360 LIVE: Intermediate Surface Modeling for Fusion 360, Featuring FXR Racing and Makerbot Method X

hello everyone and welcome back to another fusion 360 live stream i am your host for today jason lichtman and today's topic is going to be surface modeling for any of you that might have already watched our previous surface modeling class which i called introduction to service modeling this is going to be a continuation of that this is going to be more of an intermediate level so we are going to deal with some more advanced topics but i'm definitely going to focus on making sure that they are going to be as clear and easy to follow as possible so that anyone can follow it and then my goal of course is to follow this with another live stream that's going to be very advanced because there's not a lot of really advanced content that's out there and i want to make sure to cater to that so today is going to be intermediate service modeling and we do have a couple of things about today that are super special one is that we have a partnership with a company called fxr racing they've provided the cad models that i'm going to use today because i wanted to make sure that everything that we show you you're going to be able to see in like a real application so this isn't going to be you know making any kind of hobby projects at least for this particular live stream i want to make sure you could see that you could use fusion 360 and fusion 360s service modeling for very commercial applications so fxr racing has provided the cad models also as i'm sure you've seen in the title we have a partnership with makerbot which provided the 3d printer that you see in the background right over here that i've been using for nearly all of my 3d prints and prototypes and i'm going to be showcasing how you can use that makerbot 3d printer to be able to prototype your surface models right by definition surface modeling is all about having clean surfaces and so having a 3d printer that can provide you with prototypes with nice clean surfaces is going to be super important anyway those are two very special things about today but we do have an official agenda so let me go and pull that up real quick just a moment all right we want screen there we are so in today's live stream we are going to cover we're going to start off by showing you some new surface modeling tools in fusion 360. they're new as of i would say maybe six months ago at this point but a lot of the videos that are out there that you might have watched are older than that and so i wanted to make sure to cover the tools that might not be in other videos that are surface modeling specific i'm also going to be showing you what i like to call the hidden surface modeling tools i'll be covering what they are and also how to find them and then we're going to be showing you surface modeling in action that's the part that i think you're going to enjoy the most and those are going to be the examples that i'm going to use the fxr racing cat models for and then lastly we're going to cover the makerbot method x carbon printer that i have in that background and how i use that for prototyping i think that's a pretty good agenda i'm gonna go and pull my camera on here as well you can see me as well and all my fancy hand gestures and we're to jump right into the good stuff so the first part of this is going to be those new surface modeling tools and i'll give you a quick list of them right now and i'll tell you what they are what they do and then i'll show you in fusion 360 where to find them so the first one is ruled surface it is probably my favorite of all the surface modeling tools let alone the newest surface modeling tools and ruled surface can create a surface that starts at an edge of another surface and it can be normal to that surface it could be tangent to that surface and then lastly it can also be in a particular direction that's my favorite of all three you're going to see me using that tool quite a bit in this particular live stream the next one is going to be untrim surface so if any of you have surfaces that are a little bit too small and you need to make them bigger currently your or in the past rather you probably use the extend tool to extend those surfaces the untrim tool will do that more automatically and is much faster uh in many applications so i love the untrimmed surface parting line draft is an interesting one because parting line draft isn't really a surface modeling tool it's more of a solid modeling tool in fact you will find it in the solid modeling tab i'll show you this all in a moment but the party line draft tool again solid modeling is used very heavily for consumer product design or for organic models like the ones that we're going to be working on today and so even though technically it's a solid modeling tool it really to me goes hand in hand with all these other surface modeling tools because you're going to be using that to be able to create your geometry for those organic or highly stylized models so let me show you where they are in fusion 360. so let's jump over to fusion itself this by the way is a quick preview of what we're going to be working on in a little bit the squadron goggle by fxr racing but just to show you where those tools are that we were talking about it's primarily surface modeling tools so you're going to want to go to the surface tab in the design workspace and within this tab under create you're going to see ruled surface and where is it right there and when you do go into ruled surface you're going to see that you're going to get to pick an edge which i haven't picked yet and those three options i talked about are the normal tangent and then direction and you're going to see me using this quite a bit again so i'm not going to go and show you how to use it just yet because you will see that but just wanted you to know where to find that tool and if you're going to use it as often as i do you might want to put this at the very top where you could use that much more quickly the other tool we're going to be using is going to be untrim but on trim you're not going to find that under create you're going to find that under modify and you're going to find that right here under next to trim you're going to see untrim so think of untrim like the reverse of trim right trim is meant to make something smaller and untrim is meant to make things bigger very similar to extend but untrim is going to untrim it in all directions and typically untrim is going to untrim your surface to what that surface looked like before it was ever trimmed so like the original surface and that's going to be important as well you can actually extend it even further and you'll see that in a few minutes when we actually go to use that tool and then in terms of parting line draft i did tell you that that is part of the solid modeling tools so if you go under the solid tab here and you go to modify you're going to see that we have our draft command or draft tool and within this draft tool you're going to see a second option here that says parting line and this is the parting line draft that i was really referring to so if you're creating parts that have non-planar parting lines parting line draft is for you and it is awesome so those are the new tools again i didn't actually show you them in action yet but i did want to highlight what they are and you are very much going to see them in action the next thing i want to highlight are going to be the special tools or the hidden tools you're not going to see in fusion 360 by default so many of you that are newer to surface modeling probably didn't know these existed i want to make sure to highlight those as well and so let's go to the next slide here the hidden surface modeling tools include merge validate and then flip surface normal so merge is going to merge two faces of a surface body together i'll explain more in a moment validate is meant for kind of like doing an analysis on a surface like are there any bad is there bad math behind those surfaces and it can actually fix them as well we are very much going to use that today and then flip surface normal is meant to flip the surface normal but if you're not familiar with what that means a surface has like a front and a back to it even though it's infinitely thin and the flip surface normal flips which one of those is the front and which one is the inside and i'll admit i never use flip surface normal uh i haven't actually found a need to ever but if you can find a good need for flip surface normal please put in the chat i would love to be proven wrong here unlike a really good application for flip surface normal but just know of course that that