cnc machine and i'm able to you know set it between the stair clamp this thing down take it out to my chop saw basically butt my blade up against that angle of that jig whether it was one and a half degrees or three degrees or whatever and you can see like there's not even a gap i didn't have to use caulking or anything they just fit like a glove so here's another example of you know using fusion 360 to create jigs this is not really furniture design but kind of i even used fusion 360 to build a a set for a play at the school they needed it to look like a pirate ship or something like that but they were going to have a whole bunch of students standing on it so i had to make sure it was strong enough for you know 10 hundred pound students or whatever they are so i was able to design it infusion i even rendered it and showed it to the producer and saying this is what it's going to look like i was able to give exact quantities of how many two by fours et cetera et cetera we ran simulations to make sure it was strong enough and we were able to build it in a weekend this whole set that you see here which is kind of cool and then lastly even things like remodeling your house this isn't really a jig or a fixture but it's more like showing somebody what is it going to look like how many pieces of tile am i going to have to cut these three images over here on the left are fusion 360 renders i even took pictures of the tile off of the web page and applied them as a material we tried you know what does the tile look like vertically what does it look like horizontally we decided we liked vertical better and i knew exactly how many pieces of tile i needed to cut and so you can kind of see the the finished product or these three pictures over here which is kind of hard to take pictures in a in a bathroom but just a couple examples of what you can use fusion 360 for not only making jigs like hold down jigs for the cnc machine or that stair jig i mean that was a lifesaver for me um after watching jonathan yesterday i liked his taper jig so much i'm like dude can i have a copy of that so he shared the link with me i actually have a fairly large contractor saw and so because jonathan did such a good job with these parameters so here's his jig and you can see things in here like length base width etc well i'm going to change this from 20 to 32 for example and watch what happens when it updates so you'll see it actually changed the length all of his marking dots the grooves everything updated and i actually my fence my table is a little bit wider so i'm gonna do instead of eight and a half i'm gonna make it 12 and that will update also um so there we go i'm able to you know use his design and make this jig work for me on my table so great job jonathan on that okay and here's actually for example just really quick here is that stage design that i was showing the pictures of you can see all the the plywood and the two by fours and all that kind of stuff in there and here's the bathroom and you'll notice you know i didn't really care about like his tile sticking out the back or whatever i was trying to get more what is it going to look like i tried different colors etc downloaded you know a cabinet and a toilet from grab cat or whatever but i was able to visually see what is this thing going to look like and create realistic renders so you can do some pretty cool stuff okay so today what we are going to do let me uh get into this bookcase here we're going to do things like maybe your company designs built-ins um in fact we're gonna we're gonna use this example here where you have a specific design that you wanna create you go into somebody's house you measure what that's gonna be like and instead of remodeling or re-measuring every single piece it would be cool if using infusion and using the parameters you just have to type a couple numbers and everything updates so here's a prime example a little bit more more advanced than just a built-in so here's a bookcase right and you know it's got the flutes going down the middle different wood types and etc i'm going to come into here and let's just change our parameters and just like trent showed you can create different parameters heights depth width and then you'll notice i even have one in here called ply for what thickness material is this can be made out of but i could come in here and say instead of you know 22 inches i want it to be 28 inches wide i'll just go ahead and click and notice even this curved piece updated right all the shelves are the right length all the pieces are the correct size everything like that and as you'll see later on this week i can even arrange these out for like a cut sheet on a cnc machine or whatever that might be so using this kind of an example we're going to walk through how do i create you know a shelving unit that fits into a very specific location using parameters and this is kind of the finished product so you can kind of see what we're going to get to so i'm going to come into the parameters and just like trent was showing you can have some favorites there's some formulas in here and you'll notice even some some special parameters like shelf number it's not a distance it's like how many shelves do i want well i want to have four shelves for example and you'll see my four shelves updated including the little dados in the side panels uh maybe i want to change the depth from you know 18 to 12 or whatever and you'll see that that updated accordingly so this is kind of the power behind it okay so let's go ahead and kind of create this you can kind of see the process on how you would go about doing this so what i typically do is like if i know that this shelving unit has to fit in an envelope it has to fit in a certain size and you know i go into a person's house i measure