Fusion 360 for Woodworkers | Model a Complete Project in 30 Minutes

a couple weeks ago we posted a video actually two videos where chris explained his process for modeling furniture using sketchup and because we're all about fairness here we figured it would only be fair that i would post a video about using fusion 360 to do the same thing both chris and i are big fans of making a three-dimensional digital model of our furniture before we actually start building and for a long time i was a die hard pencil and paper guy but once i decided to take the plunge into 3d modeling i never really looked back i'll still get initial ideas onto paper first as that's the quickest and easiest way for me to visualize something as soon as i have an idea but once i have that first rough idea on paper i like to switch to my computer and start modeling which is what we're gonna get into in this video now before we start i want to explain a few things first of all if you're looking to become a fusion 360 expert and start modeling super intricate and detailed things this might not be the video for you this is definitely meant to be a beginner's guide to modeling pretty simple things like furniture no spaceship parts or anything like that here also i'm by no means a fusion 360 expert i wish i could master a program like this that has this many capabilities but it's just something i've never done and i likely never will so hopefully i can pass on some of the knowledge that i've picked up by using this program for quite a few years now and help someone else get started honestly so much of what i do in fusion is based off of a few techniques and operations that i've learned and then translated to the specific things that i'm trying to do in that moment all right let's get into actually using this program and of course that starts with opening up a new project so when you first open up fusion you'll probably start with a big blank screen like this one and one of the first things that i do is open the data panel so i can keep things organized i have all of my projects named and saved then within some of them i have multiple models for example my cc rocking chair project has a few different versions of the chair as well as a separate model where i was figuring out some angled cuts or something like that a piece like this rocking chair usually goes through multiple versions since it was a piece intended to make plans for and i wanted to be extra sure the design was right before building it so saving multiple versions is a must and fusion makes keeping all of them organized pretty easy so if i'm going to start a new project the first thing to do is and this might be hard to believe but it's to click the new project button so i'll name this one example project clever name i know once my new project is created i like to hide the data panel to give me as much screen real estate as possible and now we can get to modeling but before we actually start drawing anything let's familiarize ourselves with the workspace on the left hand side we have the browser this is where everything we create will be organized and while we're on the subject let's talk about how everything is organized for the most part within a model we have components bodies and sketches and very generally components are made up of bodies and bodies are derived from sketches but we can get more into that stuff later on along the top we have our workspace selector which will take us to fantastic places where we can do things like animate parts or set up g-code for a cnc router and though things like generating g-code are one of the main arguments for using fusion 360 i'm only going to get into modeling in this video so unfortunately we're not going to get into that other stuff so next to that we have all of the tools used to create or modify different things in our model these tools will change depending on the workspace or the task we're working on and there are also different categories of tools within each workspace to help decrease the amount of anxiety one might have by seeing all of these options so quickly i'll say that i'm in the design workspace probably 95 of the time and i'm on the solid tools section about 99 of the time so hopefully that makes it feel a little less daunting than how it looks right now all right if you're starting to feel a little bit of information overload let's go ahead and take a quick break and thank skillshare for sponsoring today's video so if you've never heard of them skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes that can help people learn new skills develop their interests and explore creativity they have classes that cover all sorts of things related to what we do classes that'll teach you things like premiere pro for video editing or that's right fusion 360 for furniture design but i wanted to learn something new so i watched a course called context is key social media strategy in a noisy online world by gary vaynerchuk social media has always been tough for me but the fact that so much of my business revolves around social media means that i know i have to be better about utilizing these online tools and this course helped teach me about doing just that so shout out to sean boyd made this on instagram so whether you're looking to fend off boredom focus on bettering yourself or finding a similarly creative community skillshare is a great place for all of those and right now the first 1000 of our subscribers to use the link in the description will get 30 off an annual premium membership so you can explore your creativity even if you've already