360 LIVE: Fusion 360 Tips & Tricks

hello everyone and welcome to another fusion 360 tech Thursday my name is Brad talus I'm from Autodesk helping me out today is my buddy Aaron and we wanted to start by saying we apologize we didn't have a livestream last week but we were all in Portland at our Autodesk fusion 360 Academy we had a blast it was incredible one fact we'll probably do follow-up video keep your eye out for that on what went on at Fusion Academy we're hoping they do it again and we're hoping to see you and I want to say hi to everybody that was able to come and actually said hi to me saying that they watch these live streams so thumbs up to all of you out there so so today's video is actually kind of funny because I love doing these live streams and Aaron can love to mean he's like you know you have all these really cool tips and tricks but they're scattered throughout all of these different videos these different live streams and so we decided to do a live stream on just my top 20 plus tips and tricks so we're gonna start out with let me bring up my screen here so I've also created a PDF document that is linked in the description of this live stream and so you'll actually have a document that you can reference later on okay so my very first tip tip number one the shift-key for tangent line so I'm just gonna go ahead and draw a circle here real quick and then I want to create a line that is tangent to this circle and you'll notice as I get my cursor near the edge you see that little X but if I go ahead and click and move you'll notice that that line is not tangent now I could place the line and then do a tangent constraint but here's my first tip if you hold down the shift key while you're clicking on that circle you'll notice that now move my cursor it's automatically creating a tangent line on that circle in fact if I let go you can see the tangent constraint was created automatically so you can create some pretty cool shapes here pretty easily so just hold down the shift key I'll go ahead and drag and I was able to create those tangent lines I'll bet you Aaron's gonna be answering your questions for you but if any of these tips you didn't know about or you thought was really cool make sure you mention it in the chat window that way we know which ones you really like and that we should make sure we cover in upcoming live streams okay the the next tip is tip number two that the line command actually has a tangent arc built right into it in fact you'll notice the icon you know has a straight line and then you see this curve segment so how do you do that well the first thing you do is you click and place a line but when I'm gonna click the second point I'm gonna click and hold so I'm still holding down my left mouse button and you can see that it's creating a tangent arc from that endpoint right there so I can go ahead and let's just go maybe like there I'll come across hover for my little snap point like so and then click and hold again for that tangent arc and you can kind of see how I was able to create a slot pretty quickly okay the next tip tip number three is click on an existing dimension to reference this and this is probably one of my more favorite tips so you'll notice I have this shape here and I've got this circle over here I'm going to go ahead and throw a dimension on that circle now you'll notice when I click it's asking for me to input in a size so I could you know type in two or something like that but what's really cool is if I click on an existing dimension so I'm going to go ahead and click right there you'll notice that it puts what looks like d9 so it's referencing this existing dimension and when I hit enter sure enough you can see that that's referencing that dimension there so if I were to change for example this dimension here so I'm just gonna make that let's just say two for example you'll see that that one will update also to be too because it's referencing this existing dimension now this is a really quick way to create your sketches we instead of having to type in five eighths over and over again or whatever you could type it in once and then you just click on that dimension to reference it and for all your other five eighths dimensions and if for any reason you need to change that one to seven eighths all of your other ones will update accordingly okay moving forward here I'm gonna undo so tip number four is to right-click to see your constraint options now with the new user interface update oh by the way I should point this out we just dropped an update about two days ago and you'll notice that we have newer looking icons and some things have changed or whatever next week I will be doing a live stream on what is new in this latest release so keep an eye out for that okay so all my constraints are across here at the top or I can you know pick some more from the menu here but here's a neat little trick if I were to click and were pre select for example these two circles and then I right mouse click it will show me the constraints that make sense with what I've pre-selected and I use this all the time in fact I hardly ever go to the menu okay so because I've selected two circles it's saying well you could make those circles concentric you could fix them in place you could make them tangent to each other or you could make them equal size for example so let me just draw for example a line over here and let's just do