does exist now for the merge tool i wasn't going to show it in the actual examples that we had so i'll actually show you the tool right now let's actually jump right back to fusion 360 here and i'm going to switch to maybe this model here and i'm going to introduce fxr racing in more detail in just a bit but i'm going to skip ahead for just a moment so i could show you what how to actually access these tools so when you're in fusion 360 you probably have noticed that you can have the design history on or off so when you import something like a step model like i have on my screen at the moment there's no history on this model and i know that because the very bottom of my screen from left to right does not show my timeline and then also on the very top of my screen i can see tabs for form mesh and well no nothing else besides that form and mesh are the ones that are showing up that don't normally show up and you probably already know this but maybe you don't but the reason that form and mesh don't normally show up is because those tools are not parametric so when the timeline is on they kind of like fight so to speak with this parametric way of modeling so we can't show them and what we do to enable you to be able to use them is you would go to create and you would say create a form or create a mesh and then it shows up as available in fact let's actually show you that real quick here i'm going to go and turn on my modeling history here the timeline showed up at the bottom of my screen and the form and the mesh tabs disappeared from the top and if i did want to go into those workspaces or tabs i would go to create form and you'll see the tab shows up or i would say create mesh it's a little bit lower on this and i would now see the mesh tab but again they don't normally show up they're somewhat hidden very much like the service modeling tools i'm about to show you so with the history turned on you're not going to see these tools but if i turn the history off by saying do not capture design history and i'll ignore this warning here now when i go into my surface tab and i go to modify i'm going to see this merge tool that wasn't there before and i'm also going to see the flip surface normals and where is it oh sorry it's called reverse normal i mislabeled it in my powerpoint but you're going to see these tools and again they normally do not show up so just be aware that these exist and they can be really handy i'll show you the merge tool in just a second and then there's another tool the inspect validate tool you're gonna find that under inspect validate and you'll find that right here we are going to use the validate tool in just a little bit so the only one i'll show you for now is going to be merge and let's go and create a surface that i can actually use for this i'm going to go and grab let's say what i want to use here look at this i want to use these two these two right there and i'm going to do a surface offset real quick and i'm going to hide the solid body so now we really just have two surfaces by the way if i'm using a bunch of terminology that isn't familiar to you that's okay it probably means you haven't watched the intro to service modeling video that i created a link to that is in the description so please make sure to watch that i like to call it like required reading so to speak for the intermediate level that we're at right now also if you have questions on any terminology i used please feel free to put it in the chat jeff smith from autodesk is in the chat window right now and he can answer any of your questions and any questions that he is unable to answer or would be better fit for me to actually show off i will show you those answers at the end of this particular live stream all right anyway let's show you what merge does so if you go to modify and you choose merge you select two faces of the same surface body and what it's going to do is merge them together now when i first started using this i assumed that if these surfaces are really the same surface there's just the split in it that it would get rid of that split but it keeps the original surfaces it's not exactly what's happening here so i do want to make sure to give you a little bit of a warning that what this is really doing is it's taking the boundary around the surface body and creating a patch that's patching with that boundary so it's not very different than just doing a patch yourself except for the fact that it's way faster so if i hit ok right now it's going to go and create a single surface using that boundary but the warning the reason that that's important to give you a warning is that if your original surface has like a very steep curvature to it the emerge surface may not have that curvature to it at all because it doesn't have any kind of constraint in the middle of the surface to keep that like pop to that surface so just be aware that it's really just taking the outer edge and merging or patching like a new surface between but this can still be very helpful and probably i might actually use this in just a little bit so that is the merge tool and then the flip normal actually let me show you this a little more clearly i'm going to go to my preferences here so you can actually see this a little bit better in your preferences under graphics there is a check box that i have checked right now that says display surface normal sorry disable surface normal display when that's checked i'm going to hit cancel you're going to see that the surface looks the same on the front and the back if however i turn that off right so i disable the disable so to speak let's go and do that i'm going to uncheck that box and hit ok and apply or whichever method you prefer now when i look at this on the back side it looks a little bit gold colored on the back and it looks like normal colored on the front that's just telling me which is the front and which is the back or which is the outside and which is the inside of the surface and what you can do with this reverse normal is you could select the surface and now you're going to see the gold in this case on the front and the normal color so to speak on the back right so it flipped it again though i haven't actually ever needed to use this so if you have a really good reason to use this on a regular basis please put that in the chat again i would love to be proven wrong or better yet i would love to learn something from all of you that would be wonderful so please do that and then in terms of the validate this one is really important to make sure that your surfaces themselves are clean when you look at a surface sometimes you could tell when something is off you know like when the surface is kind of like folding inside inside out but oftentimes it looks just like a perfectly normal surface but in reality the math is bad so when you're trying to do something like a surface offset and it fails and you're wondering why and you're trying to tear your hair out which i can't do very well you're probably going to want to do this validate command and so the way that works is you select your surface you can choose a like level of checking like how detailed it's going to go i pretty much always use standard and i hit the ok button and it's going to go and validate if the surface is a good surface if there are problems it'll tell you that there are problems unfortunately it's not detailed enough to tell you like where those problems are or how to fix them but you could actually just go back to that inspect validate one more time and if you hit repair and then check that same surface now it'll actually also clean the surface or fix it for you as well so this is really helpful now i've shown you that to get to these tools all you have to do is turn the history off but if you like modeling with the parametric history that's okay too you also have the ability to temporarily turn your history off and to do that let me show you how this works you turn on your history so capture design history and then you can create what's called a base feature you won't find it under surface create but you will find it under solid and if you go and say create a base feature it puts you into this temporary zone that's not parametric and in that particular zone you could go to the base feature surface and you should find the validate command and under modify you're going to find merge and also the reverse norm so you don't have to turn off the history forever you can actually just create a base feature and also access these same tools so those are the hidden tools that i was talking about earlier and now we've gotten to my favorite part of today's live stream we are going to be talking about surface