Fusion 360 - 23 Tips Beginners Must Learn

let's cover 23 things that beginners should learn when learning to model in fusion 360 coming up [Applause] [Music] first thing when i get started i like to hit that save button give it a name this is great to get the autosave started type in sk find sketch select the plane that i'm going to sketch on so i can use these items from the toolbar if i'd like to do the pull down and find them or you can use your s search and start searching for what you want so i'm going to look at for different rectangles and by looking at this i can see there's three good options here maybe i'll start by centering on the origin drag that out i'll hit d on the keyboard that brings up the smart dimension and this allows me to place a dimension but it's also editable so we do that and place our dimensions okay we've got this built and we'll extrude it finish it i usually hit e on the keyboard drag that out okay so we've got this box we've shaped it out now if you wanted that hollowed out box we could have gone back sketched and offset this that'd be great but i want to introduce a new command for hollowing things out it's called the shell command type in part of that so with shell i'm first going to just select the body from the menu and this is one gotcha for me when i first got started select it hit okay and select in you know put in the thickness value of the walls did anything happen right so here's a tool this cross-section tool section analysis you can use this face and drag it okay can you see what happened so we've got the ability to see inside and when i didn't select any faces it hollows out the entire body how do i turn off the cross section this was a gotcha for me on fusion how do i find it turn off it now lives in this analysis folder and i can turn that off visually and i can turn it on right okay great so if we go back and look at the shell feature and edit it now what happens if i were instead to do the body i do the face it's going to remove the face and hollow out the rest so if i select a couple faces holding control on the keyboard it's going to remove those faces and hollow the rest so if we select three of them starting to see that pattern i'm sure so let's remove that top face okay so we've got the shell body we finally have that result that i asked you to do kind of earlier on but what happens if you want multi-thickness now in solidworks i learned that you could do that in the shell command the way i do it in fusion is i would use the q command and this is the ability to press pull i love this so you select it and drag it you'll notice it does all of it by default and that's because it's using an automatic offset so this drag push pull we want to go to a new offset and it's creating a new feature in the design history so i select that drag it now i have multi thickness happening i'm going to repeat that right click drag up is an automatic repeat i use that one pretty often drag this a little bit get the value i want and what's cool is these are editable in the design history so i could go back find that value adjust it to what the thickness should be but one thing to keep in mind is let's measure this so another tip let's measure how do you measure i use this inspect tool i'll select face and the other face it'll give me the normal distance of 0.38 what was the offset at the offset's at 0.28 right because you're adding both that original shelled feature and this new offset so something to keep in mind that's where maybe um having it all in one shell command would be very cool it's probably worth submitting to the fusion team to have them kind of add that functionality let's now dimension this i'm going to start dropping in dimensions now how do you have the part kind of designed in your own head or what you're referencing are you thinking of this in halves are you thinking of it as a whole since we plan to mirror it now if you have it as kind of a half then this dimension is completely adequate but let's just say that you plan to mirror this whole thing well then when you're doing the dimension if you dimension to the center line and when you place this right so this was a gotcha for me as well is it dimensions this off into space and that's kind of not helping me so instead what i want to do is i'll start from the construction line go to the entity that i care about right click diameter dimension it doubles the direction i care about great that makes way more sense drive the dimension i care that i want construction line right click diameter dimensions great so i'll continue on placing the ones that i need okay something that to be aware of i know that this isn't fully defined because i have these light blue lines so one thing that helps me is i'd like to drag these points on the blue and then i can start to see what isn't defined that can be a very helpful tip is just dragging so what's missing now okay so you can see the entire thing is moving up and down so we could align this bottom point to the origin with a constraint where they run horizontal with each other now it's fully defined everything's black but i haven't defined where this construction line finishes i don't think that's critical for the design but i'll connect that have it add a coincident and it's finished and you'll notice that this icon changes and so that is one giveaway that the sketch has been completed that it's got all its dimensions and constraints which can be helpful for capturing your design intent just by having those done okay so let's give this some depth we'll hit extrude okay so how are we going to mirror this object we want to do the entire body not just faces not just features we want to do the entire body in this case and we're mirroring across we could use this plane it happens to be in the right space you can use a face as well so we mirror this and we've got it done now when i excuse me add this mirror it is still two bodies this is something i wish that uh fusion had as maybe like a merge result i know that's a tool in some other you know cad systems but there is a way to combine this into one i just gave it away right so how do you combine two bodies s key combine select the two bodies we're gonna join and it's now that seam goes away we have one mirrored body okay so how do you edit this of course going back to that original sketch now um that's one thing i like about a mirrored sketch is there um it's a little simpler there's less sketch entities on the screen in some cases so when you get into really complex sketches that's where mirroring the sketch can be simpler and editing it down the road can be simpler and the same okay the next one is how do we create this shape that follows a cross section that's not just a straight path it's a path that goes straight and then curves comes back a different direction curves how do you do that so whenever you have a cross section that follows anything but a straight line you should think about a sweep so let's get started with that one so for doing a sweep you can start with the cross section or the path i like to start on the the path in this case i'm starting the front plane i always like to start from my origin just out of habit i can create new planes if needed but i'm going to use that line arc technique where you drag out when you're in a line from the end point and it'll drag a tangent arc it's even adding those tangent constraints as i sketch this i'm going to drag holding down my left click on the mouse and drag out another tangent arc as well so now let's throw on a cross section i should stop and dimension that but just for the example if we're trying to get this shape i'm going to go to that plane at the origin it needs to be at a 90 degree angle right they cannot be on the same plane so when you look at it they should be 90 degrees to each other at least so you have a profile to sweep along so when i type in the s key and go to sweep i can select this profile and it's going to follow this particular path there we go okay so you can see i kind of didn't get that spacing right so i can go back to my original sketch right click edit sketch and start dimensioning this so that i can make sure that everything's going to be maybe uniform for this particular paperclip okay so we've got a paperclip thrown together and that's the sweep command if you'd like to learn more check out my video that i did just on doing sweeps where you go more in depth on how to create that functionality okay next challenge you've got a plate with four feet that are all the same size same spacing from their corners and it's also it's transparent it looks like it's like a glass material right so how could we build this infusion starting new design i'll start my rectangle and one thing that's worth noting is you can just start a rectangle you don't actually have to hit the comm the sketch command you can just grab any kind of sketch object and begin sketching so i want to create you know a fully dimensioned sketch we'll put in this value are these the same side length is it square is it rectangular let's say it's rectangular so that i'll add another dimension what i want to do is drop in those feet already i have because i use the centered rectangle i have these center lines to connect to which does save me some of the constraints that i'm going to need to build now i'm going to drop in the thickness excuse me the diameter of these feet and then also i want to go to the treble to get the spacing rate so i'll dimension this corner and why is that fully defined already it just gave me an error because i've placed it on this construction line so it knows where it sits kind of in that vertical alignment now but it does it needed the horizontal alignment to know where it sits in space so it's fully defined or at least this circle is the placement so how can we get all of these circles now lined up correctly without dimensions let's use constraints to do that so i'll select the center points of each one hold ctrl select these two right click and i can line these up horizontally you'll notice the constraints command is also up on this toolbar so we can select that and then select these points if we want to do it in that way select these two they're aligned select these two they're aligned so these line up vertically these line up horizontally perfect okay so nothing's dragging there's no way to oop i was wrong so that is still moving so we haven't defined all of the sizes of the circles we've just done one so pretty quick just select each circle hold ctrl i'm going to select all of them and choose the equal they're out all now defined i just take a peek at my sketch you can see it has the little lock showing the sketch is fully defined great so that's now going to behave in the way i want it to and it'll be easy to edit in the future okay so let's hit extrude so i'm going to do the plate add a thickness so i select all of the objects say that it's quarter inch great now how do i add those feet without having to do a you know whole new sketch i've done all the work i don't want to have to start over so this was a gotcha for me is it's you can't really extrude that original sketch without it showing so turn on the visibility of the one you've done hit extrude i'm going to select just the circles for the feet and i could extrude them down it wants to do a cut if i go through here i don't want to do that so instead i'm going to do a new body or a join so i'm going to do a join so that it adds new material now some things i could do here do i want to just extrude at this depth and then kind of do the math myself so i'm doing it at 0.6 but then i subtract whatever the thickness of the plate is maybe i don't want to be thinking about it that way because that .6 could be confusing for me instead i'm going to start from okay so we're going to extrude all four of these feet so instead of from the top and extruding down i'm going to do a from object select this bottom face do 0.4 and so it's only adding 0.4 from that bottom face i love that command how you can use the same sketch without having to change it now there is a way i could have done this without having to kind of get so fancy and advanced so instead of extruding the plate down what if i had extruded it up at 0.25 great and then when i was going to do the extrudes down i wouldn't have had to get so fancy i could have just started from these circles and extruded down because i extruded up for the plate and down for the feet and now these distances all make a lot more sense that'd probably be a better way to do this but cool nice to introduce that additional feature there okay so we've got this now um let's talk a little bit about displays you can see it's kind of a kind of a muted appearance and if you go down to this display image there's visual style and this is where you can show shaded with edges and that now you can make out those edges as well as we could also introduce any hidden edges right that you can't see when you're looking through the component how do i add that glass material that i had shown earlier i'm gonna hit a on the keyboard brings up my appearance toolbar and i'm gonna go to my fusion 360 appearances and some of these you will have to download i'll have a little download link next to it and it's free of course it just doesn't install automatically all of the materials to save for space i think so i'll drag on this glass and now i have this nice appearance applied