maybe a circle over here okay and if I were to pre-select those and right mouse click it's basically showing me the only constraints I could do for these is to fix them or to make them tangent with each other but if I had another line over here somewhere let's just say and I selected those two and right mouse click we could see we have a lot more options we could make them collinear or parallel perpendicular horizontal vertical and equal so this is a neat little tip just right mouse click and see what options you have in your right mouse click menu ok ok moving on here typing tip number five is typing formulas and fractions into dialogue boxes and I've shown this tip quite a few times in a lot of my live streams but it's so powerful I really like it ok so for example I could throw a dimension right here and it's just some random number right now but I could say I want that to be 5/8 so I type in 5/8 and when I hit enter it figures out that fraction or formula for me okay I could also do formulas so for example let me let me fix this here I'm gonna do a dimension here let me say dimension again I want this to be the same as this guy so I'm just gonna click on it and you'll see it references it I'll say ok and that changes the width to be whatever that width is and then I could come in here say for example I want to put a dimension between these two and I want this to be whatever that dimension is / - okay and I could even put this into parenthesis and say you know plus 1.5 or something like that and you'll see that it actually figured out that formula for mean it obviously pushed it out so let me edit that guy and you'll notice that it remembers my dimension my formula I should say so instead of 1.5 let's just make it a point five for example okay so you can type in formulas you can do cosine sine tangents you could do random numbers all the in factors of webpage and our help menu that shows all the different formulaic equations that you can do in here okay so it's a quick way of figuring out for example like equals spacing or anything like that I want these to be the same height so I'll say collinear let's just do that and that now of course they're the same height okay so typing formulas and fractions and again I could even do for example I could do let's just say 3/4 - you know 1/4 or something like that and it'll figure that out for me perfect okay moving on let me see where we're at here I have a bunch of sample there we go let me go back to this guy I'll finish the sketch okay so tip number six right clicking after pre-selection shows commands that make sense and let me show you what I mean by this so for example I'm going to click this edge and right mouse click and it shows the commands that kind of makes sense because I've clicked an edge I could fill out that edge or I could champ for that edge so instead of having to go into the menu and look for those commands they're right there at my mouse let me go ahead and click this cylinder right mouse click and you can see for example I could create an axis through that cylinder I could shell this part out for example if I were to click let's just say on a face for example I could create a sketch on that face I could extrude and make that thicker create an offset plane or again shell the part looking into that face so the right mouse click I use this all the time I click on an edge and I say I want to chamfer that edge it's just a one millimeter chamfer oops not one inch let's say put one inches so that you can see it did the whole chain all the way around okay same thing with like faces you know you click on faces it shows you what you can do you can click on parts or bodies right mouse click it'll tell you what you can do for example change the physical material find out what properties it is move it around make copies of it etc so you'll you've seen me in my previous videos I've always said right mouse click is your friend and I really can't emphasize that enough as you're designing in fusion 360 pre select something and then right mouse click instead of having to keep going to the menus all the time you'll find that right mouse click menu and the marking menu is very very handy okay this tip not a lot of people know about tip number seven show dimensions on the 3d model this is actually pretty cool so for example I'm going to expand open my sketches folder over here and I can see that I have two sketches I'm going to go ahead and turn on that sketch and you can see it shows me my sketch but if I right-click on that sketch there is an option here that says show dimension and when I click on that it actually highlights all of my dimensions so I could come in here and make changes so for example instead of 1.125 let's just make that 0.75 and it will update my 3d model using those dimensions so instead having to go into your sketch make a change so you know exit your sketch in and see what happens you can actually do it right here on the 3d model now you'll notice it gets a little crowded so you know you might turn off the ones you don't need turn on the ones you do need now I don't have any dimensions on this one but if I did I'd be able to edit those dimensions so a neat little trick okay okay next tip again what I keep saying well this is my favorite I must have like 25 favorite tips the re-inker command I think this one is really cool so I'm gonna hide my dimensions and turn off my sketch okay so the