modeling in action i'm going to show you some real examples of surface modeling and as i mentioned at the very beginning of today's live stream we're going to be using examples provided by fxr racing so i have to tell you a little bit about fxr racing and then we're going to jump into those examples so fxr racing is a consumer product company and they make a lot of outdoor equipment for the motocross industry for the snowmobile industry they also deal with professional fishermen or fisher people i assume we would prefer to say these days and also for just lifestyle equipment as well or lifestyle clothing there's a lot more to it than i can just describe myself but i will say their website is absolutely phenomenal so you can go to their website and see what products they have to offer but also i'm going to show you a video provided by fxr that really summarizes who they are and what they're all about it's a summary of last year 2020 and i'm going to start that right now hold please [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] um [Music] hmm [Music] uh [Music] [Music] all right we are back all right so that was the intro to fxr racing and what they do as i mentioned earlier they're a customer of ours and we are going to be showing you some of the things that uh that they are doing on a regular basis with surface modeling in their products and we're going to be using their products as our examples so let's jump to fusion 360 and actually show this off and actually we want to share our screen again there we are so let's go and take a look at one of their products this one is going to be a goggle and it's the squadron goggle this one is no longer in production so you're not actually going to see this one on their website but i still think this is a perfect example of a heavily surfaced product and it's going to be great for our examples today so let's actually show that right here you can see a picture this used to be on their website this is from their professional photographer we're going to jump into the goggle itself and we're going to go and focus on let's say this front view of the goggle and really take a look at what's inside how is this constructed if any of you have ever used goggles before of course you have a strap on the back of the goggle we have a frame of the goggle that's actually holding pretty much everything together it's the majority of the goggle and then you have the lens in the front you can see it highlighted in very dark blue for a second and then you have foam across the back that's what makes it nice and comfortable against your face and then there's also foam around the outside of the frame and that's what's going to provide kind of more of like a solidified outside but it still makes the goggle breathable through the vents that you're going to see from below i zoom in actually tied let's hide the lens for a second you'll see it a little bit clearly we're going to be looking at these vents in particular and of course the foam is kind of like very porous so air is going to be able to travel through it as well anyway we're going to go and look at some surface modeling in this goggle and some problems that you probably face on a regular basis and how we're going to overcome them let's go and take a look for just a second and our powerpoint again and i'm going to give you a list of what examples i'm going to show so we can keep track of our time for today the first thing we're going to do is we're going to show you how to stitch together good surface bodies into a solid i'm calling them good for a couple of reasons you'll see in a few moments i'm also going to show you what to do when you need to stitch bad surfaces together and make a solid and those two examples are really going to cover what happens when you're importing what's supposed to be a solid from a vendor a customer from a client from anyone and you're having problems because they come in as surface bodies instead of a solid then we're going to start to deal with modifications so moving event wall using surfaces and what i like to call the replace face method and you'll see some advantages of that method i'm going to show you a couple of variations there as well and then we're going to jump into the more serious surface modeling i actually have two examples for that depending on the timing for this particular live stream i may be able to show both i might only be able to show one we'll see i'm not sure yet so let's jump into those examples right so i'm back in fusion 360. i'm going to jump to the same goggle here we're focusing on just the frame and let's say i imported this from my customer or from my vendor and when i look at the bodies folder here i see a lot of surface bodies right indicated by the orange instead of the white and if i scroll down here for what seems like forever oh my gosh it looks like this is coming in as 970 surface bodies that's a lot and what we want to make sure to do is really just convert this into a solid and to be clear the reason that you might get this happening from time to time is not necessarily the fault of whoever sent you the file these kinds of things happen regularly when you're translating from one program to another it could be pro engineered to fusion 360 it could be solid works it could be even alias our own autodesk product into fusion360 it also depends on whether you translated that file from let's say you're starting in solidworks you translate it from solidworks to an igus or like a generic 3d model file and then you bring it into fusion 360. in that case you actually translated that file twice and in translating it twice you have more room for error to come up with translation issue anyway the fix for this is very simple you're going to go to the surface tools stitch and what i like to do personally from the very beginning is change my tolerance to zero and i'll explain more detail why in a moment and then i like to use the box select but you could use any of the selection tools here that you prefer and i like to box select around everything in this model so basically all of these surface bodies so i don't have to pick them one by one because i don't have enough time to pick 960 surfaces one by one it's just a waste of life so i box select over everything it's going to figure out if it's going to be able to if it's going to be able to stitch everything together and what i'm looking for here is these numbers right so it says there are free they're 5190 free edges and according to these settings that i picked it's going to stitch 5186 of them there are four edges that are not going to be stitched that's not a good thing i want all of them to be stitched and so what i'm realizing here is that i open the wrong file to show you this i have one prepared with what i called good surfaces let me switch to that and do this again so same idea surface we're going to do stitch i'm going to change my tolerance to zero and i'm going to box select around everything what i'm looking for and expecting this time is that that number is going to be 5100 and whatever that was but it'll be the same number for the free edges and the edges that will stitch there it is 5174. and so if these stitches if these services are good meaning they have really good boundaries between the different surface bodies there's no overlap that shouldn't be there everything is good then all i have to do is hit the ok button and it will stitch everything and what i should see in a moment under the bodies folder is instead of a whole lot of different surface bodies i should see one solid body and that's really what i'm after and it names it something random like body 972 and i would just rename this frame and if i want to be more anal retentive you know maybe add solid there and this is looking good right so this is the best case scenario but what happens in that other scenario so let's go back one more time i'm going to do the same thing like i did before and i'm going to highlight everything and you're going to see just like what happened a moment ago not everything is going to stitch right there are four open edges that are not stitching so what do you do in that scenario well there are a couple of things you can do the first thing i want you to notice is that i did set the tolerance to zero and what that means is that if the edges or boundaries of those surfaces aren't touching perfectly this won't stitch right because there's no tolerance that i'm allowing for what you can also do is increase the tolerance and if you increase the tolerance it can fix some of these problems in many cases all of your problems automatically for you but just know that you could potentially be creating