360 LIVE: Mastering Wooden Living Hinges

hello everyone and welcome to today's fusion 360 livestream I'm gonna be your host my name is Jason Lichtman and I'm a technical specialist here at Autodesk in colorful Colorado and today we're gonna be talking about designing wooden living hinges and our example is going to be a really cool eye glass case and in case you guys don't know a few months ago I designed a pair of eyeglasses that's the glasses I'm wearing right now these prescription glasses and I had them 3d printed they fit great they look great I'm super happy with them but I decided I really wanted a cool case to be able to store them to make sure that they're staying protected but also looking really cool and I thought why don't I take two things that I like a lot and bring them together to make it really awesome so if you think about wooden living hinges well first of all what are they wooden living hinges are the is the ability to take a flat piece of wood and to cut it in certain ways to be able to make it Bend into shape so if you start off with a piece of flat wood like this this happens to be a coaster made out of plywood you can see that it is a rigid coaster just like you'd expect and that same piece of wood can actually be turned into a piece like this that actually can Bend quite a bit and we're going to show you how to do that today so for the agenda we're gonna talk a little bit about wood and living hinges what preparation that you should have before you go and start designing things that have wooden living hinges in them and then we're gonna go step-by-step through how to actually design this case all the way from the design to the cam and by km i mean actually creating tool paths for the laser to actually follow and that's going to include something called a kerf offset now this is a more advanced course so i'm expecting you guys to have a basic knowledge of fusion 360 and some of the basic terminology that i'm going to use today and if you don't already have that that's fine i'm sure you're still gonna learn a thing or two along the way but this is definitely going to be a more advanced topic now while I am presenting in the background we have Aaron magnin he's our technical marketing ninja out of our San Francisco office and he's going to be on the computer answering any questions you have along the way so just keep in mind that he's going to be answering them not me I'm happy to answer them after our live stream is over all right now I do have a request from all of you out there I'm expecting you to learn quite a few pretty awesome things today and each time you learn something new my request is that in the comments section you just type in the number that corresponds to how many things you learned so after you learn something for the first time of course just type in the number one and hit enter you know put that in the comment and if you can get to learning ten different things today that would be awesome in that case you would just type in ten into the comment section I want to see how high we can get up today and how many comments we can get based on how much you guys are learning out there all right so let's jump into the really good stuff so I already talked a little bit about what the living hinge is but how are we actually going to make it happen well first let me tell you this I started my first living in hinge project I designed everything that I was trying to design I lasered it and then once it was done finished in the laser I went to go bend it to shape and the part broke right in front of me and I was a little bit shocked but I shouldn't have been and the reason I shouldn't have been shocked is because I made a lot of guesses along the way and I never verified that any of those guesses were accurate so the key here really is preparation and we want to make sure to be well prepared so that our project is going to be successful and again the reason that I wasn't successful was because I took a living hinge pattern from the internet I applied it to a particular project that I wanted to work on and I expected it to work but it didn't so what kinds of things might you want to do to prepare and what I'm going to show you might seem quite elaborate but I assure you that if you want to be successful this is one strategy that will pretty much guarantee success and then strategy is to start off with what I would call swatches and so in front of me and you can't see this in detail but I'm gonna switch my camera over to the computer and you'll see this in just a second I have a variety of different swatches and each one is a completely different pattern that is a perfectly suitable living hinge pattern you can find these patterns on the internet very easily they're primarily free although some of them you can pay for as well and you could also of course design your own patterns and what I did here was instead of just taking these patterns and putting them in my computer and looking them on the computer I actually applied the pattern to a laser-cut piece of wood that's the same material that I actually want to use in real life so in this case I have a variety of different patterns and each one looks different actually before I show you bending them let me show you what they look like on the computer let's go over to the computer we're gonna jump over to Adobe Illustrator and we'll jump right over here to all of our swatches and here you could see a collection of different swatches that I have available the colors by the way that you see on the screen at the moment those are just the order that the laser is going to use to actually cut and it also controls what kind of things I'm going to cut verses score and things like that but in general here I have a collection of different patterns and we could see that I have a variety of additional ones as well but the key is I want to see what they're gonna look like in real life and more important than what are they going to look like I want to see what are they gonna feel like in real life so let's go and try that out perfect so here's one example this is the bowling pin pattern looks really great and I could see that it's pretty bendable right actually is quite bendable the diamond pattern on the other hand is even more bendable but I'll tell you it looks pretty fragile in my opinion brackets look similar this is one of my favorites it's called fabric and if you try to bend fabric you'll see that it actually doesn't Bend very well so the key here really is instead of just applying one of these patterns because I think it looks cool to my project and expecting it to bend how I expected instead I'm gonna actually go and make these in real life and based on how they really Bend then I know which one is probably the best choice for my particular project now I'm gonna go a little bit further than that even and so once you pick a pattern that you like you can actually scale the pattern whether you're stretching it you know like by a percentage or you're changing the spacing between those lines and based on changing the the spacing between the lines or the scale you can actually have a big effect on the strength of the part as well as how flexible it is so this first batch of patterns that I have these are all different shapes that I like this batch is actually the same shape and each one of these is a completely different spacing so you'll see here I'll take the two most drastic as are examples I have these straight line patterns this one has a spacing of four millimeters and it doesn't Bend very much whereas this one on the other hand has a spacing of one and a half millimeters between the lines and this one actually bends quite a lot so by trying out different scales of the pattern I actually get a really good feeling of what's gonna make the most sense for my project but we're gonna go even further than that because if I design my project and I have a five millimeter radius it may or may not be possible to actually make this into a five millimeter radius right and the same could be true with any size radius that you might pick so my particular preference is going to be to figure out the exact number that is the minimum Bend radius for your project and to do that I'm going to use radius gauges now you can go out and buy radius gauges they're on the internet they're on Amazon and mcmaster-carr in a variety of other places but I find that I don't really like the radius gauges that are out there and the reason is because the radius gauges are very small and they're only showing you a very small portion of the radius you're measuring so the chances of you getting it correct is pretty slim to none at least in my opinion so thankfully I have access to a laser right you tell by all of these patterns that we're working on today and so I lasered a set of radius gauges as well we'll go and look at one of those here I have my metric set of radius gauges and the difference between these radius gauges and the ones you might buy is that each of these has a perfect 90-degree angle and so I'm getting exactly one quarter of a full circle of whatever size that I want and that means that it's going to be really easy to be accurate for whatever the minimum Bend radius actually is and so my suggestion to you is that first you go and make your swatches in whatever material you like best and then you figure out that minimum Bend radius by actually using radius gauges whether you make them on your own or not and you take your piece of swatch you put the radius gauge against it and see if you can get your swatch to actually match the radius gauge and you go smaller and smaller until eventually you can't get it to match anymore and of