360 LIVE: Generative Design Tips & Tricks

hello and thank you for everyone that's joining the webinar today my name is Matt LeMond I'm a part of the fusion adoption team here at Autodesk my specific focus is on generative design and very excited to present to you today a list of tips and tricks that we've seen over the last year and a half since we've had generative so just to quickly go over a couple things as you may or may not know now is a real great time to get into generative design as generative design is free until the end of the year so for those of you that don't know when we're running generative design inside of fusion 360 we need a tremendous amount of cloud computing resources to do those to do that processing for us so to help you get started to help you try projects once again generative design is free for the rest of the year so please use this opportunity so just to quickly go over a little bit about what we'll actually show today so over the next hour we'll show about 20 tips and tricks each of them will last about two minutes apiece walking you through the entire process from setting up a generative solve to actually sending that output CAD out and then validating it so again each tip will be about two minutes we'll cover the entire workflow and the recording for this will obviously be available after the presentation today so if you miss anything absolutely no worries so to get started typically the first thing that we always need to cover with generative because it is so new and it is so new throughout the industry as well is we have to cover an introduction to generative design so what does generative design actually mean today so when we're looking at generative design and we look at the cat industry in general so audit has been making cab for 35 years the first major transformational leap that CAD took was moving engineers from drafting boards to 2d CAD having that engineering information available electronically the the engineer is significantly higher value than what they would have had in the past is the wrong button so going back it's almost the holidays so please excuse that the next major jump throughout the CAD industry was moving from 2d to 3d CAD so within 3d CAD the engineer could now look at their product in the context of their assembly they could look at parametric modeling and again that leap from 2d to 3d provided the engineer a significantly higher value than what they previously had and we saw the same thing with the release of finite element analysis so now before actually producing a physical prototype the engineer can validate and test that that will be structurally sufficient for what it will actually see in the field and even test for the manufacturing process again each one of these leaps is a transformational shift for CAD when we look at the potential impact for generative design we see that impact just the same as all of these transformational leaps now for the first time rather than creating our own products and continuously validating CAD is actually a co-creator within that process allowing us to specify the requirements the manufacturing types and the objectives and allowing generative to go out there with cloud computing and explore hundreds or thousands of higher performing options that a team of engineers would have never thought of so let's take a look at how this would actually look within your product process so if you were to bring a product to market you would typically take a small handful of concepts that you've created and you would evaluate that you'd evaluate it for structure you'd evaluate it for manufacturability and in the end you're bringing a product to market that while it may have taken longer than what you would have hoped it's also probably very similar to other products that you brought to market in the past you're not exploring a wider range of options so the idea within generative is that again we're leading off with our requirements we're saying what we need the objectives for our product to be what the manufacturing types the loading conditions material options and we're allowing generative design to go out and find us the options that we can start making comparisons on so for instance we could have a casting solution for this part with a specific material this might be the lowest cost but also the highest mass we could then compare that solution to many other unique solutions so we could have an additive solution which will probably be the lowest mass but also probably the highest price and then CNC as well which is somewhere in the middle this cost first performance analysis may allows us to make trade-offs very early on within our product cycle and allows us to make more informed choices on the products that we actually bring to market so when many people think about generative design and maybe you've seen this on the news or through marketing or through many other resources out there on generative design what people are typically used to seeing are these very organic alien looking components that traditional manufacturing looks at and has no idea how or why they would actually produce these so there's many things changing within the industry that are allowing generative design to fit for traditional manufacturing so what are those things that are changing when we launch generative design the only manufacturing setting that we had at the time was additive manufacturing and that's why you see so many of these organic almost alien looking components because additive allowed the end user to make almost anything but we knew that if we want a generative design to truly grow within the market and apply value to everyone within the engineering space that we had to not just focus on additive but also traditional manufacturing so if you look at generative design today of course we can do additive manufacturing but at the same time we can do casting C and C and to access cutting to provide you a range of performance options that are all manufacturable no matter how you produce that part now it's not enough to just look at performance trade-offs for our components we also