different problems by cranking up that tolerance too high so i start off at zero just to check if those surfaces are clean and if they're not then i increase my tolerance a little bit something like 0.1 millimeters if you're in metric and if you're an imperial uh probably like 50 000 of an inch something like that would be fine and what i'm looking for here is again do the numbers end up matching and in this case it gets really close but not all the way there and there's still one edge left and if i select this edge it highlights it it was a little hard to see so i'm going to zoom in here so you can see that again when i selected this edge it shows me which edge is the problem and it's that one right over here if i cancel for a second now we're going to be able to see why it's not actually stitching in the first place and when i stop moving my mouse you'll see everything highlighting nicely there's a gap and that gap is bigger than my tolerance which is why it's not able to fix it if i make my tolerance high enough it would potentially fix it but in some cases the fix is really creating other problems so i just want to give you an example of that if i zoom out a little bit and we look at this goggle there are a couple of edges and this one in particular that are a great example of that and to be clear this is not the fault of fxr racing as a product design and development company or whichever factory fxr racing is using this is normal stuff that happens when you translate from one program to another your goal is to avoid these problems and fix them but just know that this is very common and so there's zero blame coming from me whatsoever but the problem surface here is that this surface and this one where they meet should be a nice oh i zoomed in too much there it is it should be a nice fillet but if i zoom in here you're going to see that there's some like weirdness going on and actually when i opened up this model earlier i was seeing that it was kind of like flipping inside out actually this model shows it a little bit better again same model just different file let me zoom in so you can see it a little more clearly wait for it there it is well there it is you can kind of see that right over here and then over here it's kind of like an hourglass shape happening but it's crossing itself that that's not good that's not what you want at all and this is the kind of thing that happens when you try to crank up that tolerance too high so i would encourage you to start off with it at zero and if you need to increase that increase it a small amount like 0.1 millimeters or 50 thousandths of an inch and and then crank it up little by little until you're happy with what you want let's go back to our other model here and i'll show you that in action so let's try this one more time we're going to go and stitch this i'm going to select everything i'm going to set my i'm going to leave my tolerance actually at zero for now and i'll let this stitch whatever it can and we'll show you what you could do to actually fix this model and there are two techniques i'm going to show you one of them is like the proper fixing the surfaces the second technique which i probably i'm going to show you that one first but the second technique is really beating because this particular model happens to be symmetric left to right and all the problems i found here are on one side of the model so why bother trying to fix those surfaces when i could really just use the other side it's perfectly fine so let's go and hit the ok button it's going to stitch everything that it can and what i'm hoping for is one surface body two surface bodies you know three less than ten would be wonderful right because the more of these you have the more fixing you have to do and in this case oh look at that just one surface body if i try to stitch this a second time which might sound counterintuitive but that's my technique here i try to stitch this a second time and when i do that it's going to calculate pretty much the same thing that i had before but it's going to calculate it much faster because it's only one surface body at this point so now it's telling me is that i have eight free edges and if i leave my tolerance at zero it's not going to stitch anything but also you can see in red this area here is very much not stitching and this area down here well zoomed in too much there it is also not stitching and if you stop moving your mouse and stop zooming and stuff it will highlight it nicely in red for you so you could actually see it you can also select them here and it will highlight the specific edges it shows you in yellow which edge is the one that you're highlighting so let's say i get it right there are two different areas that are problematic how do i fix this so let's do the second method first the cheat by using the side that's good for that what i'm going to do is i'm going to create a quick sketch on the right plane here and i'll just draw a rectangle that's bigger than my model and i'll exit the sketch and under surface i'm going to create a patch using that rectangle that i drew that easy there we are so now that i have that rectangle i'm going to use it to chop away the bad half of my model and for that i'm going to use the trim tool so i'm going to use this as my trimming tool and then it's going to ask me what do you want to remove and i'm going to say remove everything on this side it highlights it in red nice and clean that looks great and i hit ok so all the bad stuff gone i don't have to deal with that anymore and so now how do i turn this into a solid well i have a surface that's going to fill in the empty space right if i hide that you'll see that this is all empty or hollow so to speak right it's a surface and if i show that again all i really need to do is to trim this so that i have all the surfaces i need to stitch together into a closed volume so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to say trim this time i'm going to use this object or surface body as my tool and i'm going to select this in red and i want you to notice let's go in the right view so you can see this better that the red part is everything besides these three areas like it filters out that based on my selection could i also select these yes but i don't want to because i want to keep them so i'm going to hit ok and now what i'm left with the white surfaces you see here are the trimmed surface from that flat rectangle that i made and from what i see here everything that i'm doing is like closed right there's like no emptiness so all i have to do is to stitch this all together and i end up with a solid so i'll go and hit the stitch tool select everything that's in here or menus manually select them all from my list i see there are 96 edges all of them are going to stitch and when i hit ok this is now going to be a solid awesome that's what i wanted and so now what i would do is i would go to create do a mirror select this body mirror it across the center line and then i'm back with a full goggle you know join this together and i'm back with a full goggle and now i don't have to worry about filling in those problems but what if for whatever reason you can't do that right maybe your model isn't symmetric and so that's not going to work for you so let's go back let's do the undo command a whole lot of times here almost there there we are okay uh one more there we are so now we're back to the surface body it still has this hole over here it still has the hole over here and let's go and fill them in so what you could do in this case is under surface let's exit our sketch there there we go so let's go to create a patch and i can just patch this boundary and if i want to control you know how smooth everything is i could change connected to be let's say tangent and i could also say group the edges meaning make everything tangent and i could say okay now i have a surface it's showing in white right but for all intents and purposes it's really close to that original fillet theoretically it's not the original fillet it's slightly different mathematically but it's close enough that the reality is no one would ever see the difference especially for something like this size if you wanted to be a little bit more you know retentive or like do this more accurately you can also let's go and delete that surface for a moment you could also do something like a loft and often times when i see people doing loft they're using loft to create these like very crazy swoopy shapes for all sorts of reasons but you could also use loft for a feature like this so i could loft from this fillet edge to that fillet edge and then i could use this edge here as a rail and