that that opening that envelope so i'm going to start by just creating a new component and i'm just going to call it envelope and you'll see why we're going to do this as we go through so as my component i'm going to create a sketch now i like to kind of keep things symmetric so i'm going to create a centered rectangle i'm going to zoom out here just a little bit so i'm going to create a centered rectangle here and just like trent was showing earlier i can type things in so right now it's saying it's 15 inches well i'm going to say width is equal to 24 and you see that kind of updated real quick i'll do another dimension here and i'll say like height is equal to 72. and now if i go into my parameters you're gonna see that it automatically created those as my favorites in here okay then i'll just go ahead and extrude this guy and here's another tip i really like to show is if you pre-select something and right mouse click it shows you the commands that make sense so i can extrude this now how far do i want it to go well i'm going to say depth is equal let's just say 16 in this case and again if i bring up my parameters you'll see now depth has been added in there this is really cool i can type these in as i'm going and what's really kind of cool about parameters is i can just type in numbers and then come back and say you know i want to be able to change that depth so instead of just typing in 16 i could say make this a depth variable and that will allow me to change it to 18 to 20 whatever i want to do so here's kind of the the area that this is going to fit into so i'm going to let's change the appearance of this i'm just going to change the opacity of this to be like kind of like 50 percent so i can kind of see through it now i'm going to create a new component called side i'm going to start with my side panel so let's just do that so you can see side is active i'm going to click on this envelope and create a sketch on that envelope and i'm just going to project this box because i know my side panel is basically that side so i can project as a specified entity or the whole body i'm going to go ahead and just project the whole body and you can see it created that purple material or purple outline that jonathan was talking about yesterday and now i can come in here and say extrude i'm going to extrude in the into it because i want my solving unit to fit inside this envelope right now how far well i can see it's a negative number and so i'm going to say like minus 0.75 okay now this is one of those real mcmahon i might want to make that a variable so i'm going to bring up my parameters and here is the extrude and there's that 0.75 that you you saw let me type in well i want to make that a parameter so i'm going to come up to this user parameters hit that little plus symbol i'm going to just create one called ply i want it to be 0.75 in this case i'll say ok and now instead of this i can say minus p as i start to type in you can see it's going to find all of my variables that have p in it and right now it's only ply so i'm going to go ahead and click on that guy hit enter and now we can see that this number is being driven by ply so if i were to come in here and say make that two inches you're going to see that that is now much thicker and it's being driven by this plywood in fact i'm going to go ahead and make that a a saved parameter so let's just do the 0.75 and this is what i was talking about you can add these whenever you want and go back and and change existing dimensions to be driven by a parameter okay so i now have that piece of wood i'm going to go ahead and turn off the envelope i don't really need to see it right now we're going to come back to that in a little bit and i'm just going to put a dado down the back of this so i'm going to create a sketch on this face just draw a rectangle again i'm going to project the body i like to project the geometry and the reason i'm projecting is because it's linked to the body so if the body changes thickness where my rectangle is is caught to is going to also change so i'm just going to draw a rectangle here some random size i don't really care and then i can come in and say well this is going to be a quarter inch thick a quarter inch back plywood but i want the this dado to be a very specific distance in fact i want it to be half of whatever my plywood is so i'm going to come in here and say make this ply divided by two and then when i hit enter you can kind of see how that updated and what's powerful about this is if i change this to half inch plywood that's going to become a quarter inch if i change it to 1 inch plywood it's going to become half an inch and i don't have to go back and change all of these dimensions down the road it's being kind of programmed by all these variables that we're using so i'm going to go ahead and extrude this now here's another tip how far do i need to extrude this well i want it to go the whole distance so instead of clicking on a face or typing in some number like 72 i'm going to say go all the way through or i could say go to an object and pick this back face for example i'm going to say just go all the way through so that what that means is if i change the height to this to 60 to 120 that dado groove is always going to go all the way through okay so the next thing i'm going to do is create a um the dados for the shelves so i'm just going to pick on this front face here create a sketch and i'm just going to draw a rectangle somewhere like so okay just kind of guessing um i want again i want this to be very specific so i'm going to make this the thickness apply and we can see it kind of update it a little bit i also want it to be two inches from the bottom of the bookcase here and just like before i want this to be ply divided by two and so there is