need to think about how much each one of those would actually be to produce so within generative design we've also partnered with a company called a priori Technologies after each generative output that we get for each one of the manufacturing types you will also see costing analysis attached to each one so you can again make more informed choices on the cost and performance of each one of the generative options that you see so when we look at really how far generative design has come specifically around traditional manufacturing techniques if you take a look at these three outcomes on the screen one of these was entirely created by human one was entirely created by generative design and one was a combination of starting with generative and then adding the human touch to it through applying two-and-a-half axis CNC constraints through generative we were able to make option two that you see on the screen extremely high performing solid editable CAD geometry created for the user quickly and then the engineer is able to take that higher performing CAD option that's also very easy to manufacture that you see an option to and then apply the human touch so generative design is not replacing the engineer but like every transformational leap that we've shown with CAD it's adding significantly more value to what the engineer has to do so to quickly cover the workflow and this is kind of more of a thought leadership view of what generative design actually needs to do the first thing that we do when we're setting up a project is that we're coming up with our preserve geometries these are essentially the key pins that were telling generative design no matter what you do I need all of these geometries likewise we're setting our obstacle geometries which are in red obstacles are telling generative design avoid generating geometry in any of these spaces we're then specifying our objectives are loading conditions may be a mass target the faction types in the materials that we'd actually like to see this will then generate hundreds or thousands of viable options that are again higher performing that any engineer could have come up with completely on their own for you to start making trade-offs with so that covers a brief introduction to generative design now let's jump into the good stuff which are the tips and tricks for how to get the most value out of generative design today so as we cover the tips over the next 50 minutes we'll cover them in the context of where they fit within the workflow for generative design so when setting up a generative design project today it always follows the same workflow of first setup where you're setting up your geometry those preserves and obstacles that we mentioned next would be generated this is where you're actually applying your settings for the generative solve itself next would be Explorer this is where we're reviewing all of those results that we've generated next would be adjust so after we've selected the geometry that we'd like to bring back again we can either adjust it or add that human touch that we talked about and then finally validate so if we've made any changes to that geometry we can always simulate it at that point and then validate that it's still compliance what we set so to get started again the first and the most important tip that I'll probably show today is generative design is free but only until the end of 2020 at the end of this month so now is a perfect time to try out all these tips and tricks trial projects you might have in mind you can access generative design through a number of ways I'm sure my colleagues in the Czech and help if anyone has questions but please keep in mind that this is the perfect time to try to get started using generative using generative today because it is free so the first real trick that we'll talk about today and as you look to the top right this is just going to show where each one of these fits within that workflow the first tip is to always use the Edit model workspace with in generative design to make your geometry adjustments so let's move over to fusion and we can start looking at this so if this is our existing CAD geometry to set up a generative solve many people are used to doing all of their modeling workspace here within the model workspace itself now within generative design we have the Edit model workspace which has specific tools for the generative process that make things a lot easier so anytime you have to create preserve geometries or create obstacles go to the workspace drop-down at the top left and start this within generative so as we move over to generative design you can see the user interface at the top has changed to follow a workflow from left to right to set up a generative solve so what we would do and what you should do on every single project is first go to that edit model tool at the top so edit model will show you some brand new and specific tools that are only here for generative design that allow you to accelerate that process of actually creating your geometry so tip number two so we talked a lot about the different manufacturing types that you can apply within generative design today right we talked about additive we talked about casting and we talked about C and C so one that's growing in popularity very much are two and two and a half axis CNC constraints for generative design now the reason for that is because these are the cheapest and manufacture the easiest machine components coming out of generative design so they're very practical for those that are in the traditional manufacturing space now when setting up a two or a two-and-a-half axis CNC project there are a few things from the geometry setup point of view that you do have to keep in mind so unlike additive and unlike unrestricted we do have to keep in mind how our manufacturing orientation will actually affect the geometry that we've created to use as setup so if you see the image on the left here we've set up our geometry with our preserves and we have a cylinder that's actually normal to the cutting direction of our tool so if you see this view cube we're setting up this