course that's going to end up being your minimum Bend radius right in this case for this particular swatch which is the one we're going to be using today this is a one and a half millimeter spacing and the minimum Bend radius according to the gauges at least is going to be ten millimeters all right so by doing some advanced prep work now I know the exact minimum Bend radius and I can pretty much guarantee that when I go and apply this to my project I'm gonna have great success awesome now let's get on to the actual project itself let's get on to the designing part of things because I think that's a lot more interesting than the rest so we're gonna go into our screen share and instead of looking at our swatches let's go and look at the flat pattern that we want to see so here we have the flat pattern now this is the end result that I wanna get but how do you get there now I'll tell you a lot of people out there are using 2d drawing programs like Adobe Illustrator that I'm using at this very moment or maybe they're using something like AutoCAD LT a fantastic Autodesk program and if you're using either of those programs and you managed to come up with a flat pattern as they call it like what you see on the screen you're still doing a lot of guessing to figure out if this is actually gonna bend into the shape you want let's go and look at this in real life so hold on just a moment there we are so this is the same flat pattern that we had on the screen and when I bend it into shape I could start to see that this is actually gonna work really well but if I were to just design this in 2d and then have to laser this every time I want to go and see if this is going to work out that could be really time-consuming and more importantly that could waste a lot of material as well as a lot of time actually using the laser which of course is not free so the question becomes how do you figure out how to get to the flat pattern and the answer to that in my opinion is 3d CAD with sheet metal tools and we have a variety of sheet metal tools at our disposal so we're gonna show you how that works in fusion 360 so here I have fusion and the difference here is that instead of designing a flat pattern I'm actually designing the 3d model of what I want the final part to look like using sheet metal tools and then at the end I can actually flatten the result and give me a flat pattern that I could then run on the machine so from here on forward we're gonna go and show you how to design this step-by-step in fusion 360 using our sheet metal tools and I hope you guys are excited I know I am alright so we're gonna start from scratch and in this case what we're gonna do is we're gonna start from scratch with my glasses design because after all I want my case to fit my glasses and here you could see this is the same 3d glasses that I'm wearing right now these are the same glasses and we're going to use this to design the actual sorry we're gonna use this to design the case around it and it'll make sure that it fits now if you don't have a 3d model of your glasses don't worry you don't need them you could be using a picture you took with your phone that would work no problem so let's go and start our new design actually and I'll correct myself for a moment there you didn't see the screen this is the pair of glasses that we're gonna design around and you could see that in 3d I actually bent the arms into position so it'll make it really easy to be able to design the glasses around this alright let's jump back into our video and nope we're going back here class is time alright we're starting our new design and the first thing I like to do is to turn on my origin so that I could see where I am in 3d space and I'm also gonna save my file so that I get the benefits of our autosave features so this is going to be called eyeglass case and safe next thing we're going to do is I'm going to open the data panel and I'm gonna take my 3d printed glasses and I'm gonna drag it into my model so that I can use that as a reference to design the case around it's perfect I'm gonna leave this in the position and I'm also going to add a joint so that this isn't going to move so we can go under our assemble tools and use an as-built joint between the 3d printed glasses and our assembly file and now these glasses are not going to move by accident out of position the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to define some planes that are going to refer to the width of the glasses themselves and actually let me tell you that part of what you're gonna learn today that I think is so interesting is you're gonna spend a lot of time with me in our parameters table and using equations so let's actually jump into that right away if you don't know where the parameters table is you can find it under modify change parameters we'll go and move that so you can actually see this easily and we're going to add a couple of parameters that I think are going to be valuable to this particular project the first one we're going to add is going to be the interior length and we're gonna set this to metric millimeter and we're gonna set this to 145 millimeters the next thing we're gonna add is going to be thickness and this is going to be the thickness of the material that I'm using the wood that I'm actually making this out of and I'm going to set this to 3.05 millimeters be I've already measured the wood and that's the measurement that I'm gonna use the next thing I'm going to add and this is for much later but we're still gonna add it right now is gonna be the full kerf and if you don't know the term curve that's the width of the cut itself right so a laser beam is going to actually burn in a particular width and that's called the kerf if you've ever used a table saw you would know right away that whenever you cut on the table saw the blade itself has a thickness and that also is called the kerf the dimension here is going to be 0.18 millimeters and that's pretty good so far and I don't think we need any other parameters so we're going to leave this as is and we're going to come back later and add more as needed next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to add a construction offset plane and we're gonna move this one off to the side and for the distance I'm actually going to set this using the parameter that I've already created that's interior length divided by 2 and that's looking pretty good I'm gonna make one more of those offset planes this one's going to go in the other direction so it's going to be - interior length divided by 2 perfect now those are looking really good alright so now that we have our planes let's go and create our first sketch and this sketch is actually going to drive the almost entirely of our model so this is going to be important that we get this correct so we're going to spend a little bit extra time here and make sure that this is right we're gonna right-click on our plane and say create our sketch and we're gonna start to design what we want to make I'm gonna go and use some shortcuts so please forgive me that I'm using some shortcuts this is going to go a little faster then you might be used to on your end and that's fine too and we're gonna go and add another line right here and let's add some Phillips and this is where having the minimum Bend radius that we talked about before is very important now you might have noticed that our document is set to inches but I keep it I keep typing in metric numbers right I'm clearly a millimeters kind of guy and I told you earlier that our minimum Bend radius is 10 mm so we're gonna go and type that in and we're good to go but of course my display at the moment is in inches and so maybe if I'm really going to be spending all of my time in metric maybe I should just change my file to metric as well and we'll go and do that as well perfect millimeter okay let's go and add some more fill 'its and you'll notice that i'm not selecting multiple edges at the same time because I want to be able to control each of these Philips individually or at least I like that option I'm gonna hi my origin and that's gonna also hide my construction planes and now we're good to go now for the top of this we're going to add a really big arc and we're gonna go and add an arc a three-point arc from here to here and we're gonna go and see what this looks like if it's tangent and I don't quite think that this looks so nice so let's actually hit escape and will make a different three-point arc and maybe we'll actually make a couple of them combined and I think that'll look a little bit better perfect now we do have things a little bit wonky so let's go and move them around until we're happy with it so the and by the way the sketch that we're creating right now is for the interior of our sunglass case because the outside is going to be driven by the inside and the inside is based on making sure that the glasses themselves are gonna fit inside this so I'm gonna take this bottom edge and this is about where I want it to be this is looking quite good and I'm actually going to lock this down by using the fix or unfix command I'm gonna go and move this line in the back we're gonna go and move that forward and I'm gonna also use the fix or unfix command to lock this down now if you haven't used that before or you just don't like the fix around a fixed command you can also put dimensions to constrain those lines as well that's perfectly fine the next thing I'm going to do is I am going to add some dimensions maybe we'll define the angle here and maybe I don't want to define it that way maybe instead I'm going to define it like this and maybe I'm going to set this to something like 10 degrees looking