my groove that i'm going to use extrude again how far i could say all or i could say to object and here's another trick that jonathan showed yesterday which i love if you click and hold it brings up like this probe that you can kind of probe through so the first face it hits is this face the second face it hits is that back face so i didn't even have to rotate or turn parts on or off so i just clicked and held for about a second so this is going to always create the dado to this back face just a couple little tricks there okay now i have this little dado groove i'm going to do an appearance i kind of like to make it look like what it's supposed to look like let's just do maybe some 3d wood pine or whatever you kind of see it makes it look a little bit more realistic that looks pretty good and then i'm going to i want to create these shelves up the side okay so i'm going to use the pattern command i'm going to do a rectangular pattern and let's pattern a feature we're going to pattern this extrude feature right here so it's gonna notice i didn't have to select a whole bunch of faces or anything like that it's gonna pattern that i tell it which direction i want it to go i'm just gonna pick one of these vertical lines and then i can start to drag now the preview doesn't show up really well so i'm going to drag down so you can kind of see what's going on here but it's basically creating three patterns of this little dado groove so i'm going to start to drag up okay now i want it to be whatever the height of my shelf unit is whether it's 90 inches whether it's 60 inches so here's something kind of cool i'm going to say distance i'm gonna type in height and i get a quick preview of this one kind of floating up in space which is kind of weird okay so why is that well i started that dado two inches up from the bottom of the shelf and by using height it's basically adding that on so this is what trent was talking about you can do formulas in here so i'm gonna say height minus 2 okay that's closer but it's still not quite it looks like the thickness of plywood is sitting on top so i'm going to add in another one so i'm going to say minus ply and now you kind of see it disappear as soon as i say okay it machined that dado there there's one in the middle and there's one down here so we started two inches up and yeah it's a little bit of thinking there but look at the power behind that no matter what the height of this side panel is there's always going to be a dado at the top and there's always going to be a two you know a dado two inches from the bottom at the bottom okay and if i come back and change these parameters you'll notice i don't have like a shelf count or something like that and maybe i want to change the shelf count so this is what trent was showing earlier these model parameters so here's all the parameters that have to do with my envelope so there's the sketch you can see it's using width and height et cetera et cetera my extrude is using depth here is the side and i know i did a pattern so i'm going to expand open this pattern and here's this count how many in that direction well i don't want to have to keep finding this and changing it so i'm going to come in here and create a user parameter and i'm going to call this shelf number so i i'll say shelf underscore number now notice the unit says inches well i don't want a distance i want a number and so if i click on this you're going to see all of these options length angles mass i mean it is pretty amazing all the stuff that it's in here that you can change but i want to do a no unit so i'm going to just say shelf number no unit and let's do 5 for example okay so i now have a user parameter called shelf number quantity of 5. i'll come down here to my pattern and instead of this i'm going to start typing in shelf number i hit ok and look what we got we now have 5 right and i can change this to my heart's content like trent was talking about the customer say i want six shelves i want you know i could even design it so instead of the number of shelves i could do shelf spacing or whatever so that would be a distance for example okay so i now have that and i'm going to go ahead and turn on my envelope and let's mirror this side so i'll just say mirror what's the component that side component what's my mirror plane and you'll notice because i started with a centered rectangle everything is kind of symmetric right so i can click on this plane now unfortunately the envelope is in the way but instead of turning it off i'm just going to click and hold and i can actually pick that y z plane we see the mirror happen i'll say okay and because this is a mirror whatever i do on the left side is obviously going to happen on the right side okay i'll turn off the envelope again now i want to create some kind of a back so i'm going to create a new component we'll call it back and i'm just going to kind of look at the the back side i can tell by the the cube here i'm going to create a sketch on this back face and once again i'm going to use projected geometry and this is going to really help me out because no matter what happens to that back that sketch is going to stay on that back face so i'm going to hit p for project i'm going to do bodies and jonathan alluded to this yesterday which is a really cool tip he wanted to capture information of this body but he didn't want it to be part of the actual um profile i'm sorry i couldn't think of a word there so i'm going to project this as construction geometry so watch what happens when i do that i'll project that guy and you can kind of see that the dashed lines when i kind of hover over this it's projecting construction geometry if i turn that guy off sure enough you can see their dashed geometry that won't be part of my profile so now i can come in