part to be machined in the plus and minus C orientation now you can imagine that we'll want to create a flat face and then the contour profile around that part around it however you can see with this generative outcome it has a very hard time dealing with that essentially transverse cylinder or transverse round around that cylinder so what we can do to fix that if you look at image number 2 to the right here within that cylinder we've now replaced that with a box now that box has a flat face against the orientation which is in this case see that we are milling against and you can see how the outcome has now kept that in perfectly so to show a little bit about why two and a half axis is so important so we also have things like three and five axis subtractive constraints through generative design but two and a half allows us to make parts that are very easy to machine creating them in pockets instead of the entire profile so as you can see while this three axis geometry has some curves it has some complex geometry that we would have to come in later in machine the two and a half instead creates pockets that are much quicker to machine and in this case this one's already completed while the three axis would would continue going so this is why that two-and-a-half axis is so important and why there's some additional geometry set up factors that will actually need to consider here so the final piece when setting up a two and a half axis generative solve again because these are really the things that are growing the most momentum within generative design is we also need to understand how the layers will work within each one of the generative outputs so when you're setting up a generative solve for 2.5 axes what it does is it will provide you three specific outcomes splitting the part in two layers in changing the orientation of how the part is machined so you can see in outcome one it's splitting that geometry into three layers to be machined as one set up how come two is three layers but it's machining from the opposite direction and then outcome three is from the two setups with five layers so these are all things to keep in mind when you're setting up a generative solve for these factors or if you're reviewing the outcomes that you would see so tip number three the connector obstacle so this is a tool that is specific to the Edit model workspace many times when setting up a generative solve and creating all these preserves and obstacles that we talked about our product team realized that when making obstacle geometries for things like fastener locations and assembly clearances there had to be an easier way to do this than creating a sketch and extruding and combining all these bodies so let's actually take a look at this so with infusion today and we're within that edit model workspace I'm just going to hide one of the other solids so if we look at this triple clamp we know that we have to avoid any geometry within the space that I'm highlighting now so we can attach that other component later on so the connector obstacle tool is a great way to do this very quickly so I'll just look to the top I'll find the connector obstacle tool and you'll see a new window will appear this will prompt me to select the start of the shaft which I'll select the top of that hole the bottom of the shaft that essentially obstacle all of that space within that section but we know we also have things like assembly clearances and other geometry that we might have to avoid around that maybe we need a clean face on the top in the bottom as well so we'll select the bolt head selection here and this will allow us to very quickly adjust the size of these we could have them on one side or we could have them on each side adjust the width and adjust the height of these to create them as obstacle geometries so to go back that was the connector obstacle tool next I'd like to show the remove feature command with an edit model so when setting up a generative design there's many times when you'd like to remove features to drive brand-new innovation right so in this existing triple clamp that we have an engineer had created this pocket that you see in the middle to reduce the mass of it if we're using that as a starting shape to run through generative design or if we had a very complicated preserved geometry itself we might actually want to remove features like holes fill it or even that pocket itself so we know that we're not going to have any issues with in generative design later so within that edit model workspace and this is why it's so important we have an automated feature to select the feature in the size and remove them all and then repair them as one solid so to go back to fusion let's cancel out of that connector obstacle and let's say that we wanted to automatically remove this pocket so to do that I'm just going to go to the modify command at the top and I'll say remove features when I do that I can select the solid that I'd like to remove features of and then I can select the type of features that I'd like to remove so as you can see here it is highlighting the green hole in the middle and I think we'd like to keep that in so we can call that out later as an obstacle so by unchecking that it's now unselecting that hole and selecting the rest of that pocket we can also adjust the feature size that it's looking for so if I move the feature size all the way up to the top it's pretty much looking at everything but if I slide that down you can see it's only selecting what's in that pocket itself so when I press the delete key for all those settings that we placed it will now run through computing what that new geometry would be and you can see it automatically replaced that pocket for us so again this is a very powerful tool in many cases within generative design you will want to replace features like that and this is a very easy way to do that automatically so next many people always ask this question so for tip number 5 we have what are called generative models and we have what are called studies so the easiest way to think about generative models and generative studies is that a