re-anchor command so for example if I wanted to pull this face forward I'm gonna say press pull and I'm gonna start to drag now it's not gonna let me because if I let me turn off my Philip's first let me do that let's just back up and do it maybe something like this I'll say press pull and I'll start to drag now what it's showing me is I've moved point eight six inches or - point eight six inches from where that face originally was okay well maybe I'm more concerned about the overall length so if I click on this little down arrow next to the dimension you'll see it remembers here's another tip I actually didn't have in this list it remembers your previously typed in commands that you've done before but there's this re command so I'm going to say reinker and I'm just going to click on that face and now you'll notice that the distance is basically measuring from that other face so saying right now the total length is minus two point two three five well I want it to be minus two point five and it is now two and a half inches thick because we re anchored the measurement from the original face to this new face over here it's a really powerful command you can also find that command in the down arrow next to the distance in the dialog box so you can see the reinker command there also okay so let me do that one more time because it's so powerful again I click on the face I'm gonna do a press pour an offset and I'll just start to drag and you kind of see where it's referencing from and I don't want the reference from that I'm gonna say reinker and I want to reference it from a different face or a different point doesn't matter edge etc so I'm gonna just say that face and I can specify the distance - two point one two five or something like that and now the total length is to 1/8 perfect okay another cool command let me go ahead and undo I'm just gonna drag this back to the end the probe through selection I use this quite often and you've seen me do this in in previous live streams so for example I want to select this face and I want to select this face over here and I'm having to rotate around to do that well here's a neat little trick if you click and hold for about a second you get this probe through selection so you can see face and it's almost like you're shooting a laser through your objects so the very first thing it's gonna hit is this face and then you'll notice it that face that we can't see and then the laser would hit that flat face and then finally it would hit that back face so I could select a lot of objects or faces here without having to rotate the part around and I don't know if I'll be able to do it or not but let me just do something like this I'll click and hold so here you'll notice I get a lot of options faces vertexes edges so you can see it gives me a lot of different options here especially depending on where your laser is pointing okay okay so for a prime example I could come in here and save press pull I'll click that face I'll click and hold to grab I mean maybe it wasn't quite like that well do that again let me go click click and hold I'll grab that other face and now when I do a press pull it'll actually do both faces at the same time okay neat little tip there I use that one a lot okay this one is I think a great tip that not a lot of people use it's not that it's hidden or anything like that you can rename any of your features down here in your timeline okay so for example I could come in here and let's just say this guy whoops let me uh click out of it if I just hover over it you see it says sketch one well I could right-click on it and say rename and call that main sketch okay and now you'll notice this one says sketch two but if I hover over this one it now says main sketch so I could come in and you know basically rename any of these features and I'll just say major Phillips okay and then this guy here I could say minor Phillips or something like that yeah make sure I'm clicking the right one rename I could even say you know Oh point zero one two five Phillips or whatever so you can rename your features down here and now when I hover over that you can see it gives me a better description of what it is major Phil it's this just says extrude four which really isn't all that helpful okay but by renaming these I know okay that's my main sketch and this is a pretty simple example but when you start getting more complex timelines it really does benefit you to rename some of these features so that way you know what they're for and what they're doing okay here's another cool trick or tip I should say is if I right mouse click I get what's called this marking menu and you'll see this blue kind of radar moving around and at the 12 o'clock it's repeat the last command so tip number 11 is repeat the last command and so this one's kind of boring it's a rename so let me do something a little bit different here I'm going to go ahead let's just put a small chamfer let's do a point one chamfer on there okay now if I right mouse click you'll see at 12:00 o'clock is that repeat chamfer command so instead of having to go up here and pick the chamfer command or whatever all I have to do is right click and drag straight up and it's going to repeat the last command okay so then I could pick on another edge and put a chamfer on that edge for example and this works in sketches so for example if I were to draw a circle and I escaped out or whatever I