good perfect now I do want to make sure that I have a that area and hold on just a moment let's move this out of the way it looks like I have a little bit of a graphics card glitch so this is a perfect time we're gonna just fix this but nip this in the bud I'm gonna quickly save my file and we're gonna say started to make sketch perfect I'm gonna go and close this file real quick we're gonna go and reopen it and I believe that little problem is gonna be gone perfect let's go back and edit that now it's looking great now I want to make sure that I have a flat spot for me to be able to put magnets in so I'm gonna go and put a dimension here and say this dimension is going to be 10 millimeters that's looking pretty good let's see if I could move this around and I can this is looking great and maybe this is would be a good time for me to start to put a dimension in and we're gonna put a dimension between these two areas here and I like nice round numbers or at least integers so we're gonna go and set that to 32 and that's looking good and if you are already familiar with sketching you're noticing that my sketch is turning from blue to black and what I'm doing there is really I'm starting to define all of the information that you need about your sketch I'm fully defining my sketch or fully constraining it and I think that's a really good thing because it prevents errors down the line now I am also going to go and add some tangency z' here so I'm gonna go and add a tangency between this arc and this one and this one and that one that's looking really good I'm also gonna go and move this over quite a bit we'll clean up this area in just a few moments and we're gonna go and put a dimension between this line and this one and I want here a gap now if you're wondering to yourself what kind of gap is Jason gonna pick let me tell you that there's going to be we're going to be very specific about that gap that gap is going to have to be at least the thickness of the wood itself so I'm going to type in here thickness because we defined earlier a value for thickness to be the same value as the actual thickness of the wood and I'm going to add 0.001 millimeters and the 0.001 that's arbitrary I just picked that at random or somewhat random really I'm just trying to have it be bigger than the thickness by how much is up to you and in my opinion having that be a small number is a good thing and I'll explain in a few minutes why it has to be at least thickness and it'll actually become pretty clear on its own anyway but I will show you alright so let's go and add some more information I'm gonna go and draw a perpendicular line right here and another perpendicular line right over here perfect and it automatically applied the constraints that I wanted I'm gonna pick these two endpoints and I'm gonna make them coincident and I'm gonna go and trim this one right here because I don't need that either and we're gonna make these lines construction actually I think that'll be better perfect now let's go clean up the top end of this particular case because it's looking a little bit funny and this is where you might want to not fully constrain your design because this is gonna allow you to have a little bit more leeway and how you want to make this now I want to make sure though that I have at least the minimum Bend radius so here I am putting in a dimension but if I want this to still be editable I can actually come in here and change my dimension to driven and now I actually can still modify my sketch and it'll just constantly update me on what the value is and what I want to make sure is that this is going to always be at least my minimum Bend radius of 10 the last thing that is important to me here is I do want the end of this line to match up with this spot right here and we'll go and make that coincident and I'll go and actually fix this design just a little bit that's a little funny let's go and fix that and now we're talking now this is looking much better maybe I do want to fully define this so I'm gonna go and make this driving again maybe we'll set this to 30 millimeters and I'll go and set a dimension to this arc as well we'll make that 15 nope I think 17 might be a little bit better that's looking much cleaner so now I have a shape and you'll notice that my sketch is all black or completely defined fully defined and I'm good to go to start actually making this in 3d and remember that sketching is actually the fundamental skill that everything else in fusion 360 is based on so don't rush when you're sketching spend the time learn how to sketch properly because the value that it's going to bring to you later is going to be immense so I'm done with this sketch and what we're gonna do here is not actually design the living hinge portion we're going to start with the sides and for that we're going to use those construction planes that we made so we're gonna start off and create a sketch on this construction plane off on the side and what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to project the sketch that we already made in the center we're gonna project it off to the side and we're gonna go and use create project project and you can see there's a shortcut for the letter P that would make your life a whole lot easier I'm gonna go and select entities and I'm gonna pick all of the different entities in this particular sketch that are important to me and that's going to be these portion right here alright and that's actually looking great so I'm going to hit OK now I have a close profile and we're gonna use that to actually make the side of this this case to do that first I want to make a component so let's go and say create a new component we are going to call this sides and the parent I'm going to deselect it and automatically make sure to pick the top level assembly and I like to deactivate it I don't like to activate it right away because instead what I like to do is to lock down the position so it's not going to move on me by accident I'm gonna hold shift J which is the shortcut for an as-built joint that we did earlier and I'm going to choose the side component and my eyeglass case and I hit OK and now this component won't be able to move and that's good I don't want it to move by accident next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to activate this component select that profile and I'm going to extrude the shape of that part for the amount that I'm going to extrude or the distance well we already have a value called thickness that's why we put it in our parameter table and we're going to hit OK and so now I have the side of my part and that's looking pretty darn good now I do want to make sure that this is going to look even better and I want my properties to be correct so the next thing that I like to do is go into your bodies folder right click and go under physical properties and now we're going to go and set this to the type of wood that I'm using which happens to be walnut so I'm doing a quick find and here it is we're going to go and drag walnut onto my part which now means that the weight of the part is going to be kind of close to what it should be with walnut now I don't really like the look of the walnut in this case it looks a little washed out a little dark actually and so what I'm gonna go also do is I'm going to go and hit a for appearance and I'm going to override the appearance of the walnut with one that I like better which happens to be the 3d cherry semi-gloss I'm gonna go and download that within a couple of seconds it's downloaded and I'm gonna go and apply that to my part and now this is looking much better and much more realistic and we might have to do the same thing with a main component but that'll be pretty quick and easy now that we've done this perfect now you might have been wondering why am i designing the sides first that'll be evident in just a second but first let's go and make the other side as well for that I'm gonna go and select this side I'm gonna hit ctrl-c and ctrl-v on my computer and it's going to paste a copy of this particular design to make things easier to position I'm just gonna move this over a little bit and hit OK and now we're gonna go and apply a regular joint I hit J and my computer for joint I'm gonna select the very center of that component the very center of this side of the component and it's automatically going to put them next to each other but I want them to be apart from each other I want the second one to be the exact other side of this particular assembly and for the distance we're gonna go and drag this hour a little bit that makes it pretty clear that it's the Z that I need to adjust and I'm going to type in interior length and hit OK and now these are in exactly the right position and if you compare this to the offset plane that we made earlier you could see that this offset plane is actually falling on this surface perfectly so I did a good job excellent and I don't think we're gonna need our construction planes for a little while so I'll go and turn those off excellent so now we have the sides let's go and build the center and now we're gonna start to get into the area of sheetmetal so let's go in and see the sheet metal tools for a moment and under sheet metal you could see that we have a variety of tools at our disposal but what I want to start with are the sheet metal rules and here you could see I have a list of a lot of different materials and two of them in particular are going to stand out for today's topic and that is proof grade medium walnut ply or plywood and proof grade medium cherry ply now the laser that I'm using is called agloe forge I own this personally this isn't owned by Autodesk I keep