generative model contains the geometry for all of the studies within that model whereas a study contains all of the generative settings for that specific solve so let's go back to Fusion and you can see I'm still within the Edit model workspace I have what's titled generative model 3 what combining or cloning generative models allows you to do is essentially set up multiple configurations of the same solve to run at the same time so let's say I wanted to run one of these with that pocket I could right click on generative model 3 and clone and it's saying which one of the generative settings would you like to keep forward I could say study 9 and then within generative model for I could now go through and follow that exact same workflow to remove that pocket now could have a generative setup for not just the pocket example with all of the settings that we'll place later on but I could have another generative set up that has it without the pocket and then I could start to compare those results so we'll cover generative studies a little bit later on but those are very similar so when you've set up that generative solve and you have all of your loading conditions there it's an easy way to clone or create a new study to keep those the same across multiple different solves so tip number six when running a generative design study many people may have seen this within the study settings and may not know what it is but synthesis is a way within generative design to allow for a certain amount of complexity within the solver so the easiest way that I would put this here is that if you have very thin walls within your geometry you should use a higher synthesis if you've removed a lot of your complex smaller features you can use more of a coarse synthesis everything else I would stay exactly in the middle where that's said so just to quickly show how to get there so I'm gonna go to a generative solve and when I go to my study drop down to the left you'll see under settings that I have this mesh synthesis slider so again for the majority of your projects you'll probably be somewhere in the middle that's why we selected it to go there at first for each project but if you notice that you have very fine geometry or very thin geometry I would slide this resolution to the right and if you had a very simplified geometry with a lot of primitives and you've removed a lot of features you could slide that a little bit to the left again I would probably keep this to the middle for the majority of the projects that you have so next would be tip number seven local preview so we talked a little bit about what generative design actually is trying to do so when we place all these settings all these different manufacturing and material types and run hundreds of iterations in the cloud we need to know that it's actually going to work and everything's going to connect the way that we would expect before actually solving so this is what the local preview within generative design allows you to do the local preview applies a coarse approximation to the generative setup before you've actually solved anything so all you need to look for with these his first is the preview actually able to be made or is it failing and the second would be are you missing anything is this course approximation connecting to all of your preserves is it doing what you would expect with in earlier iterations within the solve so to jump back to fusion so we have our geometry setup we have all of our loading conditions our preserves and obstacles before running a saw we're just going to go to the preview tab here at the top it looks like a green play button and now you'll see this timeline slider that will appear at the bottom right so we'll take just a second but what generative we'll do before sending anything to the cloud for this project it's going to run a local course approximation of this just to make sure everything's lined up so as I rotate my geometry around you can see this transparent generative preview has been applied to this part and all I need to look for is that things have been connected and I'm not clearly missing anything within my setup so as soon as I see this within the preview I know that I'm probably ready to go to run that generator itself so next would be a starting shape so within generative design today you don't always need a starting shape or existing geometry to start a solve with now I say it's optional with kind of a note as well so it's optional but sometimes you may need it the situations where you may be required to use a starting shape or when there's not a clear line of sight between the preserves to connect within the solver that will actually cause it to split off and not finish that solve there's other reasons that we'll talk about as more of an advanced tip that you can use the starting shape to steer you in the right direction or steer you in a way that you'd like or to speed solving time so we'll talk about that a little bit first but let's cover this example where a starting shape would actually be required so if we go back to generative design I'm just going to again clone this solve that we're looking at here so we have a second one and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to create an obstacle geometry that will extend through the part that we have right now making it impossible for generative design to connect these early on so here I'm just creating a plane all of this is just really to prove a point so when I have that plane I'm just gonna create a sketch create a very large essentially obstruction that would stop these two from connecting create that as a new solid and now when we're in generative design this also shows the power of that local preview so if this is one of the obstacle geometries that we had and we go to run our preview this will actually say that it fails because generative design could not figure out an easy path from the preserve that you see to the right to the preserve in the middle it says preview failed something went wrong and this wouldn't actually be able to solve within the cloud so to fix that we need to create a