and say i want to create a rectangle i want it to be regular object line so i'm going to turn off construction and i want it to go maybe from the top here but i want to leave it open down at the bottom so you know people can get a vacuum cleaner or duster or something like that down there so i'm going to go ahead and just catch to there finish my sketch notice actually let me slow down here a little bit i click on this profile and it's all one object and i didn't have to come in and pick all these little extra little areas so projecting construction geometry cool tip of the day hopefully you if you didn't know about that you will use it in the near future um so i'm going to go ahead and extrude and let's just do um quarter inch and i'm going to do it in the negative direction in this case i wanted to kind of go into that data that we created i could even create another variable called back ply and and jonathan mentioned this yesterday you go buy your plywood and it's not quite you know three quarters of an inch or it's not quite a quarter of an inch you could come in and tweak with that and all of my dadoes would update in this case i'm just going to say it's a quarter inch i'll say okay i'll add that appearance to it real quick just drag that on there i'll say okay now what i like to do is um i like to test to make sure everything's working the way i would expect it to so i'm going to go into my parameters and we can see the width is 24. well let's let's type in 32 and you can see how the back updated um let's change maybe the depth from 16 to 24 and sure enough we can see that updated um let me undo back here and let's just do maybe a shelf change instead of five let's do six and sure enough that updated and i still have that data across the top so hopefully you guys are seeing the power behind what we can do here so let me undo back to five okay so i basically have this enclosure and if i turn on my envelope you can see it's right inside this envelope and that's kind of allowing me to really visually see what is the opening where this is going into and maybe we measure it at 24 and we would come in here and say you know i want a little bit of some slop or whatever so i would come in here and say my width is you know 23.5 right and it would just move that in just a little tiny bit and all my stuff has updated okay so the last thing i'm going to do here is the shelves so um again going to create a shelf component so let me go new component call it shelf um hopefully everybody's using components i love using components it keeps things much more organized it's really useful especially when you're doing like drawings um you know assemblies and joints all that kind of stuff and and notice i haven't even created a joint yet like a rigid joint or a slider joint or anything like that this is all just based off of existing geometry so um okay so i'm going to again create a sketch so let me do it here i want to use the information where these datas are so i'm going to project again i'm going to project the body and let's do it as construction geometry so i'm going to project both of those bodies i'll say okay and then i'm going to create a rectangle now i'm going to do something a little bit different here i'm going to again kind of think i'm thinking ahead a little bit um i obviously i could just trace over and connect the dots but that basically means and let me turn this to regular geometry that basically means this shelf is an exact fit and there's no tolerance or slop or anything like that and maybe i down the road i want to add in some tolerance into here so i'm actually going to create my rectangle just kind of off to the side a little bit like that okay then i can come in and say i want this shelf to be the thickness of plywood right and you see it kind of update accordingly and then i want this edge to be collinear with this edge right here no matter where this edge is whether we widen or shrink the base i want that to be that particular distance this is going to make more sense here in just a little bit when we start talking about the tolerance okay so i'll go ahead and extrude now here's a neat example this piece of plywood is sticking inside the back right because that quarter inch dado so i don't want to extrude to depth i want to extrude to an object so instead of a distance i'm going to say to object and we'll just click that back face there and if i look at it kind of from the side here sure enough we can see that it's extruding to this back piece of plywood and not all the way the full envelope the full depth okay hopefully that makes sense i'll say okay throw an appearance on here say okay okay so now what i want to do is basically pattern these shelves or this shelf i should say so go into rectangular pattern now instead of features i'm going to come in here and say let's pattern the shelf component okay what's the direction i'm going to say up i'll go ahead and start to drag so i can kind of visually see which of these is updating i can see it's this guy right here i'm going to leave it to extent and just like we did with the dados i'm going to say well i want to go to the height okay but when we do that we see that issue again i'm like okay obviously i need to come down two inches and i need to come down even the thickness of whatever plywood is and now we can see that sure enough that's sitting right in that dado and then the um quantity instead of typing in five right i'm going to start typing in my shelf number so there i type in s there's my shelf number i click on that and instantly we have five shelves and believe it or not in what 20 minutes 30 minutes we've created this built-in that's fully parameterized so now i could come in and make some changes so i'll come into my change parameters and like i said before