it at my home in my office which I like to call my laboratory and this laser the glowforge is incredible and one of the coolest things about it is that if you buy your material from the company that makes the glowforge then they automatically give you all the right settings to actually laser it and so I love using their materials and they call them proof grade materials and the one that we're going to be using today is their medium walnut plywood and you could see here that I've already set up the thickness to match the 3.05 millimeters that we talked about earlier and then I have a lot of other options here and one thing that I didn't update that I probably should have is the bend radius and you could see right now the minimum Bend radius is set to 3.0 5 millimeters but I can go and edit that really easily and so we're gonna go to bed conditions and we're gonna say that our Bend radius instead of being equal to the thickness is actually equal to 10 millimeters perfect quick update now we do have things like k-factor in here as well and if you're not familiar k-factor is a special number that determines how your material is actually going to stretch or contract as it's bending and for now don't you don't have to nerd out too far ignore the k-factor it's going to be close enough to start with and so leave that as is but if you're even more advanced and you know what that number is of course you could go and input that number and be very happy that your results are gonna be even more accurate so that's my sheet metal rules and I already have it set up so let's go and create a flange but before we do that we want to have a component to go and add that flange now theoretically you could add flanges to your assembly and that's fine but I would say that my best practice is to always create a component for each and every sheet metal part that you're going to design and that's actually very important because some of your components might have different sheetmetal rules and you can't do that if you're just making your sheet metal flange at the assembly level so in this case we're gonna start off just like we did with the side and we're gonna say let's make a new component we're gonna choose for the parent to be the eyeglass case assembly we're gonna name this living hinge we are going to not activate the component we're then gonna go and create an as-built joint between the living hinge and the eyeglass case and hit OK and now we're gonna go and activate the component itself and create our flange for this I'm going to go and select the exact same sketch that we created earlier and I'm gonna go and drag my arrow and you're gonna see that it's going to turn this into a 3d part now right now it's creating this in one direction but I could also change that to symmetric and we're gonna make sure to select our proof grade walnut' that we were using before or that we created before but this is where the distance is going to be very important and the distance is going to be important because and let's actually we're having a little issue let's go and use this for now and I'll go and switch this in a moment if we look at this from a front view if I were to type in the value for the interior length let's go and do that and we use this before interior length and in this case we're gonna do it / - and it's looking pretty good but if i zoom in you'll see that this doesn't actually reach past where I wanted to and that actually kind of makes sense because when we created our planes from the beginning they were set to the interior width not the exterior width and in this case I want this to be the exterior with so luckily for us fusion 360 uses equations and so not only can I put in an interior length divided by two I could also add some parentheses and add an additional part of our equation which is that we're also going to add the thickness to it as well and now it's automatically going to be the right size all right now we're gonna go and figure out why we had our error and we're gonna go and look at our more info and it's giving us an issue and I think I know why so we're actually gonna go and bypass this very temporarily we're gonna go fix our sketch and then we could actually go and change our sheetmetal rule very easily so let's go back to our sketch that'll be this one right over here we'll go and edit this and I'm gonna go and change two things to make sure that we don't have our problem we're gonna go and make sure that our gap is just a little bit bigger than before maybe we'll go and make this 3.01 and I think that's actually pretty good I think that should work and actually I'm also going to increase these radii just in case we'll make this 12 we'll make this one 12 because remember that just because I said earlier that the minimum Bend radius is 10 doesn't mean that I have to push my limits and get to that minimum 12 is just going to be safer than the 10 and that's good and this is also looking good let's go into our living hinge and we're gonna change our sheetmetal rule and we're going to use our proof grade walnut perfect and now it's actually updated and so this is actually great we are going to go and fix just like we did before our physical material to match the walnut that we want to use that's looking great and then I'm also gonna go into our appearances and I'm gonna set this to be our 3d semi-gloss cherry and now this is looking great now what I'd like to do is to test that this is unfold a bowl right because after all my gold end is gonna be to make a flat pattern now there are two ways to do this one is to create a flat pattern itself and we can do that by saying let's create a flat pattern choose a flat surface like this one on the back and hit OK and now you're gonna see that it flattened and it's going to show us all the different Bend lines that I need for this particular design that's one way to do it the other way to do it and we'll go and delete that flatter and flat pattern for now the other way to do things is going to be that we're gonna go and look at unfolding this design so we're gonna go under modify unfold I'm again gonna pick a stationary face and I could choose which of the bends I want to test if they'll unfold so here's a great example I'm folding the top and this is realistically what I'm gonna do to actually take the glasses out so this is a perfect simulation of what it's going to look like when I open and close this design excellent alright and instead of deleting this one we're actually gonna use this in just a little bit but this is looking great I'm really happy with this let's go and refold them so let's go ahead and give this a little bit of pizzazz the first one is going to be we're gonna add some magnets for that I'm gonna go and activate this particular component the living hinge select this face and we're gonna create a sketch on this face I'm going to project the actual face that's right over here onto my model and now that I've projected it I'm gonna use the sketch from now on so I can actually hide the body and I'll also hide the glasses because I don't need those as well and let's go and look at this up close and let's add our magnet holes now I want these magnet holes to line up so I'm going to go and add a line from the corn the center rather of this line to the center over here I'm gonna go and turn this into construction I'm actually going to do the same for the entire perimeter I just used the shortcut the letter X but you could also have construction over here on the right I'm gonna go and draw some circles right over here for our magnets and we're gonna take a quick pause to talk about magnets perfect so I need to get magnets to fit in this particular project and how I'm gonna do that but there are a lot of different ways but the way that I like to do that is by having magnets that I could choose from the so this is an assortment of magnets that I bought on Amazon it gives me about I think it's 20 different 20 of each magnet and I get something like five different sizes and so I can pick through this and figure out which one of these has the right diameter for my particular project or the right thickness or my project and I could even try pulling them apart and see which one has the right pull strength for the project that I'm doing in this case we're going to be using the smallest magnet in here and I already know the dimensions so we'll go and put those into fusion 360 but I wanted to show you that you could just buy an assortment of magnets like this that I keep in my home and use that to be able to figure out which one you're going to use for this project excellent alright jumping right back into fusion here I have my circles I'm going to put in a dimension for one of them and this one's going to be five point eight millimeters and then for the position of this I'm going to apply a symmetry constraint by adding a centerline in the middle and then using the symmetry constraint voila and then I'm also going to go and put a dimension here from the side wall to the magnet itself and you could see here that right now this dimension is actually going to be from the side wall to the center of the magnet and now that might be what I wanted but there are plenty of cases where that's not at all what I wanted so here's a quick tip for you let's go and delete this dimension and make a new one I'm hitting D for dimension but before I select anything I'm going to right click and shoot instead of choosing to pick the circle or arc Center which is the default I'm gonna pick the circle or arc tangent now I can select the side edge and the circle and it's automatically gonna let me pick whether I want the inside tangent edge or the outside