starting shape that connects all of these preserves together and then allows generative to have essentially a starting point for this so if we go back to the Edit model tool and we create a sketch on the plane where our preserves are in this case I'll this pretty crew just to prove the point but there's multiple ways of doing this I would just create the geometry that could connect the property preserve geometries that we have here creating this is a new solid and what I'll do is all combined cut away that obstacle that we have keeping that tool so we can call it as an obstacle later on and when we go back to generative design I'm going to select that solid that we just created as that shape and now when we run the preview it will actually be able to solve so again use the preview to tell you when you need a shape to shape to start with and also think about using the starting shape when there's not a direct connection between all of your preserves so I'll hide that starting shape so we can see the preview here in just a second and one second here think maybe my laptop's on a holiday already okay now you can see the preview the transparent material there and if we didn't apply a starting shape in this case that we have that obstacle essentially blocking any of the connections between the preserves it would not have been able to run so to go back we'll now take a look at tip number nine so we talked about when to use a starting shape with with tip number eight but there's also very advanced things that you can do within a starting shape to get you further along so there's two main advanced tricks that you can use with a starting shape so one would be to use what we call a seated starting shape to create a more organic outcome and I'll show a little bit about what that means and the second one would be to actually pre-big a generative outcome so when you've already exported from generative design as a starting shape to use for further refinement so let's show that seated starting shape first so we'll go back to these solve that I had already setup before prior to actually making that protrusion there and as we show the starting shape what I've actually done here is that I've created the original geometry that we had and that I went through and I created a pattern of essentially spheres or primitive spheres in this case to then subtract away from that geometry and what this allows us to do when we go to the Explorer environment later on is it gives generative design more surface area to solve with providing you not just a solution quicker but also a more organic and complicated solution now that may be a good or a bad thing if you're trying to make things to produce with traditional manufacturing I wouldn't really recommend that if you're trying for the most complicated organic look to your component maybe you're working with something like additive this is a really good tool to provide it away to start generating something complex very quickly now the second one that we talked about would be pre baking so pre baking is the idea that we've taken a generative solve and we've taken that generative output and we're going to use that as a starting shape for another generative solve then you're probably thinking why would I do that if I've already generated the output well pre-baking allows you to further refine something that's already been generated so let's say you solve 1/2 a factor of safety of 2 but then you realize you'd really like to go to a factor of safety of 1.5 by bringing in that exported CAD geometry it allows you a starting point to further refine what's already been generated so tip number 10 when setting up our manufacturing settings within generative design we have to always be aware of the orientation settings for manufacturability essentially orientation drives all of the manufacturing processes within generative design one other thing to note well within CNC and casting and to axis cutting they would work in both the positive and the negative orientations additive manufacturing settings will only apply in the positive x the positive Y and the positive Z so we'll show a little bit about what that means now so when setting up a generative design solve again the ideas we want multiple manufacturing techniques to apply and as we go to the manufacturing drop-down you'll see we have the unrestricted this one's actually not asking us for one because it's ignoring manufacturing constraints we have our additive constraints and what additive will do is provide us a self supported part and the positive X the positive y and the positive Z so we have to think about our existing geometry and if you look at the viewcube to the right this probably would make sense if we're generating and then printing this component we'd probably want this face at the bottom to be flat on a on our platform and then print it in the positive Y orientation so that probably would make sense when we go to milling for three axis configurations we're actually applying the tool direction that will machine this part so here if we look at our geometry we know that again in looking at the viewcube to the top right that we would probably want to machine this in at least the plus or the minus or maybe a combination of those Y directions so we can get again normal to these holes and then machining our part from there for two-and-a-half axis we're just selecting one tool direction for five axis we're not selecting anything because it can move within multiple orientations and then same thing as two axes cutting where we are applying again in this case the Y we're going to look normal to our part and because this is a two axis operation it's just going to cut the profile so Y would be exactly what we want and then for casting we would want this to eject in the plus and minus y direction so I know manufacturing orientation can be a little confusing especially starting off with in generative so what I would say is that if you have any manufactured holes like we do with in this project here use those as references to how you're actually going to set up your manufacturing constraints within