then this one at the top as a second rail and i can control my tangencies and stuff like that and when i hit okay again i'm left with a very similar surface that original fill it it's still not the original but again no one's going to notice and this might give you a much better result than just the patch tool depending on the geometry that's around it i just want you to know that that's available you can also do that same thing one last time we'll go into another loft and this time i'm going to loft from the top edge to the bottom edge i can go and use the billeted edge as my rail i'll go and add a second rail this one right here that looks pretty good and hit okay and this is the third iteration of doing this fix and again this is looking great i'm pretty happy with it and then i would just stitch this all together the next thing we're going to do is focus on this area and this one's going to be a little different right could i create a patch absolutely i'll just go and make a quick patch hit okay stitch this all together this would be fine but the reality is that this is a pretty close to flat if not flat surface let's do a double check i like to right click on things or faces and if i see create sketch i know it's flat right so instead of doing like the inspect tool i just right click and if it lets me make this into a sketch it has to be flat because you can only create sketches off of flat surfaces or faces or planes so this one's very much not flat as it turns and also let's get rid of that patch because we're going to do this properly so how do you fix this properly what i want to do is to take this surface face that i highlighted in blue and i want to extend it until it fills in that area but i don't want to do it via patch i want to do this with the original surface so to do that i'm going to say that we need to separate some things here we need to split this up a little bit just like we were stitching things together you can also unstitch or split up things now you've probably done split using split face or split body but you can also split surfaces based on the faces that exist in it by just saying unstitch i'm going to choose the unstitch command and i'm going to select this face here that i want to unstitch or separate from everything else and when i hit ok you're going to see an additional surface body in my list just like that really easy now to make my life easier so you can all see this more clearly i'm going to color this something different so you can actually see this a little bit better i'm going to color this something like kind of uh no blue is a little too harsh let's go with red and i'm going to color this red so you could see what i'm doing relative to everything else so we're going to go and use the extend tool and the extend tool is going to extend a specific edge so i could pick just this edge or just the side edge and extend it i'm going to drag that blue arrow or type in a number whatever you prefer but the key is that i'm extending it a little bit more than i think i need to right a little bit past what i want to do at this point is to trim this and what you might try to do at first is say well let's just use the trim tool i'm going to select the goggle surfaces and then i'm going to go and select that area i want to get rid of which i'll admit is kind of hard to select right now because that other surface is kind of blocking it but what you're going to find is that especially when we're talking about surfaces like this fill it that's like nice and tangent to the surface you want to chop or trim it can be really difficult it doesn't always necessarily trim the way that you want it so what i like to do is to create a new surface that's just my trimming tool i could also use a sketch by the way but i like to have my 3d surfaces i find them to be more accurate because the sketch is two-dimensional usually and the surface is typically very much three-dimensional so now we're going to start to use those new tools that we talked about so under create i'm going to go and grab the ruled surface and i'm going to show you what we're talking about on how this tool works i'm going to go and select this edge right over here and right now it's set to normal and so when i drag this blue arrow there i want to tilt so you can see it it's creating a surface that's normal to the surface that contain that edge so in this case it's actually the fillet here and this surface that i'm creating is normal to that to that surface if you let's actually hide that for a moment you can see what else i could do i could also change this to tangent and it will be tangent to that surface and then the last thing you could do is direction and this one is my favorite it's not really applicable to this situation but you can pick a direction like that this would typically be like a draft direction for me and i can add i can make my edge follow that direction and i can also tilt this which means i could do my draft for injection molding or for foam molding or for fiber molding or any number of different things i will show you this again shortly but for this purpose we're going to go and use normal i'm going to drag this to be out just a little bit and i'm going to hit ok and i'm going to hide this main surface show you that one that we wanted to trim the red one and i'm going to go and use that as my trimming tool select this surface and when i go to select the top notice how it's kind of selecting everything not really stopping what i wanted to and the reason is because whenever you're doing surface trims and things like that you typically want intersections between those surfaces that's going to be the the real winner for any kind of trimming that you're doing and right now even though theoretically this edge is the same and they should be touching each other i prefer overlap or interference on purpose so what we're going to do is we're going to go and use the extend tool and i'll select the inside edge of that ruled surface and just drag that a little bit now i could see a nice clean intersection of those two surfaces and i could use this as my trimming tool select the top and hit enter there we go that's what i wanted so now you might be wondering what on earth am i going to use this thing for am i going to stitch that with a rest absolutely not i don't need it for anything anymore it's really my tool that i used to accomplish what i wanted think of this like scaffolding on a building right the scaffolding should not be there when you are done with your construction the scaffolding just helped you do the construction i did that construction i don't need this anymore delete it and i just hit delete on my keyboard now that i've done that let's go and look at our surface again and that even though the colors are different the reality is that this surface well zoomed in too much this surface is terminating exactly on that edge and is looking great so now let's stitch this all together select everything with my box select i have my tolerance set to zero and i'm gonna go and hit okay i'll admit that right now it said that it's not gonna stitch everything i'm a little surprised actually let's go and do another stitch command select that same surface and let's see where the problem is and it seems like there are a couple of problems here let's go and find them i'm actually not seeing it oh there it is so like this would be a perfect example of like when i'd pick the tolerance and move it up because the reality is at least from my perspective i created these surfaces to match exactly where they should so there's something funny going no i see there's a little bit of an edge problem right here and so this would be a perfect opportunity to either go back and do that same thing again and extend it not only up but slightly forward and then trim using this edge as well or in this case if if like that gap is really really tiny then just up your tolerance a little bit i'll put in point one which i had recommended earlier and let's see if these numbers match oh that's great hit okay and it's going to just fix everything for me a small tolerance of like point one perfectly fine but if you're going to be setting that to five millimeters you are going to run into a whole bunch of pro so just be aware of that and now of course i have my solid let's do a quick little time check here oh my gosh we are getting out of time i'll tell you what i want to cover all this stuff so we're going to go a little bit long today and we're going to get to the next thing and the next thing was let's do a little double check moving event while using surfaces and replace phase so what do i mean by that we talked earlier about