okay maybe maybe the height is 80. so we go to 80 and we can see that that grew maybe the width is 36 and the depth is 12 and the number of shelves is um six right and everything is updating i'll say okay let's turn off um i could even organize this let me just do a new component and i'll call this you know shelf assembly and i could put all of these shelves into that shelf assembly that way i could turn those all on and off really quickly really easily but sure enough you can see all of those dados let me activate this guy are still there etc etc okay now i mentioned this whole tolerance thing the these fit perfectly inside this dado in reality i might want a little bit of a gap there how am i doing time okay i'm gonna have to keep this short and sweet but basically what i would do is i'm gonna create a new parameter so i'll come in here and maybe i'll just call it tall or tolerance or whatever i'm just going to say you know 0.05 or something like that okay so i now have this user parameter called tolerance now i want to use that well so let me go back to when i was creating this side so i'm going to activate my side component and notice my timeline is getting a little complex which sketch do i edit what do i change i have no idea well i'm going to go ahead and activate this side okay and notice my timeline is much simpler here so i'm going to go ahead and edit this little sketch right here and this is where we defined that data and remember we used plywood as the variable well i'm going to say plywood plus t-o-l and you can see i start to type in t and watch that rectangle grew a little bit i'll finish my sketch and there you can see because i made my shelf the thickness apply it's going to be 0.75 and all of my grooves have updated to have that little bit of tolerance right and i did .05 it's kind of a big number but that way you can really visually see what's going on so you know we go to the lumber yard we end up buying some plywood and instead of 0.75 it's 0.76 i click on that everything updates let me hit home here real quick we can see i still have that tolerance in there but if i were to measure we can see that my plywood is .76 in thickness so using that idea that's kind of how i did this bookcase i you know created um width and depth and height this arc right here is a three-point arc that goes from one point to another and so no matter where how tight or wide that is it's always going to be a three-point arc i could change the width of this piece here and these grooves will space accordingly you know all that kind of stuff so pretty pretty cool stuff what you can do with parameters okay so trent that's what i had is there uh any questions no that's that's awesome brad your timing is perfect i think uh if you want to stop sharing and maybe we'll take this opportunity to field any questions i know there's a lot to cover and the hope today was to to to kind of give you all an opportunity to see how you can use it from like maybe a casework perspective for mass produce ability or a custom furniture process or whatever we've been getting a lot of great questions but i think you know now if you've got any throw them out we'll see if we've got an answer to them um and or workflow questions too like there's been some questions i i saw a couple folks said you know um i think back in the beginning i don't know if i'm gonna be able to find who said it but uh you know they use it for their lumber dimensions right for actually dimensioning what material you're going to use so for instance i'm renovating an old house right now i actually parametrically modeled up all the decking that i use and i started with two by sixes two by twelves you know all those things so that's a great workflow um maybe jonathan if if you could keep an eye on chat um i know some folks definitely said that they're getting a lot of out of these workshops i love to hear that i was really hoping that people would um you know this next so tomorrow is going to be kind of an industrial design approach to how to use surfacing and things like that um and t-splines for more organic shapes we're actually going to be showing an iteration of the credenza we showed today and uh and a kind of a a chair and then thursday we're going to be focusing on the manufacturing side of things like how do you make a custom tool how do you design a custom tool in fusion using sketch geometry so that you can get one made so you can do custom molding custom you know you know shape tools or anything like that which is for me a massive tool that no one really ever talks about right like because the workflow is if you're doing custom molding and let's say you have a bs like rover and you want to do some some you know molding for an architectural job you're going to design your tool send it out and then they're going to make it for you and then that's the easiest way to do it or you're going to do it like if you're doing shaping if you're using a shaper to do molding you're going to draw it out and set it up so you can do all that infusion and you can simulate it you can make sure that it's going to work perfectly and you can optimize your tool path so that's thursday and then friday is going to be us three again and we're going to be talking about drawings we're going to be talking about fusion teams and it looks like maybe some of these questions we're getting outside of the context of today's maybe we can even field some of those so um yeah i think uh for me like you know does anybody in the event like anybody watching do you have just something really that you're curious about or um let's see what is this on the back piece i didn't understand how the back is parametrically stuck to the side pieces yeah so that was a great great question that's all about the projected geometry and so let me