tangent edge and this is exactly what I did want maybe I'll set this to 12 millimeters and of course it's going to update the other side as well and that's looking really good now if I show my body I can go and use this circle as well as this one right here and we can go and make an extrude cut through our model let's go and show that from the side we'll go and make this maybe 20 millimeters deep which is more than enough for our needs and now I see that I have my through-holes now whenever I'm making a big change to my model I do want to make sure that it's still gonna unfold and I'm not gonna have any problems so let's go and test that out we're gonna go and again do an unfold select our back surface select our Bend and you could see that everything is unfolding perfectly right of course I could also come in here and edit this and say you know what I want to unfold everything and again this is looking much closer to the final flat pattern that I want for this design perfect let's go and refold those faces and I don't need this for now so I'll just go and delete that perfect so now we have the magnet holes maybe I also want to go and put my text on the front so I'm gonna go and create a sketch and you know what instead of creating a new sketch let's actually use what we've already created let's credit our sketch that we've already made we're gonna hide our bodies and maybe the height of the text is more important to me than the width of the text so I'm gonna go and make a quick rectangle here and I could set a dimension from the bottom of this edge to here maybe I want that to be a millimeter and a half and I'm going to do the same thing over here and instead of typing in the same value I could actually click on the first one and now they're going to be linked to each other so if I change this value from 1 after two and a half the top is gonna change as well let's go and put that back to one and a half and this is looking really good we're gonna go make that construction like so and this is looking great now we're gonna go and bring in our actual image so I'm going to go and say insert DXF because I already have this from another file I'm gonna select the DXF from my computer we're gonna go to my desktop here I have files for today's design and we're gonna bring in my wise wizard logo you could see that it's coming out often space in a different location and my units are off that probably has something to do with it so I'm gonna go and select this to be millimeters that's looking much better and now I might want to go and place this exactly where I want it so we're gonna go and zoom out a little bit perfect go and place this and we'll actually hide our body we can actually turn on the sketch that we had from before and make sure that I place this in the right position now for today's lesson this is going to be close enough so I'm actually going to be happy with this we'll leave that there and we're going to go back to our body and we're gonna go and take this shape and we're gonna extrude cut partially through our design go and select these areas right here and by the way if I didn't have this in the right position I could use the move copy command and move my sketch entities I could also rotate them and do a whole number of variety of different things to it we're gonna go and use and extrude and for our depth here we're gonna go - and I'll go 0.5 millimeters perfect and now I have my logo on the front by the way if you're wondering what wise wizard is from it's something that I made up I thought it was cool I just wanted to have a cool logo and all my stuff all right so let's go and continue our design now I'm not gonna focus on the lightning bolts that you've probably seen on this design right I have lightning bolts on the side as well I'm gonna skip that because it's going to be the same process as you see right now for the wise wizard on the front we're gonna focus on the lattice that is the key for this actually bending right because we don't have a lot of time left I don't want this video to be too long for you guys you could always want rewatch this on high-speed you know one and a half times and it'll go much quicker but I don't want this to be too long regardless so let's jump right back into screen sharing and let's get into the lattices so for the lattices we're gonna go and do a whole bunch different stuff the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go and unfold this design I'm gonna go and choose the back surface and for the bends we're gonna unfold everything perfect oh actually you know what I completely skipped the spot a very critical step so we're gonna have to go back for just a moment let's undo that we'll go and delete this and we'll be back here in just a moment actually we can go back in time using the timeline and we'll come right back here in a moment so it is important that I have a connection between these parts on the side and the rest of the living hinge otherwise this won't stay together my case actually you can see here it has no glue in the joints whatsoever this is actually a press fit and everything fits together really really well and stays together really well so we want to put those same shapes in here as well so for that we're gonna go and design this on the side view we're gonna go and show our side piece we're gonna go in design on this particular plane that face and here we're gonna see that I have a couple of flat spots I have a flat spot here I have a flat spot here and I have a flat spot there and that's what we're gonna use to create our joint right so for that I'm gonna go and project these regions right here perfect and I'm gonna hide our bodies because we don't need that and we also don't need this and what I'm going to do is I'm going to break them up into different sections so first thing I want to do is measure the distance between them and it looks like this one is 10 millimeters and that makes sense because we actually set it to exactly 10 this one over here is 6 point 4 4 6 millimeters and this one here let's go and reset our snap this one is something like 18 millimeters this is perfect so what I really like to have is I'd like to split these up into three pieces each I can definitely do that here but I'm gonna have trouble on these two because I want each section to be about five millimeters so what I'm going to do here is we're gonna exit out of our measuring and I'm going to split this one up into three sections perfect and I'm gonna go set our distance to five millimeters same thing over here and over here the bottom we're gonna go and split this into two right down the middle and we're gonna do the same thing over here perfect all right now that I've done that we're gonna go and show our body again and I'm gonna choose to take this one this one this one and this one and we'll do an extrude here and for the extrude depth we're gonna choose to extrude all the way until we get to that back surface right over here we're gonna join this together and say okay and now you could see that I have a little bit of the funny shape on this piece and of course the same thing on the other side because I designed these as two instances of the same component they are the same thing just in two different locations and so this is looking really great let's go and show our living hinge and now what I want to do is subtract one from the other so I'm going to do is I'm going to activate our main living hinge and we're going to do a combined command we're gonna target our living hinge and we're going to use these side pieces as our tools and we're going to cut but we're going to make sure to keep the tools so that they're not deleted and now you could see that my living hinge actually has these cuts in it that's what I wanted so if we go forward in time just a little bit to show where we unfolded now our design actually has these little pieces in it that are important for everything to actually fit together so we're in a really good spot so far let's go and design our living hinges so I'm going to hide our side is we don't need those and we're gonna activate we actually already activated our PR I'm sorry we already activated our main living hinge and so we're gonna go and create a sketch and we're gonna use maybe this plane right here to create a sketch and we're gonna start off and just do the living hinge from this edge right over here or my mouse is to this edge and that's the only thing we're gonna do at this point so we're gonna project this edge right over here as well as this edge actually we'll just do these two points we'll make it easy on ourselves and I'm gonna say okay I'm going to hide the body and I could just use the sketch itself I'll go and connect these two together and we're gonna make these construction lines as well and I'm also going to add a centerline I'm gonna go and draw it a little bit off-center makes it easy to know that if it did this correctly we'll go and add our symmetry and I'm also gonna make a vertical constraint between these two so everything is nice and symmetrical perfect now we talked a little bit about our patterns and how we're gonna do this and this is where we're gonna get to the really I'll admit the hard stuff if you thought what we were doing it before is advanced this is gonna get just a little bit more advanced yet but I think you're gonna find that this is worth it we are gonna go back to our parameters table and add some new parameters the first thing I'm going to do is add a dimension for this height it's going to tell me that this is only going to be a driven dimension and it's going to be sixty nine point three three four we're gonna go into our parameters table and I'm gonna