could right click and repeat Center diameter circle okay so I use that one a lot I just drag straight up boom I'm in the circle command okay maybe I do a trim or something like that and I get out and I'm like okay repeat the trim command so right click and drag straight up now with that said this is not part of my tip but this little black line is what we call a gesture and that's what's actually happening when you drag straight up you're repeating that last command well notice if I go at six o'clock it says sketch and it brings me kind of to this sub menu here and I could see at 10 o'clock is circle at 2 o'clock is rectangle at 6 o'clock is line etc so check this out I'm not in any command right now I'm going to dag down into two o'clock and there's my rectangle I'm gonna drag down and 10 o'clock and there's my circle okay or you could use the shortcut keys I'm gonna drag down and straight down and there's my line again this takes a little bit too getting used to but you can kind of see you have access to your dimensions to your spline to project offset etc using this marking menu okay that's a finisher sketch there tip number 12 is windows selections make sure hopefully everybody can hear me okay and all kind of stuff kind of glancing over at the chat it looks like Erin's been pretty busy okay um tip number 12 windows selections this is actually pretty cool so for example I could come in here and say I want to delete some stuff and I'm going to drag from left to right and notice what's where mine my window is I'm gonna let go and it selected all of the faces that were inside of that selection window okay and only the faces that were fully enclosed inside of that window however if I were to drag let me go delete if I were to go from right to left notice I get a different looking selection window and this is actually what's called a crossing window and it actually selects the whole body because it crossed over the body okay so there might be situations where you want to grab everything that's inside the window and that's also crossing you will do that from right to left but if you only want to select what's inside the window you go from left to right and you can kind of visually see the difference there so I meet a little tip there okay let me I'm going to back this up again real quick let's go to here this is another neat little tip I want to fill it a bunch of edges so I could come in here and say fill it and then I could start selecting these edges but that takes quite some time to do that okay well there's a neat little trick if I come in here and say fill it instead of selecting the edges I instead select the face it's gonna actually grab all of the edges that have to do with that face so you can kind of see how it's filling all of those edges at once so it's almost like a selection set by face and I again I find this really useful instead of having to manually click a bunch of edges I can just come in here and grab that face and I've just selected all of those edges facts let me just go ahead and click on that guy and click on this face and notice what we've done we've basically blended or fileted all of those edges and there's probably what 1520 edges I would have had to select doing that so you can select by face and you can also select by feature so what do I mean by that well I could come in here and for example fill it and in fact it tells you right here edges faces or features so I could pick for example this extrude feature and it would select all of the edges now I've already let me back up let me just do this say fill it I'll pick the feature let's just do maybe like that extrude feature there and let's just do the point o2 and it would select all of the edges that it could and in this case it couldn't probably because of this little tiny thing here so let me pick a different feature there let's do maybe those guys I'll say point o2 and sure enough it's selected all of the edges of that particular feature so kind of a neat little trick you can do individual edges or you can do faces and you can do features okay moving on and I kind of just showed this but this is a better example I think select a feature in the timeline to select all of the edges so I just kind of show this I kind of jumped ahead I'm gonna say fill it and you'll notice I have this web in here so I can actually just click on this web right here and let's just do you know point one in this case might be too too big it's 2.01 sorry yep go point oh five zero six or whatever and yeah there we go so I did point oh five I selected the rib and I'm sorry the web feature and notice that it selected all of the edges at once it's a great way of knocking sharp edges or whatever and again think about how long it taken me to select each individual face and edge and all that kind of stuff it would have taken a long long time so instead just click on the feature in the timeline and you'll get your result there pretty cool trick okay hopefully you're all learning something I hope so this next trick or tip I should say is I use the shell command to speed up design and let me show you what I mean by this so for example I want to create some kind of a pivoting bracket or whatever so I'm gonna start with just a simple primitive like a box let's just make it you know 2 by 3 or something like so and let's make that 2 inches tall maybe I'll click on this edge here's one of my tips right mouse click