generative so let's go back to tip number eleven so within generative design we talked about this at the beginning the real value is not just comparing across only performance but it's also across comparing cost as well so comparing the full cost versus performance for each one of those generative outputs so what so what it really does is it provides you an estimate on the real manufacturing cost for each and what you need to keep in mind is that not every material is linked with a manufacturing process for costing yet and there's some that will actually never link so you could imagine if you wanted to generate a part with stone and with casting manufacturing process that's never really been done before and there's no information and it's actually impossible so there would be no way to actually come up with how much that part would actually be to cost so when setting up a generative design solve there's a couple of things we can do to make sure that our materials and our manufacturing types are mapped correctly now the way to do that would be within our pre-check so we talked a little bit about the preview that was running a local course approximation the pre check is also done before the solve and this will tell you if all of your manufacturing and your material types are linked correctly so if I go back to one of our generative solves that has again just to show them a range of materials so here we have 6061 aluminum tae sik's for stainless steel 316 and a few others and we have all of these different manufacturing processes when I go to that pre check it will tell us which ones are mapped and which ones are not so for instance if you see at the top aluminum 6061 is not supported for additive manufacturing we don't have costing information for 6061 for additive whereas with aluminum alloys which is the specific one we picked here we do have costing for additive but for this one we don't have it from milling and to access cutting so again just a point if you're very much interested in costing analysis make sure that you're looking at that pre check to see if the material you've selected is actually mapped to a specific costing process so tip number 12 so we talked about setting up for costing how about reviewing the cost information so when you set up a generative solve and you run all those hundreds of iterations in the cloud now is the time where we actually go and start to explore those results so within the explore environment there are a number of tools to let you look at the cost for each one of those outcomes filter down and select the right one so again after we've generated ourself we're just going to go to this explore environment here at the top now again the explore environment is what we're what we're using to take all those hundreds of iterations those hundreds of results and actually find the one that makes most sense to actually produce so there's a couple different ways to look at costing within the context of what we're seeing with an explorer if we see this filtering range to the bottom you'll see estimated manufacturing cost so we actually have a part that could be four dollars to manufacture and we have another one at the high end of the spectrum which is two thousand dollars to manufacture this is caused by looking at casting versus additive titanium versus plastic material we have an extremely wide range of options that we can start looking at so the first thing that you could do is you could use this slider and say show me only parts that are less than a thousand dollars to manufacture this will filter all of these different thumbnails that we see on the screen to only show what's within this range at the bottom so if I said show me less than 500 you'll see there is less show me less than 250 dollars to manufacture even less the other thing that we can do is we can view all of these solutions graphically so here we have over a hundred 30 unique solutions to this to this problem that we've set up and on the x-axis we could have mass but on the Y we could have price so now again you can see that range from 0 to 2000 and as we filter in on any one of these sections we can really start making those cost and performance trade-offs that we talked about at the beginning now let's take a look at one of these outcomes so when we select this one this one has extremely low mass it's one of the higher priced solutions at $180 but let's take a look to see what it is we can automatically see this is an unrestricted solution meaning it's probably produced with additive manufacturing and this is very complex inorganic so that's what's driving that price for this one up to a median at about a hundred eighty dollars compared to the range which would be anywhere from 150 to 240 now opposite to that let's say that we wanted to look at a low price solution so if we unselected the solution that we picked there and we go to a two axis cut part this is going to be something that's very easy to machine you can see it's created a profile and essentially those pockets and rather than $180 this one is 50 and this is where those cost for his performance trade-offs come in do you need the higher performance and are you okay with the higher cost or do you need something that would be more affordable to manufacture so tip number 13 so within the Explorer environment we have hundreds of solutions so how do we effectively find the right ones and if we're collaborating with other people within our team how do we let them know the ones that we're really interested in this is where tagging and filtering comes into play tagging allows you to actually put a note on one of the iterations to someone else on your team or maybe you later on to figure out what what you'd like to see and then filtering allows you to set those criterias kind of like what we showed with cost to narrow down the solutions so going back to this Explorer that we were just looking at we have all of these solutions that we could look at we have organic we have additive we have all these different manufacturing types we also have what's called visual similarity within visual similarity what it's