make one here that says total lattice height zero one and this one is going to be equal to the number that we had just specified which I hope I remember correctly is sixty nine point three three four and if I got that incorrect I'll cheat a little bit oh I did go to ride sixty nine point three three four perfect now to note the reason that I had to enter that manually is because right now our parameter table does not let driven dimensions like the one that I created a moment ago drive other things they driven not driving so they cannot drive other things so I'm cheating the system just a little bit it's a little workaround of my own that I came up with where I'm just making a parameter that's matching that same value and if at a later date I change my design slightly and this value changes I will have to come in here and update this number but that will still drive quite a bit in my design I am gonna add another parameter here and this is going to be called lattice gap this one's going to be set to six millimeters and by the way if you're wondering where I got this value this is literally from the swatch that we looked at earlier and if I look at the one and a half millimeter swatch which is somewhere right over here if i zoom in and take a measurement that's the gap between these different lines you can see here and so I'm just going and using that same thing over in fusion and so far so good so we're gonna go and draw our geometry I'm gonna go and draw a line like so another line and I'm intentionally drawing them a little bit crooked that's on purpose actually and I'm gonna draw a second line right over here and sorry a fourth one and a fifth now I'm done now the reason that I drew them at an angle is because I didn't want any constraints to be added automatically I want to set the constraints myself so we're gonna go and add them I'm gonna set collinear between this line and that between this line and this one between this line and this one I'm going to set my dimension between these two that's the gap that we talked about and I'm gonna set that to lattice gap I'm gonna do the same thing over here lattice gap now we're looking really good I'm also gonna make these lines a little bit longer than my actual model because I want to make sure we're burning all the way through I'm gonna set that to be 0.5 millimeters and I'm gonna move this one across and do the same thing on this side as well point five nice and you could tell that these lines are still movable at this point okay I'm gonna go and add a centerline let's see right around here we'll go and make this vertical and I can and say this centerline is going to be in the center of this line in particular now this is also centered that's going to help me quite a bit later also now we're gonna set this line to be horizontal this one to be collinear we know that we want the gap between these to be six millimeters or our gap that we talked about earlier lattice gap I also want to make sure that this is symmetrical so I'm going to go and add symmetry here from left to right oh and I have to pick the third line now it's looking good and in terms of the distance on the end I know that this from here to here in width is also going to be the same gap we'll set that and we're gonna do the same thing on this end gap perfect so we're mostly good to go here let's go and look at this further I know I can change the height but I can also move this around and I don't want to be able to move that around exactly so I'm gonna go and use another geometry trick I'm gonna draw a line from the very center of this one to here and another one from the center of this line to there set these both to construction and geometry trick if I set them to be equal to each other it's automatically going to Center this line so now this one can't move left to right anymore and the only thing that I could move around is the height right over here perfect so now we need to go and add another variable actually several more variables and this is where it's going to get a little bit confusing but I'm gonna try to make this as clear and as simple as possible we're gonna go back to our parameters table and we're gonna add one here that's going to be called vertical lattice gap zero one and for now I'll set this to be one millimeter actually one and a half millimeters because that's what we really want the gap to be close to I'm also going to add a variable called number of vertical lattices number zero one this is going to be a unitless number and I'm gonna set this to let's say 30 to start and we'll go and work on that and we're gonna make let's see here well we're gonna change this vertical lattice gap and instead we're gonna change this from one and a half millimeter we're gonna change this to be an equation and this is where it gets complicated we're gonna make this equal to the total lattice height that's the space that the lattice is gonna fit divided by the number of lattice is oh hold on I missed click let me go and try that one more time divided by the number of vertical lattices and hit enter and the value at this very moment calculates a two point three one one as the gap let's go and take a look at that and see what that's going to look like this value here is going to be set to be that vertical lattice gap and that's two point three one millimeters but if you guys remember when we had our actual swatch and we bent it we were doing all of this and saying you know which one I wanted I wanted the one that was one and a half millimeters in gap now if I set my gap to be exactly one and a half millimeters the problem I'm gonna have is that the top line in this swatch and the bottom line might not line up perfectly with the part that I'm actually making so I want it to be as close as possible but it's unlikely to be perfect but two point three is definitely pretty far off what I really want so let's go and see if we could fix that we're gonna go back to the parameter table and actually let me go and show you this view that's the wrong view let's go and look at it like this I did the wrong view again just a moment there we go so I'm going to move this over so you're going to be able to see this as we change it in the parameter table so we talked earlier about the number of lattices is gonna be 30 and I made that number up I could have picked 10 I could have picked a hundred wouldn't matter whatever I pick in here is going to automatically change this gap so all I have to do is change this number until it gets really close to 1.5 so you could see I'm getting closer getting really close now 46 is gonna get me 1.50 747 is gonna get me just under now at this point you get to choose do you want to be a little bit under or do you want to be a bit over I would say either is perfectly fine it's entirely your choice or you could just go whichever one is slightly closer so maybe I'll go with 46 perfect so our gap is now one point 507 perfect the next thing I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna add the same lines that I have on the top on this edge right here on the bottom and I'm gonna make this easier on myself I'm gonna use the mirror command I'm gonna mirror this line this line and this one I've got to select it there we go and I'm gonna use this symmetry line in the middle to actually do the mirroring and that's looking good now you might be wondering yourself if I'm gonna do the pattern of this particular set right here and I'm gonna tell you no I'm not gonna do the pattern here in fact I'm not doing it here on purpose and there's a reason if any of you guys have ever designed something with a really complicated sketch especially when you start to include a lot of symmetry and a lot of patterns and a lot of entities one thing that you'll find is that you make a small change to the sketch and you have to wait a really long time for everything to update I know that that happened to me when I first designed my eyeglass case and it was really frustrating but luckily you're gonna have a little bit of a tip here and that is that you can design this as separate sketches and as a result you can actually control how much of the math is cow is recalculated every time you make a change so let's go and take a look at them so if I come in here and I change something on my parameters table what is gonna change in this sketch the width is gonna change right because I have this value of 6 and a bunch of different places and I have the gap over here but nothing else is really gonna change if however I have a pattern that actually makes like 500 different lines all of those lines are to recalculate every time I make a change and that would drive me absolutely crazy so instead I'm gonna hit stop I'm gonna create a new sketch and the first thing I'm gonna do in this new sketch is I'm actually going to project the original lines that were created using my parameters and again I know that this is gonna sound crazy to most of you out there but this is on purpose and there's a good reason for it we're gonna go and select this line over here and you'll notice that I'm having trouble selecting the line that I want but I can actually select and hold and it'll give me choices and I could select exactly what I want I'm gonna go and do that again and there we have it so I'm gonna select all of that and hit project now I can hide the original sketch and you'll see in pink I have all of the entities that I designed in the first sketch but now they're projected which means that if I change something in the parameter table it's really editing it in the first sketch and then showing up in the second and this will make a little bit more sense as I go I'm gonna go and add a pattern