to see the commands that you can use let's just put a large fill it let's just do 1.25 in this case well now I want to basically machine away a majority of this now I could come in here and create a sketch and then draw rectangle okay and then add some dimensions this is totally fine totally valid let's make up a point three let's make this point three again I'll just click on an existing dimension to reference it I'll do the same thing here click on the existing dimension to reference it and then I could machine this away okay so I'll say extrude and click on that back face so this is my end result that I want well believe it or not there's a much faster and easier way okay so I'm gonna undo all that instead of using a sketch I'm gonna use the shell command so watch what happens is I have a click on a face I'm gonna right mouse click and it shows me the commands that makes sense I'm gonna say shell and I'm going to start to drag and you can kind of see I'm sort of getting the result that I want but what about this back face well you can actually continue to add other faces into your selection so now I could come in here and say I want that to be point three and boom we're done okay I didn't have to draw a profile they're all equal wall thicknesses etc and it's very easy to come back and make a change I want it to be point four and if I were to change the size of my model it will always update so that she'll command is actually quite useful and you can select more than just one face to look in okay here's another tip that I actually didn't learn until fairly recently you've heard me in my previous live streams I always talk about try and make your designs in components instead of bodies I find it just so much easier to use components well let me show you how you can there's a couple different ways to create components so the first way is to come up here to the assemble menu and say new component or you can select it from the menu and then it brings up this dialog and you could give it a name so I'm gonna call this you know rod or something like that and I'll say ok and it creates a component well there's an easier faster way if I just right click new component and you'll notice it didn't bring up a dialog box or anything like that I could click on this guy and say new component and notice it now turned this into a sub assembly and put my new component underneath that guy I could come in here and say new component under that let me do another new component under that and let me do another new component so I hadn't even drawn a single 3d model yet but I'm basically building my structure and so for example I could now come back and name this you know bike assembly or whatever this guy here will rename absolutely yeah click on it we'll just call this wheel assembly and then finally you know tire wheel etc so I find it really fast just coming up here and creating your component at whatever level you want is really really really handy okay okay um I showed this in one of my drawing live streams and people like how'd you do that so sometimes you want to get like an isometric view let me go back let me go back to this guy here you know here's my finished part I want to create a drawing of this but maybe I don't like my oh yeah my Philip's because I've done so many edits maybe I don't like the exact isometric look maybe I want to show it more like this for example in my drawing for whatever reason well to do that you can come up to this named views I'm gonna go ahead and expand this open and you'll notice that we have some default top front right and home okay you'll notice home was just a little bit too steep for me I want my ISO to be more like this so I can right click on named views and say new named view and you'll notice it now says named view and I can give it a name I could call this my ISO or something like that okay I could do a shape you know one like that and say new name view and let's just call this back or something like that back ISO okay and then if I were to save this and then create a drawing of this which I'll do real fast I'll come in here and say new drawing from design I'll just leave that all alone it will actually allow me to pick those named views so by default you see front and there's my front right home but notice the new ones my ISO and back iso so i could say my iso and now we're looking to change that scale a little bit easier to see we're now looking at the direction that I wanted in that particular case okay let me make that let's just make it a solid for example okay and that could come in here and do another base view and let's just change that to be the back iso and now you're gonna see the back i so let's make that one-to-one so my point here isn't how to create a drawing but it's more that you can create your named views and just do like that named views to get certain angles that you might want for your particular design and that works for you know not only in drawings but same thing for here like maybe you're doing a presentation and you can actually drive through your presentation just by clicking on these named views so as you're you know talking to a client or whatever you can just click down through your name views and kind of show certain things okay I just I just glanced over the chat I saw James made a good comment he's like I like these tips hopefully I can remember all of them like I mentioned I created a PDF document