doing is it's taking geometry outputs across multiple manufacturing types and grouping ones that look that look very similar so you might find that you like a certain segment of these solutions not just because maybe they look visually the same but because they're applying a certain or or performance value to what you're creating so the other thing too is if you look at one of these outcomes so this is a two and a half axis subtractive solution I can apply a tag to either reference a colleague later on or to make sure that I can come back to this specific solution so by pressing the tag at the top I can trigger a message says Erin take a look at this Bruins are better and we can say whatever we like in that space so when someone else who's within our fusion team needs to take a look at this project they can automatically find that tag that you've applied tip number 14 so when looking at all of those outcomes I think many people are familiar with selecting that final converged solution so that last iteration within that part but as people use generative design more and more they realize that the iterations that are closer to the middle may actually be preferred so again when we're generating that part it will extend 20 30 50 iterations maybe an iteration in the middle is not just lighter weight and higher performing but maybe it's also cheaper and more conservative than that fully generated solution so let's take a look at this so if we look at this two-and-a-half axis subtractive solution we're looking at iteration number 21 but what you might also be interested in looking at are the iterations leading up to so in this one is showing all these different manufacturing settings it's looking at machining all those pockets and how I would actually interact with that geometry if we take this one out and we actually look at some other ones let's take a look at this one for additive we can see maybe this final converged solution although it's meeting all the requirements that we set maybe it's a little too organic or a little too complicated for we like again you can scale this all the way to the beginning and maybe find something that makes a little more sense for what you're doing so tip number 15 so we talked about the value of generative design is actually accelerating the time that it takes you to bring a product to market one of the ways of doing that is to export solid editable CAD geometry from generative design now this one is not as much as a tip as it is what I think should be a rule there are two kinds of exports today within generative design you can either export a solid or you can export a mesh now I would always recommend to export the solid if you're working with 3d printing and you do need a mesh later on you can always convert that solid to a mesh at a later time but if you start by creating a mesh first it's going to make your life much more challenging later on so I'd recommend always export the new solid from that outcome tip number 16 so we've exported a design and we now like to start actually making adjustments to it so something that we hear often is that customers would like to apply symmetry to a generative design part now something that we are working on is actually applying symmetry as an upfront setting but we don't currently have symmetry as something we can apply within generative design today so to do this we can take our generative our generatively exported design and apply symmetry later on so to take a look at this I'm going to go back to our project and I'm going to search for created from outcome this will find parts that have been sent out a solid CAD you can see we have a two and a half axis milled solution here and since I've already created the new file from the outcome I can simply open it here within this window now that I have this geometry it looks pretty symmetrical but it's not exactly symmetrical and if this was an organic design something for additive you would definitely notice that so if I wanted to quickly make an adjustment to wear this part could be symmetrical what I'm going to do is I'm going to split the body of this part and I'm going to split it around a central plane so if we had a mid plane for our part or if we had the origin geometry itself we can split across that plane so for splitting tool I'm just going to select that plane here you can see that it's extending through the middle of the part I'm going to hide the half that I don't want to copy so now I'm looking at this half and now I can come in to modify and all I have to do is mirror this part now so I I think actually it's under create my fault so I'll create modify the body from the left half selecting the mirror plane across the middle and this now provides us with that symmetrical part that we would have hoped so now it can come in and combine those two halves and we went from having a non symmetrical part to now a symmetrical part coming out of generative design so tip number 17 so we talked about all of these different manufacturing outcomes all of them do provide you a different editable K geometry in different techniques for how you can adjust them after it's been generated and sent out from generative so the first one will look at our organic generative designs these are coming from manufacturing settings like additive unrestricted casting and CNC so as we take a look at these and I'll just open one up from our study what the organic outcome is actually doing is it's taking our original preserve geometries it's taking our obstacles and it's combining the preserves with what we call T splines so all of that organic generative design geometry gets combined with the preserves and then subtracted from the obstacles to give us that final solution so I'll go ahead and I'll open up a pretty dramatic generative solution that I got out of this part this was actually using that seeding workflow that I talked about to give us something that's very organic now to start making adjustments we're going to look at this timeline at the bottom so I mentioned first comes first that first thing that comes in are the preserves next would be the