turn off the back really quick so and then i'll turn off the shelves too so you can kind of see so i i used this face and i created the sketch on that face and i projected that geometry and when i'll just do it again when you project so i'm going to hit p for project notice this option right here says projection link what that means is and i just clicked on that face it's going to project that no matter where that body is it's going to use that so when i created my rectangle for the back i captured like i think this corner right here and and this other corner over here for example so no matter where those go that projected geometry is going to grow and be linked with it also and so the back the extrusion has to stay that distance i didn't have to create a parameter for the back called back width minus ply divided by two or anything like that i'm using projected geometry in this case okay so great question i also noticed somebody asked a question about like can you parameterize curved designs and stuff and you absolutely can um you know here's a really quick example so i'm going to do a three point arc um in this case i'm just going to say that point there that point there and then like that point there and i can throw um a dimension you know i could even do like a construction line from that center point to here and i'm going to turn this guy into a construction line so here's my my curved computer desk or something like that well i could now throw a dimension on this guy and i could call it you know curve radius or whatever is equal to 5 or something and then let me throw you know this is my length oops length is equal to i don't know i'll just say 12 and my height and again these are weird numbers because it's kind of small but i'll just say height is equal to 4 or whatever okay so now i can come in and this um i could parameterize so let's just try a different number let's try six and you can see how that grew right well i'm gonna call this um you know cr equals six if i come into my parameters um i can see cr is right there so let's come in here and change that from six to four and um okay let me do it this way sorry i'm going too fast so here is that linear dimension you can see um it's 4 i want it to be cr and maybe i need to do something yeah sorry i'm going too fast but you can drive changes using um like a dimension or whatever and i'm not sure maybe i need to make that longer et cetera but you can make that curve because this point this line here is defining where that that center point is for that curve so awesome awesome so we've got a couple really good questions i know jonathan and i were we're going to capture on one jonathan why don't you hit yours first you said you'll touch on it for uh ek biker yeah so he's asking he says when he uses uh or she uses parameters in a complex piece and then change the parameters like width and height i always get warnings and errors what do i need to do for parameters to work better that's a super common uh problem right so um the more parameters you've got the more dependencies you have between things the more margin for error you have it's just the nature of the beast the ways to avoid it are first of all when you when things start to break you get a list of the things that broke right so if you change your parameter and make it something kind of extreme and then it really changes the shape of whatever your design is you're going to start to notice where things when it went awry right so you sort of work back from there and then try to figure out how to change your design so that those dependencies are are consistent with each other um like trent mentioned earlier you also kind of have to think about it as as these things are kind of like bumpers there's going to come a point where if you're if your parameters are too far off from what they originally were it's just the geometry just isn't possible and that happens too um another way to do it is to rely on joints more so than um like sketches for example so if you make a couple of different parts um the example we had yesterday with the um [Music] the tapering jig which i can show here um there are some things that break on this model when you change the parameters right but one of the things i did to make this to make this work was when i created these two different objects i created a planar joint between these two things so the bottom face of this i click hold there and go down to that bottom face i can find it well let's not let me do that for some reason anyway the bottom face of this becomes a planar joint to the top face of this and when i did that and i changed the thickness it allowed it made it so that these are always coplanar right so i can make it thicker and it's always going to recognize that this face is attached to this one right so that's another way to solve that problem and i know brad and trent have have can wait because we all see this all the time totally it's and i'll be honest with everyone you know it's it's parameters are based in the real world right like there are there are physics there are rules there are regulations to how things are made and and i think that that's the most important thing to remember is that you know i think ethan had a lot of really good points and and a person named peter and and uh you know neil at uh oliver olive woodworking i think is what sorry i have bad eyes but all of them have great points right like there's workflows that work with you and though and that's important to remember there's there's a couple questions i do want to hit on um that i said that i'd feel uh earlier so it's so weird reading people's handles mmm bbb um you know is wondering about layout pieces for cam and public version this is really important and i want everybody to play with this so there are two