that's linked in the description of this livestream make sure you grab that and then you can have that as a reference that way you can scroll through and see all the different tips yeah cuz it's like drinking from the fire hose of tips today okay I'm moving on tip number 18 the control key to control your selection in Matt you've heard me say this before for example when I'm creating a joint type you'll notice what I'm hovering over this face I get all these little tick marks that kind of pop up and show all the different places that I could capture and you see it kind of flashing around it gets sort of complicate pretty quick okay but I want to control my selection so I can basically like hover and see all the lines and this gets really crazy well all I have to do is hover over for example this cylindrical face and I'm going to hold down my control key and now notice that it's not snapping or trying to get to any of those other edges or faces or anything like that and I can pick the top the middle or the bottom very easily so same thing over here you know it's going to try and capture to all those faces it gets sort of snappy all I have to do is get to kind of near where I want pull down my control key and now you'll notice it's no longer trying to snap to any of those other faces or edges or snap points okay and then I can snap to the middle there so perfect so that is using the control key to control your selection and that works with the joint command that also works with the align command so you'll notice when you're aligning you can you get the kind of the same idea you see all of these little points and faces that line up and all kind of stuff I can hold down my control key and now you'll notice it's only allowing me to select what's near that face okay tip number 19 I think this is one of Erin's favorite ones and that is the S key if I hit the S key on my keyboard I get what we call our shortcut dialog and this is really really powerful I think it's underutilized honestly basically what this allows you to do is you can put your favorite commands into this shortcut and what's cool about this is this exists in all different workspaces so for example if I go to my drawing and I my esky you'll notice I get my drawing shortcuts okay if I'm let me go back to the assembly here if I'm in my sheetmetal work space you know I get them all my design shortcuts if I were in let me just switch to for example let's go to simulation I would get my simulation work I'll just create a study I get my simulation shortcuts so you can create your own custom shortcut commands that you want in your design okay so let me show you how this works I hit the S key and I get all of these commands here now these are my personal ones so how do they get those well it's this search right here very very powerful so for example let's say I want to do a pattern so I'm gonna just start typing in P and you see all of the commands that start with P I'll just keep typing and so now I can see pattern on a path circular pattern flat pattern rectangular pattern well I use circular pattern quite a bit so all I have to do is hit this little up arrow which says add two shortcuts and you can see I now have the two patterns that I used quite often right there okay next time I hit the S key there's those commands so if you are working and you tend to do certain things over and over and over again certain commands definitely recommend adding them to your design shortcuts okay now if you don't want any of those you just drag them off you just click and drag these guys off of here like so okay now I also use the search command especially if I'm coming from a different CAD system and I want to reflect something so I'm gonna start typing in reflect and you'll notice that there is no command called reflect it's almost like a help menu to me so I'm like okay if it's not called reflect maybe it's called mirror so I type in up there we go sure enough it's called mirror inside of fusion so and you can run any of these commands so for example I'm going to type in pattern and I'll just say playing along a path or whatever and you'll see that it's actually running that playing along a path command I actually have some some people in in my group that actually do these shortcut keys more than they do the menus they'll actually just search for the command you know fill it or whatever really fast and then do a fill it kind of a thing okay that also exists in the side if you create a sketch I'll hit my S key and you'll notice I have my sketch shortcut so here's a lot of my commands I might use in sketching so that shortcut key exists in a lot of these workspaces okay tip number 20 isolate and an isolate components now you notice with the new update we don't have the light bulbs anymore we have these you know eyeballs basically and I can click the little eyeball to minimize that okay and I can turn these all on or off individually but that can be time-consuming especially if you have a really complex assembly instead I could come in here and say for example the right mouse click on the spur gear I'm gonna say isolate and watch what it does it turns all of the other ones off and I'm now just basically looking at this individual component okay then I can right click again and say an isolate and it turns all of my parts back on so this is a really great way so that's the connector rod of kind of cleaning things up and