Channel: Tyler Beck of Tech & Espresso

Views: 93,731

Keywords: fusion 360, fusion 360 tutorial, fusion 360 tutorial beginner, fusion 360 sketch, autodesk, engineering, mechanical design, industrial design, product design, cad, cad software, cad in the cloud, free cad, free cad software, free cad program, 3d cad solution, autodesk fusion 360, fusion 360 tutorials, 3d printing, fusion 360 course, fusion 360 tips, fusion 360 sweep, fusion 360 for beginners, computer aided design, 3d fusion 360, fusion360, cloud based cad, freecad

Id: F6_Wy4SvhSY

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 26 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Dweller]

As somewhat of a beginner, I made it about 90 seconds in before you were doing things I did not know how to do, without explanation. What did you hit to "type shell" and select it? There seems to be a way to "find" a command, how?

you did it again at 1:45. Keep in mind your target audience. We do not know all the hotkeys, this is your chance to inform us, or remind us.

[u/LoudShovel]

Nice quick video if your switching over from Solidworks, Inventor, etc and are familiar with the concepts. For those who are starting from zero, it might go a bit quick. If that is you, slow the video down to 75% playback and be ready to pause after each Tip.

Would it be possible to include a transcript of the lesson in the description? Or a list of the tips the related command/keyboard shortcut used in them?

[u/SoloSpinout]

It’s going to take some time and a lot of viewing to get your feet wet in learning Fusion. You will watch tutorials that go over your head. Don’t get discouraged. Just keep watching—and rewatching—videos. It will fall into place. It does take persistence to learn this software, and very few tutorial channels are geared to total noobs. Kevin Kennedy’s channel is great for beginners, and Brad Tallis’ channel is really good to learn from; though it is more advanced, he is an excellent teacher and covers basic stuff along with more advanced moves.

I’m only a couple of months ahead of you. Good luck and hang in there.