obstacles then our organic geometry it gets combined and then we have one solid part in the end so what this history allows us to do is we can roll back select the t-splines organic geometry itself and let's say we started we wanted to start making adjustments to these struts we can use the t splines tools within Fusion to drastically accelerate the time that it would take to make these adjustments so I can select a face on one of the struts select the coordinate space that I'd like to work with and I can now click and drag this out to automatically thicken that strut for us if this was just solid kagiyama tree without this power I would have to go in create a series of planes project offset hope it combines together but this allows us to adjust organic geometry extremely quickly so you can get very far into T splines for generative outcomes there are a number of great resources there was a youtube live on this topic itself so I'd highly recommend taking a look at that so tip number 18 so we talked about adjusting these organic generative design outputs next let's take a look at adjusting prismatic outputs so prismatic designs come from two and two-and-a-half axis CNC results here the history slider is going to show something a little bit different it's not going to show the T splines organic geometry it will show a series of sketches and extrusions so let's go back into that T splines output the one that we just looked at creating symmetry for and you'll notice at the bottom the history is a little bit different right it still has the preserves first and then the obstacles but then there are a series of sketches and extrusions coming up and that's what's actually making each one of those pockets and each one of those profiles that we see so if we wanted to actually make some adjustments the only thing that we have to do is select the sketch twice and now we can start actually using the control points on these splines to start making adjustments now you can use this to either remodel it parametrically if you'd like you can use this to make sure that you have the right machining allowances something that I've seen is really helpful is if you have a number of these points along a line a very easy way to smooth that out is to say let's select every other and let's just erase those now that's a smoother pocket so tip number 19 so we have this two in this two-and-a-half access part how do we really know that we can machine all of those pockets so within fusion 360 after we've generated and exported that design we have tools to look at not just accessibility but also minimum radius analysis for all of those geometries so if we take a look at that same part and what I'm going to do is finish this sketch so it recombines that into that one solid if we go to our tools tab at the top and we go under inspect we have accessibility analysis where we can actually look to see if all of our geometry could be manufactured from a specific orientation but we also have minimum radius analysis this allows us to select the body and then select the minimum radius that we'd like to make sure that we can analyze it actually machine later on so here you can see as I'm moving this slider you'll start to see geometry show up in red this is saying if we had a minimum tool that was one centimeter I might have issues around this curve and that can prompt us to go back into that sketch and actually make that adjustment we can also check for a sharp edge that would be hard to machine and all of this can feed into the way that we set up those sketches in those extrusions tip number 20 so this should be the last one generative design provides a setup that you can bring into simulation to adjust so you can imagine we generated this part we've started making adjustments to those sketches looking at the machining radius analysis how do we know that that part is still compliant to all of the loading conditions that we set up at the beginning so if we go back to fusion 360 and we have our outcome CAD geometry all that we have to do is go to the workspace drop-down at the top left and go over to simulation when we do that it says it looks like the design was created with generative design do you want to use that set up information within a simulation solve and when I press yes what it will do here in just a minute is it will bring in the study material so in this case 6061 all of the load cases that we set up within generative so we don't have to do it again and then all we have to do from here is maybe adjust our mesh and we can run this simulation solve either locally or on the cloud so if I run that locally this should take just about 30 seconds and we can then again validate that any change that we made to that geometry that we've adjusted after generative design has it compliant still so now you can see I have my factor safety calculated and I have all of the load cases that I can now look at and that took just about a minute so the final piece of advice that I would give so we showed everything with generative design outside of actually how to produce that part so we showed setup generate explore adjust and validate we did not show actually how to manufacture in this case the CNC part or the additive part so what I would highly recommend is take a look at what some of my colleagues I'm sure many people know Brad and Angelo and the rest of the team out there there was actually a youtube live last week on manufacturing this same generative design two and a half axes part take a look it's very useful in thinking about how to actually machine these components so with that I know we covered a lot today first of all I want to say thank you for everyone that joined happy holidays and please leverage the next week and a half of generative design being free to learn as much as you can and to try it on the projects that you have today so once again thank you very much and Happy Holidays you

Channel: Autodesk Fusion 360

Views: 20,772

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

Id: hk4TN8xkSQM

Length: 60min 58sec (3658 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 19 2019