I'm gonna work on my connecting rod for eyal etc etc then I'll just come back and uh nice elated and get all my parts back instead of manually clicking the show and hide icons okay let's see tip 21 is show all components so again I could come in here and sit up isolate maybe I have I turn off that guy I turned off my spur gear maybe we turned off all of these bushings etc you know I've turned off a bunch of these things well now I want to turn them back on well I didn't isolate them but I could come in here right mouse click and say show all components and it'll turn all of them back on again instead of having to manually do it individually you know I can just right click and say show all components or show all bodies if you're using bodies in this case but we're using components I'm gonna say show all components again a really fast way of doing this and the only reason I've added this to my list was you know I do help quite a few customers and I'll watch them turn parts on and off but you know by clicking the the light bulb or the show/hide icon on the left and it just takes a lot of time so I'll show them that show all components isolate etc and I didn't know that existed okay tip number 22 let's see where we're at here so this is actually a kind of a neat little trick so you'll notice I have a profile right there and it's buried inside the part now you've seen me hover over this you'll notice it's wanting to select the front face and not the profile now if I were to click and hold for a second I could probe through and grab that profile okay but here's a neat tip if I were to run the extrude command so I'm going to just right mouse click and say extrude it automatically selects that profile for me because it's the only profile in this case if I have multiple profiles this doesn't work but if you have a singular profile I can now you know I don't even have to select it it automatically selects it for me okay so let's just do that again I just go into the extrude command it automatically selects that profile for me okay tip number 23 let's see I'm gonna jump into a different sketch here let me go into here now by default we typically dimension to like center points or whatever so you can see I have this 10 millimeter dimension that's kind of going to the center of the slot I'm gonna go ahead and delete that dimension don't get rid of all of these here just to clean things up check this out I'm gonna go ahead and go into my dimension command and you'll notice that it wants to dimension to the center point but maybe I want to specify the overall length of the slot all I have to do is right mouse click and you'll see by default it's trying to go to the center of a circle or arc but I can switch this to tangent and now you'll notice when I get near that curve I get that little X all I do is just click I don't even have to be very precise get over here and click and now I'm able to specify the overall length of my slot using the tangent option and again that was in the right mouse click once I'm in a dimension all right mouse click and pick that option like I said before right mouse click is your friend okay let's see tip number 24 we're getting close to the end here let me go ahead I'm just gonna finish that sketch and I want to do let's do a different sketch here see this is where naming your sketches make more sense okay here's a better one okay so tip number 24 right click in your sketch dimension to get dimension orientation options let me show you what I mean by this typically when you click like an edge it knows that you want to make that you know for example a vertical dimension okay but if I were to create a dimension that went maybe from like the center of this circle to let's just say this top corner here you'll see as I move around I get a vertical I get aligned and if I keep moving okay there I get horizontal but it gets kind of confusing sometimes as you're moving around it's like why is it so flashy and how I just want it to give me a horizontal dimension it's not giving me a horizontal dimension well all you have to do is right mouse click and you get these options aligned vertical or horizontal if I click on a horizontal it's gonna force it to be a horizontal dimension if I click on a line it's gonna force it to be an aligned dimension and then obviously vertical it's gonna force it to be a vertical dimension okay so all you have to do is right mouse click to see those options right there okay tip number 25 this is actually a really cool tip that I don't think a lot of people know about so I've got an assembly here with lots of parts on it in fact you can see all of these individual components and stuff like that and maybe I want to start simplifying this maybe I want to turn some on or off so they're not displayed that would take quite some time well under the Select menu under selection tools you have a bunch of options now usually we just select my window right well here I can say select by name and maybe I'll want to select all the LEDs so I'm gonna just come in here and type in LED say find and notice what it did it actually found those LEDs it highlights them in my browser and a highlights them on the board itself I can search for bodies I can search for components and it tells me how many items it found so let's do the same thing I'll come in here and say select by name and I'm gonna just start typing in capacitors I'm gonna just type