here we're gonna go to create rectangular pattern I'm gonna choose for the objects these lines that are right here at the top that's all of them I'm gonna go and drag this arrow down and you could start to see the pattern forming I'm gonna change the distance type to spacing and here's where it's going to get interesting this is again gonna work with our equations so the quantity that I want we actually know that we made a value called number of vertical lattices and you could see now I have apparently something like 46 lattices all generating this is exactly why we're doing this in a separate sketch instead of the original but the spacing is totally off and because of that nothing lines up the way that I want but for the distance I could actually come in here and we have another value that we could type in that we created earlier and that distance is going to be the vertical lattice gap and now everything updates and if i zoom in you'll see that it actually lines up perfectly and that's awesome now there is a reason Oh actually I made a mistake let's go back and fix that let's go back to our parameters here we're gonna go and edit that and I believe the distance is actually vertical lattice gap / - let's go see if that's what we get if that's what I wanted no that's not what I wanted let's go back and do that one more time we're just gonna reverse things and I think it'll be great we're gonna make this the full value and then over here we're gonna go and set this to be divided by two and now I think everything is gonna line up great perfect no hold on let's fix that one more time this is by the way the fun about doing things live for you and so we're gonna go and fix this I refuse to have this be incorrect we're going to buy that by - and let's see if we got this right and something still seems off so let's go and fix that I see the problem our quantity does need to be correct it doesn't need to be I figured it out thank you guys for bearing with me our quantity is going to be the full value and our distance is not going to be the vertical lattice gap / - my mistake it's going to be x - and now it works perfect now because I had a little bit of fudge there I do want to make sure that we're going to go over the exact numbers one last time and have this be correct ah finally so for the quantity we're going to do the number of vertical lattices divided by two and for the distance we're going to use the vertical lattice gap times two and now this actually lines up exactly how I want it again this is the fun of live demos and this actually makes sense right because the quantity should be divided by two because ever I am doing my pattern I'm actually patterning two of these at the same time so I want to divide that number by two so I get the exact number that I really wanted and the gap is gonna have to be doubled because when I move this one unit over I'm gonna have to move it twice this distance really I'm moving in the distance from here Plus this which is the same as this one times two so that makes sense so here I'm going to go and say that looks good and theoretically I'm actually good to go now I might want to do this I would have to do this two more times for this particular design because if you look at the original flat pattern let's go and take a look at that we'll show our body this area here is really just a part of our design that needs the lattice I also need a lattice from here to here and I also need the lattice from here to here now our webinar is actually running a little bit long today so I'm not going to do this two more times but I think you guys get the idea that I could easily do this two more times and just repeat the process but what's important is that instead of editing the sketches you've already made and adding more lattices to it I'm gonna create a third sketch and a fourth sketch for the lattice in this area and I'm gonna create a fifth sketch and a sixth sixth sketch for the lattice in this area and I know that that sounds like a lot of sketches but again that's on purpose because when you're doing things like patterns like this it's going to be very resource heavy and limiting the amount of rebuilding when you make a change is important so if I do need to make a change to my lattice gap or something like that what I'm gonna do is actually go back in time one step between the sketches and now if I make a change to my sketch of just these lines at the top it's not gonna go and try to rebuild all the actual patterns after it and that to me is really important because it's gonna make my life a whole lot easier a lot a lot easier the other thing to note is how are you going to make this look in 3d right how are you gonna make this look in 3d and by the way I also do notice I made a mistake here I'm starting the lattice a little bit too high it should actually start right here right if we had a little bit more time I'd go back and show you how to fix that that's pretty quick and easy but just I recognize that I made a mistake over here and that's okay now for actually creating the tool pass for your laser or for cutting this the sketches that I made are actually perfectly fine let me jump to the finished part for a second and if I go and I scroll way ahead in this particular design you'll see that over here this is where I created all of my patterns for the different lattices will go and hide everything that we don't care about like the disk magnets and the cork and the side panels and things like that and here you're gonna see if we show the sketches let's go and turn those on we're gonna turn on just let's see we're gonna turn on this one alright so if we look at this here this is actually what I'm using to drive the laser I don't need to actually have the cuts in the 3d model itself I could actually use this to drive it in fact if you go to the manufacturer workspace will go and refold this if you go in the manufacture workspace and you look at how I created my tool paths will go and regenerate these really quickly you'll see that these tool paths are actually based on the sketch not based on the 3d model in this particular case and here you could see that right there but I might want to make this look really beautiful so that I can make really high-resolution renders or I could just see anticipate if there gonna be any problems in my design so let me show you how we're gonna do that we're gonna go back to the design space and we're gonna go a little bit further forward and we're gonna go right about here perfect and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to unfold this design using the sheetmetal tools we're gonna go and unfold it using this back surface just like we did before and I'm gonna unfold all the bends give that just a moment to calculate and then once I do I'm gonna use extrude but instead of extruding a solid because the solid requires a closed sketch we're actually going to go and extrude the lines themselves as surfaces and that's going to allow me to then thicken those surfaces and even do a boolean cut using those thick and surfaces and you'll see that in just a second and actually fusions taking just a little bit longer than I would like to be able to go and unfold this so perfect just in the nick of time perfect so I have this unfolded and now we're gonna go and add our cuts for that I told you we're gonna go and use these surface tools and we're gonna go and choose extrude looks like I have a little bit of lag here just a moment there we go all right so I have my sketch and I'm gonna go and use the surface tools we're gonna go and use extrude I'm gonna go and hide the bodies itself and I'm gonna go and extrude all of the entities that are inside this particular lattice right here I'm gonna go and give them a distance and for now the value doesn't really matter I'll go and set this to maybe a hundred millimeters and we'll do this in both directions and we'll say okay by the way we do want to see the body so we're gonna go and show that real quick and here you can see that I have plenty of different surfaces to look at now I can go and thicken those same surfaces I'm gonna go and select all of those surfaces right here perfect and I'm gonna choose to extrude to thicken them symmetrically and for the value we're gonna go and use that curve value that we talked about earlier and we're gonna actually divide that by two for now so it's half kerf in each direction and now I'm gonna go and have a whole bunch of solids I can then go and delete my surfaces I don't actually need them anymore go and remove them and now all we're gonna be left with are the solids I could also go and show my sheet metal part let's go and show that and now we're gonna do a boolean cut using those solids we're gonna go and mess with this particular part the living hinge and for the tool bodies let's go and hide pretty much everything else that we don't care about here we're gonna go and hide our sketches and we're gonna go and hide everything else that we don't care about and we're gonna even hide this for a moment and select everything that's in the graphics window and we're gonna get rid of those tools after we cut and we'll say okay now we're gonna go and calculate a little bit of a lengthy compute on that and when I show it you're gonna see if i zoom in you can actually see the slice of the individual laser lines right and the cool part is that now that I've done that while it was unfolded I could actually go and refold this design and you'll go and see that here we'll go and refold this design refold it right here and you'll see that it's gonna go and take those different cut areas and it's gonna still show it in its 3d state in its folded State