ways to effectively nest infusion and i know other programs like rhino for instance has unroll and uh you know a line or all those things and and it's different sir it's a different program and it's built differently like on the back end um you know nerves versus parametrically confined solid bodies things like that so there's things that we have to do so we actually made tools like feature tools so in public version there's a range and a range is actually really helpful because it's like a nesting light and what a range will do will allow you to take all your parts and kind of arrange them within you know say a four by eight sheet of plywood is what you're working with like you can arrange them in that effectively and i actually use a range quite a bit i like it there's always limitations because it is a feature tool and and this is not a plug for for anything else in it but but for the for the businesses or who are doing tons of cabinetry like brad was showing today there is the nesting and fabrication extension which is like a paid thing and that's actually a lot of technology from true nest which is pretty much an industry standard for panelized construction shops right so seeing like cnc gantry mills or or routers or water jet or lasers they're using our nesting and fabrication tools and and that one's pretty rad um it takes a little bit of a different workflow to get it to work everything has to be a component um which is still like the better way to work there was a question about components in the beginning or converting both of them work jonathan said he's totally right but like i just really had to train myself start with the component so hopefully that was helpful look for the arrange command um i told somebody else that i'd ask one or do one live and let's see here oh i think eric killian asked about um oh an ek biker which which jonathan feels that um so eric killian asked a question let me find exactly um oh where'd it go while you're looking for that trent yeah go for it jackson said is there a way to have a parameterized material library safe for steel profiles etc that would load into any new drawing um so if you're talking about a new design um i think what you're talking about there is global parameters right that's not something we have yet but there is a there's an add-in that trent mentioned yesterday where you can have like an excel spreadsheet and then plug that into your parameters so that effectively gives you global parameters that's a super useful thing to have steel profiles is a great example lumber profiles anything like that um that's that's a that's a great thing to have i totally understand why you want that yeah and jonathan yeah we have customers that actually create all the parameters in an empty design and they save that and then they when they start a new design they just open that up it's got all their plywoods whatever you know and they're able to reference those parameters so that's a great question yeah and i think too there's there's some really things that we should call it too is that like uh you know someone in the chat yesterday was talking about ilogic an inventor and kind of having this like global library of componentry um you know we're aware of it it's something we'll work towards i have no idea what the roadmap is but it's something i have conversations with a lot hopefully that brings like a little bit of excitement for y'all like knowing that the people behind this are also experienced in the industry so hopefully we're capturing some of your you know once needs and must-haves i found the question um from eric killian he says are there more deep dives using parameters and complicated geometry say for chair making so i'm super happy to explore those topics uh there are amazing ways that we leverage parameters for joinery in our products especially where we're doing like floating tenons or you know you know sliding dovetail stuff like one of the data sets that we made for this was the table saw that had just a a sled on it and it's got a sliding uh dovetail kind of stop block and parameterizing that stuff is really good there's nothing right now eric there's we can certainly work on that jonathan is also a really accomplished like furniture maker actually if you're ever in new york you can sit in his chairs at that park in brooklyn um i uh i randomly walked to a park in brooklyn once and saw jonathan's chairs like 50 of them i was like what the heck i knew this guy was awesome so eric maybe coming soon um and and yeah hopefully it'll be good but but hit us up in the chat and we'll definitely um if we do one and and we'll definitely kind of tailor it to you because our goal is to make content that's really helpful for y'all like we just want you to be successful uh and then there was one other question james krueger so james asked a question what about surface pattern structure on large surfaces without a crash and yes i get it fusion crashes it's cloud-based it's also i mean that's that in and of itself is a total paradigm shift from from other softwares right so we could talk about that all day but i'm not going to get into it um but there are for some industrial designers the use of things like grasshopper to do node-based geometry which is effectively computational geometry using nodes autodesk does have a product called dynamo it's it's essentially grasshopper for uh you can use it in fusion so if that's kind of the thing you're talking to talking to check out dynamo we're definitely like still developing that there's some workflows for fusion but i will say that advanced patterning is something that comes up a lot in conversation with us especially for when we're designing like like say we're designing a grip for a motorcycle patterning grip you know the pattern on a grip