in cap say find and it went through and have found 11 objects that have the word cap in and sure enough all these different capacitors okay so that's one great way of quickly selecting things that you know you've named well but maybe you haven't named them well so the other one I'm gonna come back to boundary here in just a second I use select by size quite a bit this is actually really cool notice what it did it already says ten selected and I have a slider right here so I can and it's actually getting highlight it's found objects that were four are zero to about two and a half millimeters in size and if I were to drag this up a little bit larger you can see that now it's selecting all of the objects they're a little bit bigger and if I were to keep dragging this it's gonna start adding in more and more objects okay and I'll just keep dragging until now it's begin you know getting objects that are 27 millimeters which is obviously I don't want I just want maybe some of these smaller components like that how long would have it taken you to select all of those objects manually he would have had to spend quite some time doing that okay so let's select my size is actually a really cool command I could delete these I could move them or whatever select by boundary this is actually pretty cool so it's saying what's the centroid so maybe I'm just gonna grab that component right there and you'll notice it puts this green little box around it well I can say you know what select anything that's inside and so you can see as I'm dragging that a little bit wider it's grabbing all of those headers but you'll notice if I keep going it's not grabbing that capacitor and that's because it's not fully enclosed inside this window here but as soon as I drag this boundary a little bit bigger you can see that it's going to select that capacitor I have options I want a box don't like a cylinder do I want a sphere so I can you know do a sphere and have it grab anything that's fully enclosed in that sphere I can say anything that's inside it or select everything that's outside of it so I want to keep everything that's inside so again you can see kind of the power behind this okay so let's select by boundary then we have invert selection so for example let's just say select by name I'll do the LEDs again we'll find those it's found those four LEDs I could come in here and say select the invert and it now leaves all of the LEDs alone and it's selected everything else except for those LEDs so that's what the select invert is for so really cool and powerful commands here especially when you start getting into like Fe a analysis a lot of times want to simplify your models and if I were to want to analyze this like for a thermal or something I might not want all of these components and I could quickly select them and remove them in my simplification okay and finally our last keyboard tip is keyboard shortcuts again not a lot of people know about this but let me just jump back to something here pretty simple so you'll notice that there's keyboard shortcuts for a lot of these commands like L for line are for rectangle but you'll notice there's not any for arc okay maybe I use three-point arc a lot and I want to create my own custom keyboard shortcut so I'm gonna click on this little these three little dots right here and I can pin it to the toolbar which will put it up here I could pin it to my shortcuts so that's gonna go to that s key it's gonna automatically put it in my little s key dialog and then you'll see change a keyboard shortcut so I'm gonna click on this and it says assign a new shortcut key for three-point arc well I want to use a but you'll notice it says well that conflicts with appearance you already using a for appearance so it will give you some warnings if you can or cannot so maybe I'm gonna say I want it to be shift a and this time it doesn't give me any warnings so I'll say ok if I come underneath my arc now you'll notice it says shift a next to three-point arc and if I were to do a shift a I'm in my three-point arc command that quickly right so you can create your own custom shortcuts using that methodology and this exists in everything so for example in here maybe I use the shell command quite a bit and there's no keyboard shortcut for shell I'll come in here obviously s is probably taken yep its reserved so let's try shift s okay that conflicts with section analysis let's try alt s that one's reserved so maybe I have to do you know a bunch of different options here maybe I can't use s but I could do ctrl alt s in that case which I tend to not do multiple combinations but you'll see that that sure enough that works ok ok unfortunately that was the last tip I have so far if you know of any other tips that you use quite often please add them not only into the chat but into the whatever the comments in the live stream we want to share these with everybody and we love listening to what you guys have to say you know we've done a live stream on what we've learned from you hopefully you gleaned a lot from this live stream and keep your eye out for next Thursday we have another live stream coming up and hope to see you then with that have a wonderful rest of your day you

Channel: Autodesk Fusion 360

Views: 18,168

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

Id: YjI4PDfx7UQ

Length: 61min 10sec (3670 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 15 2019