how solid modeling is faster than surface model so trying to keep the solids whenever possible is better is faster and it's a lot easier so this technique i'm about to show you is what i would call a hybrid of surface modeling and solid modeling because we're going to use surfaces but we're going to use solid modeling tools to fix our model so let's jump back into fusion and you'll see what i mean let's start with a solid okay so like this is our same goggle again the fxr squadron goggle and what we're going to do here is we're going to mess with these vents on the top but i don't want to double my work so i said earlier that this is symmetric so the very first thing i'm going to do here is i'm going to go and create a sketch and we're going to go and chop off half of this model and only work with half so i'm going to go into a quick extrusion here we're going to extrude this in both directions something like this and hit okay perfect and by the way the service modeling i did a few moments ago i did all of that with the history turned off i'll admit i mostly surface model with a history off and i know right away that a lot of people out there are going to think that i'm crazy for saying that there are some good reasons i'm going to show you what those reasons are by turning the history on and for this exercise we're going to use our history and then when you see how ugly and terrible and long that history is for absolutely no reason i will then show you why surface modeling without the history is perfectly fine so let's turn on our history capture design history there we are and let's look at this vent right over here so what i'm trying to do at this point is i'm trying to move this wall backwards and i want to move it so that it's exactly two millimeters from this surface here now could i create a sketch and project probably this edge and offset that two millimeters and use that to do a solid modeling but absolutely but what i'm trying to do here is i'm trying to make it so that this surface whatever tilt it is i get that same tilt in my vent and for now i'm ignoring draft for like you know actual manufacturing but just say for a moment here that i want that tilt to be exactly the same so it looks like super super awesome so how am i going to do that well i'm going to take that surface i highlighted in blue or that face i highlighted in blue and i'm going to create an offset surface and many of you out there probably have found this there is a bug infusion that drives me crazy we haven't fixed it yet and i'll tell you what it is so that you can at least avoid it is that we have a checkbox here for chain selection when this is checked when you select something it should chain anything that's tangent to it you'll notice that when i select right now it's actually already doing that even though this isn't selected so the trick to fixing this or at least avoiding it is to check the box and then uncheck the box that can be done very quickly it's you know check check and it's done and then now even though it didn't show a check before now it actually isn't acting like it's checked so i'm going to say sorry that that bug exists i am working to get them to remove it but right now it exists so i want you to be able to avoid it so i selected this face and what most people would probably do is to offset this i think i said two millimeters and you have it offset my recommendation is to offset it by zero extend it however much you need because you're gonna have an easier time extending surfaces that are not offset and then to ex to offset it after that's personal recommendation my best practice jeff smith is on the chat window he can confirm if he also does that or if he thinks i'm crazy too but you could ask him in the chat window so i'm going to set this to zero there it is and we're going to hide our original solid for a second and i'm going to extend this surface now if i want to extend this in all directions i'd have to pick all these edges right and then i drag that arrow and it will extend or if you want to use some of our newer tools to make your life easier untrim so modify untrim where did it go here it is at the top select the face and it will untrim to its original before it was ever trimmed and i know you might not have ever seen what the original looks like but this is what it would have been like mathematically this is the original if you wanted to extend even further you can also add a number here and it will be even bigger it doesn't always work it depends on the math on the surface but generally that's how this happens i'm going to go and hit ok now i see my original solid again i'm going to do an offset of this extended or untrimmed surface and we're going to move this two millimeters and hit okay and you'll see here that there is a little bit of an interference with the original surface which is fine doesn't matter to me at least not for now and what i want to do here is replace this face there the blue one with my new one for this to work the new one has to be bigger which is why i was doing this extend or on trim method that i was doing you know so i'm going to go to solid because again replace face is a solid modeling tool modify replace face i'm going to check this face here is what we want to replace and then my target is what we want to replace it with and let's wait and see if it works give it a moment there it is and i go and i hit ok and for any of you that come from other programs like solidworks or creo i i bet that you're looking at this and saying how on earth did that actually work because those fillets that you see around here let's hide all these surfaces again these fillets this one here this one there and this one in the corner are typically going to make that impossible but in fusion 360 or kernel or like the math or brain that we have in the background is really really good and so it's able to calculate this despite that not always but in many cases it does if for whatever reason it fails like it doesn't work the trick for you in that case let's go back one step here so this is the surface i want to use to replace it with is to get rid of the fillets the fillets are not your friend if you see affiliate walking down the street on your sidewalk you move to the other side of the street phillips are not your friend when it comes to surface modeling they are great to make your model look smoother they're great to make your stresses in your model not propagate but when it comes to making edits they are not your friend they will make your life very difficult so you can get rid of them by selecting those fillets right here there we go and if you're in the solid modeling tab just hit the delete button and it fusion will do a really good job of getting rid of them i'll also do the same thing with this fillet here and now i'll try that replace face command same like i did before it will replace that surface with the new one i can now hide or get rid of the original surface because my history is turned on don't use delete use remove and it will just remove it from the timeline but not delete the original and then now i could go and add to fill it back in and i'll admit i didn't pay attention to what size that was oh that's way too big it's probably like a millimeter and then the fillet up here is probably like half or maybe a quarter close or at least for now it's good enough and i'll go and add those back in so if replace face doesn't work with the fillets you can also remove the fillets and then again use replace face so this is a great technique to be able to use what i call hybrid modeling where you're using surfaces or creating surfaces but then still using solid modeling i'm going to take this a step further i'm going to complicate it a little bit because the goal here is to be able to up level all of you out there so let's say i want to do the same thing with this vent here so if i use the same technique as before and i'm going to do this again on purpose you can see what's happening here double click on the chain selection i pick this guy i untrim it right that happened nice and quick i extend this two millimeters what do i see here i see that the shape here actually doesn't match this one at all and i wonder to myself why oh and i know why the reason is because i did an offset of just this face and in reality there are two here and i really should have done both so let's do it for both offset by zero i don't want everything try again just these two and hit ok i'm going to hide this for a moment so you could see here i'm going to try the untrim tool and you're going to notice that it won't let me select anything so to be clear the untrim tool is limited to