it does take a moment to calculate this I did say pretty much early on that these lattices take a lot of compute time which is why I'm showing you how to be able to avoid the excessive compute and you could see this living hinge is actually 3d modeled and that's actually looking really great now I only showed you how to do this for one of the three lattice areas and so you would do that for each of the different sections and you'd end up with the final result that has all the different lattices in it if you recall when I was creating my parameters earlier on I was putting in numbers at the end you know I had total height a total vertical height zero one lattice gaps zero one and so on and so forth and so you're gonna do the same thing for each of the different areas calling them you know lattice area number two lattice area number three because each one is going to need different numbers to it and once you do it for all of them you're gonna have the full lattice so the last part we're gonna show you today is how to take that and actually send it to your machine to actually create it so let's actually go and we're gonna delete all of the changes that I made to that particular part we're gonna go and reopen this completed design and I'll show you how we're gonna go and create those toolpaths we're gonna go and jump from the design workspace over to the manufacture workspace just like so we don't need the 3d model if you recall the 3d model is really in this point just for aesthetics and not actually for the toolpaths so in this case we're gonna go and show the model we're gonna go and hide everything that I don't care about so the cork is going to be gone or in my case I used denim we're gonna hide the bodies themselves and what we're gonna show are the sketches that I made earlier that are important I made a sketch for a front view of the outside shape of the design including the text that I wanted on the design itself and I also made a sketch for each of the lattice patterns you could see those here we're gonna go and use this one and this one and this one all right so this is all of them and we're gonna go and you'll notice by the way that I have the side pieces also here nested together I did the nesting manually all I did was copied the components put a new joint to put them where I wanted them and then I did a projection of a sketch sorry I made a sketch and in the sketch I projected those parts to give myself the outline as well as the lightning bolts and so now I have everything all together in one place all the sketches and now we can go and actually put the tool Pat's on I'm gonna go and create a new setup and for this setup we're gonna go and do cutting for our tool path I'm gonna go and look at my coordinate system and I want to make sure Z is facing the right direction so I'm gonna go and select a new z axis and this is looking much better I'm also gonna then go to the stock and I could choose whatever size stock or sheet I'm actually going to start with so in this case we're gonna go and use a fixed size box and we're gonna go and say that maybe the width is going to be 19 inches the height is gonna be maybe 11 inches and the Z is gonna be something like you know five millimeters or something like that I'm gonna say okay it is gonna warn me that the Z height is less than the height of the selected model because what is looking at is the 3d model whereas I'm actually only using the sketches so I'm gonna ignore the warning here and then I'm gonna go and say let's make a 2d profile for different things that I'm gonna do here and this is where you get into some of the nuances of laser-cutting where I'm gonna want to choose what order I'm going to cut different things so maybe I want to do the engraving of the lightning bolt or the text before I do the cutting of the lattice or before I do the cutting the outer perimeter so the first thing I'm going to go would do is choose what I want to do in this case I'm going to go in vaporize or edge the lightning bolts and I'm going to go and choose this you'll notice that the arrow here is on the outside of the lightning bolt and what that's doing is it's applying kerf offset so that you get the exact size that you want but for this particular scenario I don't actually want a kerf offset so I'm going to go over to the passes area and for the sideways compensation I'm gonna put it at Center which is the same as not using curved compensation I'm also for the geometry going to add the wise wizard logo and I can go and grab these really quickly and I'll skip the other text for now because it'll be the same thing for that but this is a great example perfect and we're gonna say ok and it automatically is making the tool path for me for laser cutting this particular area and you'll notice that I set the Z on the back side of this particular part because the way that we were unfolding the model the text you know the seeing is believing and the wise wizard we're all on the back side so actually we're gonna look at this as a back view to see what's really gonna go in the laser we're gonna go and do another 2d cutting operation we're gonna go and select these individual lattices and I'll admit you do have to select these one at a time and that is a little bit time-consuming so I'm just gonna go and select some of these for now and then we're gonna go and make sure we're gonna cut all the way through our model underpasses we're gonna put either left or right compensation doesn't matter sorry no we want Center for this because we're gonna have the laser be centered on these lines and we're gonna say okay and imagine you were doing that of course for all of the different lines and then lastly we're gonna go and do one last one here 2d profile we're gonna have this one be also cut all the way through but for the geometry we're gonna select the outer profile and this one is important that you're doing your compensation I want to make sure that arrow in this case is on the outside of the part and I want the passes to be either left or right either one will give you the same and a result in this case the key is going to be that it's going to move the laser over so that the final part that comes out of the laser is exactly the dimensions that you want whereas if you were to use Center or no compensation you're gonna end up with a part that's slightly smaller and one last thing that's important is you're going to want the compensation to be in computer instead of in control so that it's all calculated through fusion 360 as opposed through it through the controller of your laser and now you're good to go so I'm gonna go and do this once for the outer profile of this part I'm also gonna go and do this one more time for the profile of the side pieces I'm gonna make sure the arrows are on the outside again make sure that my compensation is in the computer and say ok and now I have a full set of operations that I can go in post-process I'll go and skip to the one that I've already completed that's this one right over here we'll go and regenerate those tool paths and you'll see that I have a full list of tool paths for all of the cutting here and when I go and I choose to post-process this I'm gonna use the post processor from my machine in this case as I mentioned earlier I am using a glowforge so I'm using the custom post processor for the glowforge created by Gareth or at Gareth if you're on the glowforge forums and we call that the color if ik post processor and when I go and I post this it's gonna create an SVG file that my laser is going to be able to understand and if you want to see what that looks like again we'll go to illustrator we'll jump to the other file and it'll look exactly like this the only difference is if I turn on my preview of the colors each color here is going to correspond to different operations for the laser so maybe I'm going to be itching the green text first then the blue text next then maybe I'm gonna go in and laser these light blue lines for the lattices themselves excuse me and then we're gonna go and cut outer perimeter and we're almost done right so fusion 360 in short is gonna allow you to be able excuse me to design your parts and 3d even when those parts are gonna be ones that are gonna be starting as a flat shape and that's an incredible thing to do excuse me if you recall the beginning we talked about how do you go from an idea to a flat pattern without guessing and fusion 360 is gonna allow you to design the part in 3d unfold it into a flat pattern of your choosing if you want to simulate it with the actual cuts you can do that you don't have to as you saw in my example but if you do want to simulate it with the cuts you can do that and then you can make beautiful renderings of your design to show off what it looks like before you ever make a real part but the key is is that by doing a little bit of advanced preparation and that advanced preparation was creating some swatches figuring out the minimum Bend radius and then applying those as well as some equations in fusion you can create anything that you can think of this particular living hands eyeglass case is just one example of that and so I want to thank you guys all for your time today I've got a run it was a little bit longer than I anticipated but I hope you guys all enjoyed getting to learn from me today I look forward to teaching you guys about another advanced topic next time and in the meantime thank you again and have a great day you

Channel: Autodesk Fusion 360

Views: 18,391

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, Jason Lichtman

Id: qLjHWRs-iiI

Length: 87min 1sec (5221 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 21 2019