like little bubbles or something would be super powerful so it's something we're continuing to develop um i've seen some early tech on it that's really exciting um i don't know when the release date would be to be honest with you but i don't know maybe you're excited that it's coming and i'll try to add to that keep your sketches simple and do your pattern in 3d if possible yeah that's a great point it's a great point um yes jonathan did make his own hop tub thank you kaching um let's see it looks like a question for you jonathan even when the sketch is fully constrained and you change your parameters some oh yeah for sure peter yeah hundred percent um sweet well i trent like i have a really cool assembly up do you want me to do a 15 second demo of a rain yeah totally yeah let's see it let's see um so here's another project i did in fusion um it's like a little wine cabinet you can see the little hangers and all kind of stuff in there there's you know drawers and places for wine bottles etc and like trent was talking about we have this arranged so if i go into modify arrange right and it basically allows me to specify i could use a sketch and what's cool about that i could actually sketch out maybe a scrap piece of wood that you know maybe the corner is missing out of and a range will try and fit into that to keep things fast i'm just gonna click on a plane and let's just say this is you know 96 by 48 or whatever like so and then it's asking for the objects and so i'll just go ahead and click on this left panel and it will you can kind of see it's thinking it's going to take all of these pieces and try and lay them out into um into this and i have auto preview turned on right now so it takes a little bit of time to do this but um and i should have had it queued up before i demoed it but you can kind of see it allows you to specify each of these i could flip them up or down so if i had like a groove routed in one of these um it would you know i could make the groove be on the top that way my cnc router could get to it so um let me please uh whoops sorry go to do a demo live and it it doesn't do it gotta love it so it's it's thinking or whatever if you saw the preview the um pull down you could actually see the the um example what it does so i'm not sure why it's taking so long it's probably because we're streaming it's it usually is pretty quick so i apologize tren maybe we'll show this on friday or something like that once it's queued up so yeah i mean i think you get it basically what's going to happen is all of that's going to get arranged onto a single plane which you know for for manufacturing on your router like jonathan for instance has the shapoco in his garage if he jonathan makes a lot of like normally like he'll batch things and you know he might use that function to just do a quick on a on a panel right and in brad's point about if you have a piece of plywood let's say you have a chunk missing i see it a lot industry when people are working in the like the live edge or the slab industry people will rough out what their outline of their slab is and let's say maybe there's a crutch in your slab you kind of model that and then you want to arrange some of your text like maybe you've like or maybe you've made a a a couple faces and you want to so it really is a super powerful tool especially if you sketch out what your base um plane will be so i i'm super excited about that stuff um yeah well unless anybody else has any questions one last kind of just reminder of what the next like the rest of the week is gonna gonna hold so uh we actually get this question uh a lot uh yes these will be on youtube um after the fact you can watch them and reference them as long as you want um we're not going to take them down hopefully we'll continue to do things like this and there was one about an additive or 3d printing one you know 100 let's do it like all of us are excited to make this type of content and then for the rest of the week tomorrow is kind of for the industrial designer we'll be talking about surfacing t-splines you know sculpt those workflows actually awesome guests kaching who i saw in the in the chat so if you want to see him in person and watch his workflow come tomorrow along with alex lobos who's a super accomplished industrial designer and professor has an awesome workflow very good i highly recommend it'll be us me and those two on wednesday and then thursday we'll be manufacturing i think for anybody who has manufacturing in-house then you need to go to that one because we're going to cover nesting and fabrication but we're going to cover custom tooling um and we're also going to cover um kind of a advanced work holding ideas and how to how to constrain tool paths to work around your your work holding really effectively and then friday it'll be s3 again and we'll talk about drawings we'll talk about fusion team and maybe we'll just do kind of a live riff session too i saw some folks were curious about rendering um which hopefully we'll cover a little bit tomorrow but if not tomorrow friday we'll we'll get in um and then yeah awesome thanks for coming i really appreciate it love seeing everybody engage i can't thank you enough for making the time and brad and jonathan thanks again for joining and we'll see you again on friday thanks everyone

Channel: Autodesk Fusion 360

Views: 5,930

Keywords: fusion 360, autodesk, design, engineering, mechanical design, mechanical engineering, industrial design, product design, software, CAD, CAD software, Computer Aided Design, Modeling, CAM, computer aided manufacturing, machining, manufacturing, make, cnc machining, cnc programming, integrated CAD/CAM, integrated CAD, integrated CAM

Id: TGtBcI-nC34

Length: 71min 12sec (4272 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021