individual faces if you have a surface body that has two faces and you could tell that this does visually but it also says the number two here telling you there are two faces and trim will not work just tell you flat out will not work so the trick is to go back to the extend tool i'll go and select my edges i'll do the same thing over here and there we go excuse me so now that i have my extended surface i'll do an offset of that original we'll do two millimeters just like before and now we're going to do that same replace face i'm going to choose this face right over here and then for the target this is a little bit funny i'll admit but when you're choosing the target if you choose it from the graphics window it's going to assume that you want just that one thing and not this entire body so the trick there for multi-face bodies is actually to choose it from the browser on the left and that will choose it as like an entity is like a group and in this case it did it and this is looking fantastic that's exactly what i wanted so this is similar to what i did before but repeating it with a slight twist so you see what's happening now we're going to get into the really hard stuff and i have to really check my time i've got i'm going to go over a little bit but i have 12 minutes before i have a hard stop so we're going to do this a little bit faster than i would have liked but you're going to get a real taste for what surface modeling can really be all about oh and i do want to incorporate real quick the makerbot method x into what we're talking about here because when we talked earlier about you know doing the whole point of doing all these surface models is to have a great product that looks fantastic so part of that means prototyping early and prototyping often and so you don't always have to prototype full scale models you can actually prototype smaller models this is the same model here the squadron goggle in 50 scale so it looked really tiny but the benefit here is that this prints way faster 50 in width is also 50 in height well not always but in this case 50 in general is 50 in width 50 in height and 50 in depth which means 1 8 of the volume which means one eighth of the material which means about eight times as fast to print that's awesome this printer the makerbot method x carbon that i have is a fast printer and prints great actually i've had a lot of printers in my life this is by far the best printer that i have had in my own home that i could print on anytime that i'd like you know i've used some commercial grade monster machines that i mean they're commercial grade monster machines they're awesome but oftentimes the prototype shop that i'm using has a backlog or a queue or i have to wait three days for it to print i have to wait for shipping having a printer like this in your house is a game changer and i'll actually show you i printed the full size goggle and i have that right here the bed of this printer actually is magnetically attached so all i have to do is pick it up there it is and here you can see a full-size goggle that's the squadron goggle right here on the bed the white that you're seeing here is the support material and i'm using sr30 it's the stuff that you have to use like a tank to get rid of but it is amazing especially for the high-end materials like nylon or abs or in my case nylon with carbon fiber a nylon 12 with carbon fiber in particular and what that means for me let's actually get this off the bed i'll show you what that means for me there we go almost there we go cool all right that easy what that means for me is that i get a part that stays put where it's supposed to and i never i pretty much never have to worry about prints going bad because the part shifted or there was warping this machine has a built-in heated chamber and of course is a high-end nozzle that is able to print nylon with carbon fiber and also able to print this sr30 and the result is great parts every time and if i want to set this up for printing another job which i do there it is turn that back on and we're going to have another print starting in just a second you'll see that in a moment so it's going to heat up the chamber for us and then start my print but in the meantime let's go and do our surface modeling and we're gonna have eight minutes left for this so so far i showed you that we have this parametric history i would actually urge you to really think about is this history important what's the likelihood that i'm going to go back and change that offset to another number and it's not going to blow up my model if you're doing something more complicated than just moving event chances are that this is going to blow up so excuse me what i do personally is i do a lot of my surface modeling non-parametrically and keep in mind that you can choose what you want to be parametric and what you want to not be parametric i started with a step model and that step model shows up in my history let's actually show my history i'm not showing my screen yet there it is okay so we're back to the goggle you see the history at the bottom and the very first thing you see here is the base feature that's really the imported geometry and what i showed you earlier is that that base feature is actually the like non-parametric temporary zone so if i wanted to edit or create surfaces and i don't care about the history all i have to do is right click on this base feature and hit edit and this is going to allow me to be in this base feature mode where there's no history and i could do all the surface modeling i want and not worry about the history so what i want to do here is to start editing this area here at the front and i want this to i want to tweak the angle on this a little bit so we're going to actually go and tweak it but to start this off what we're going to do is first of all copy this solid body because i might end up needing to reference the original as i'm going so i'm going to hide the original and we're going to call this edited or something like that and i'm going to start to unstitch our bodies just like we were doing earlier and this is the surface we're going to really tweak but it's going to affect everything around it so i'm going to unstitch anything that it might need to affect so this fillet is definitely going to go away we're going to have to rebuild the fillet we're going to get rid of this as well just like that we also want these surfaces down at the bottom that looks pretty good zoomed in too much again sorry about that i'll also do this surface right there and this one there we go so that's everything that i care about and i'm going to go and hit ok it's going to convert this all to surface bodies that's fine and i'm going to select something in the background that i don't care about for now and hide and then i'm going to stitch together these three things so it's a little easier to show or hide them i'll do the same thing with these three and we'll go and select and hide it we'll do the same thing with these three and then we're going to go and hide that as well hide the thing in the middle and these fillets they are gone toast don't need them don't care about them so now we have these three surfaces and what we really want to do is to extend everything so that they match as though there weren't a fillet if you could do this in the solid modeling environment that would have that would be much faster so we're going to go and select these edges right here and i'm going to go and drag this up and it's doing something weird here so let's try this again i'm going to select just this area right there sorry there it is yep and we're going to extend that a little bit then i'll go and extend this one it's doing something weird there that's okay i can even unstitch it from the things the surfaces next to it and then uns and then extend this as well and so now i have this like kind of weird stuff going on here and again we're going to go and trim this but it's all about extending past and trimming and now that i've done that i can go and stitch this back together i want to highlight that when i tried to extend it it failed and all i had to do was unstitch the surface and then extend it a couple of times trim it and then stitch it back together it's really that simple it takes a couple of steps but that's perfectly fine i'm also going to do the same thing with this surface over here that looks a little weird but i don't really care about that area so i don't doesn't matter to me i'll also go and grab these edges here there we are that's looking pretty good and i'll also go and grab these edges over here and again what i'm trying to do is just have everything extend past itself that looks pretty good except for this bottom area and i'll go and extend that also yeah there we go now that we've done that we can actually trim everything so if i use this as my tool i could trim away no that was a little weird we'll do that again i'm going to switch it up for a moment we'll go and trim the top off i'll go and use the bottom and trim this bottom off that looks good i'm going to go and use this to trim this area that looks good too and let's try this one again this is the one that was being weird a moment ago still being weird and remember what we did when we were trying to extend and it was being weird untrim it totally fine then we'll go and try this again and we'll trim this off this one off and this one off and i have to pick these separate because they're separate surface bodies totally fine there we go this is looking great now but what we're really trying to do is not to just stitch this stuff for the sake of stitching it we want to replace this surface with a new one so this fillet is not going to work we're going to delete that this is what we're going to replace let's hide that for a moment let's go back to my ruled surface that i love so much and we are going to select this edge and we don't want normal we don't want tangent we want direction and i can pick any direction i want including in this case this edge of the original pretty cool at 0 degrees it's basically going to just follow that original but i could also change this and say you know what i want 5 extra degrees down relative to that i extended this a little extra so i have what i want there and that's looking good the original i don't need it anymore gone there it is and now we're going to go and extend this just a little bit now if this fillet that we had there the original so to speak were real fill it i would extend this surface and this one here get them to merge together and just add a fill it but i know that that's not what's really happening here what's happening here is that this model is actually trying to make the fillet match this top fill it and this bottom fill it exactly so it's really not a fillet it's more of like a loft this is like a real application of a loft versus some others that i've seen what we're going to do is we're going to create that and for this i'm going to unstitch again i know i'm going a little faster than i would have preferred but i'm going to do some trimming here i'm going to trim this bottom edge here and hit okay that looks pretty good i'm also actually that one's looking pretty good too so let's go and create a quick sketch this is going to def i'm going to use the sketch this time to trim what i am making and i want to project that vertex right there yep that one right there with this one right over here you should see two pink dots show up in a second in the background i'm going to draw a quick line connecting them and i'm going to connect the line to the dots there we are and i can use that also as a trim tool so i could use this line and get rid of this section here of my surface and that's looking pretty good i can also go and trim the bottom of that surface using the bottom edge right there and now we're going to go in loft between this one and this one oop let's add a little bit more there we go we'll go and change our tangencies there that's looking really good and i'm gonna go and hit okay actually before i do there's some options here that i like to mess with and align edges will get me a little bit closer to what i want i'll go and choose that too now remember when you're trimming you always want things to extend past at least just a little bit so what i'm also going to do is i'm going to hide this top here and i'll extend this just a little bit yep a millimeter is fine i'll show that surface again and i'm going to extend that one forward just a little bit that's looking great and i could use them to trim each other so trim this using that okay and this one using that one okay great and then the same thing down below we'll do a quick extend here are we on time we're going to run a little bit late hit okay and do the same thing over here perfect trim these up just like we did at the top perfect now this is looking really good we're almost done by the way we also need to trim this side piece so for that watch what's going to happen first of all there were fillets here so i definitely need to extend this just a little bit before i do my trimming did that look did that work yeah i think that did actually there it is and you'll notice that when i do my trim actually that's working fine you're not going to notice anything it worked just fine so this is looking really good except when i show the original the original had that fillet running all the way up it and down it here and so i want this one to also have the same so what we'll do is we're going to stitch this all together something like that now it is one surface body that's looking pretty good and i don't know what that one is we don't need that and then we'll go and add our fillets i believe i already measured this once so i believe this is going to be a 0.5 millimeter billet that's pretty good i believe this one on the top is all going to be 0.4 if my memory serves me right and i just go and measure this if i didn't remember that's pretty good so now i have those fillets and i'll go and look at this and i see a little bit of funniness going on here we're about to fix that and we'll be done i'll take this surface and extend it by millimeter yep and then i'll go and use my ruled surface right here i'll choose normal and we're just making a tiny little chopping surface so to speak or surface to be able to use for chopping i'm going to do the same thing down below yeah it looks like i need to i'll go and take this we'll extend it a millimeter we'll go and use my ruled surface we'll make that a millimeter good we can hide this and when i trim it watch well first of all we should untrim this oh that was a little bit put that back to zero when i trim this it might try to trim more than what i want so so i can untrim this fillet right here use this as my trim tool and just affect that area delete my tool same thing over here we're going to untrim this we are going to use this as my trim tool get rid of my tool i don't need that anymore i can stitch all of this back together and i'm going to cross my fingers that this works with our very limited time here oh actually we have one more funny thing going on here we're gonna unstitch whatever this weird thing is and we'll get rid of that that'll be this there we go okay so if all goes to plan now i can go and stitch this back together i should see all my my edges stitching and guess what i have i have a solid and if we compare the original to what we have now you'll see that angle difference right there exactly what we want and doing something like this i'll tell you right now is solid modeling nearly impossible surface modeling is the trick to being able to do this effectively so i think that's really the key there last thing i'm going to show you guys because this was all the surface modeling is again about the prototyping with my 3d printer if i'm ready to go and 3d print this i'll just go and pull up a web browser right we have our fxr racing right there i'm going to pull up my bookmarks for a moment and i have a bookmark for my makerbot cloud print i have another 3d print ready to go you'll see that my printer says it's ready for printing i have another one right here in the queue and if i want to start this all i have to do is say start print job start and the beauty behind makerbot's method x being cloud connected is that in the background already it's starting to go and heat my build chamber and it's going to go and start my print and it turns out in let's see how many hours this one's going to take in 6 hours and 14 minutes my next print is going to be done i'm going to get an email telling me that it's ready for me to go and take it off the bill chamber and of course i could go and start printing my next thing so we covered a lot today a lot a lot today and i just want to say thank you for joining us today today was intermediate surface modeling with makerbot method x as well as with fxr racing if you liked what you saw today please like our video and we are happy to do these and we're going to do another with even more advanced surface modeling so thank you all for your time today and don't forget with fusion 360 you can make anything have a good one you

Channel: Autodesk Fusion 360

Views: 7,594

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

Id: RDvrRXfpzSQ

Length: 82min 38sec (4958 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021