had a free trial of skillshare you can still take advantage of this offer to get a full year of unlimited creative exploration and learning alright thanks skillshare let's get back to 3d modeling this piece of furniture we have a few more things that are in our main window and the first is the view cube which allows us to quickly rotate our model to specific views as well as return to a home position if we get a little lost in the model it happens i'll admit it we can also switch between perspective and orthographic views here which can be pretty helpful depending on what you're doing finally at the bottom we have our history which can be nice to be able to go back if you realize you messed something up then we also have a few visual controls which i never really use as well as some options for the way your window looks but again these aren't things that i often change all right now that we're familiar with the workspace let's start actually making some shapes and just like with most things in life there are many ways to get to the same result but generally the idea and the way that i mostly go about it is that a sketch is the basis of the solid bodies that make up your model so starting with sketches makes sense a sketch is a two dimensional drawing that can then be extruded into three-dimensional shapes so for something like the piece we're modeling i'll make sure my origin is visible by clicking the little i next to it in the browser which you can do with any of the items in the browser then right click on one of the planes and select create sketch this will bring up the sketch tool set which wasn't visible before so we're kind of in a sub workspace that's still within the design workspace kind of like a dream within a dream [Applause] one of the things that makes fusion so powerful is parametric design which essentially means that because everything in our model is based off of these two dimensional sketches we can change a parameter down the line by editing our sketch or sketches and it'll change everything in the actual model now i'll totally admit this isn't something i've fully figured out how to utilize and i'm probably able to get it to work about fifty percent of the time but this is one of those things i'm hoping to get better at as i feel like it could be wildly useful in a lot of different situations anyway the first thing we need to do is start sketching the overall shape of our piece and i'm going to start with the main cabinet which is just a box so i can either go up to the toolbar and select the rectangle tool or just press r on my keyboard or the other easy way to select sketch tools is to press s on your keyboard then start typing the name of the tool you want and select it from here so i'll use the two point rectangle tool and draw a rectangle to the desired outside dimensions of the cabinet and we're drawing a front view of the piece in this case you'll also notice that i'm doing some zooming in and out and once we have some three-dimensional objects i'll be rotating and moving around those so let's quickly go over how i do that i'm using a trackpad on my laptop which i find to be very easy and intuitive to use i've used fusion a couple times with a mouse and always go back to the track pad so i'll explain how to navigate with that and it's pretty simple to navigate around a model i use two fingers together so to just move left and right or up and down it's two fingers moving around the track pad then to rotate it's the same motion only now i hold the shift key with my left hand and the last one is zooming in and out and that's just a pinch movement like we do on most touch screen devices we use like i said it's very intuitive and simple and you'll be surprised at how quickly it becomes second nature okay so back to the sketch i have my overall box shape but now i need to create the inner box that will give the cabinet panels their thickness and i can do this by either drawing another rectangle inside of my original by the amount that i want the thickness of the case to be which we'll say is one inch for simplicity or i can use the offset tool o on my keyboard which lets me select a shape or individual lines and offset a matching shape or lines by a certain amount so one inch in our case at this point if we were just looking to create a general model to get an idea of proportion and the shape of things and we weren't too worried about joinery methods or how it'll be assembled we could go ahead and extrude out the cabinet box but actually let's keep going a bit more with something like this if i already know how i want to assemble the box i can start drawing that stuff in as well so at each corner a quick line using the line tool or l on my keyboard will give me the miter joints i want to use and you can really get as detailed as you want if you know that your cabinet is going to have dados running the full depth of the panels you can draw those in as well or even if you knew that you were going to round over the mitered corners you can use the fillet tool or f on your keyboard to create that and then from there i can start extruding things from that two-dimensional drawing so i can select the extrude tool or just press e on my keyboard then i can select the shapes that i want to extrude and enter my desired dimension one thing here is that if you extrude shapes that are right next to each other fusion will want to make them one body which might make sense in some cases but for the most part i like to keep my model broken up into the pieces that i'll be making when i actually build the piece to do this i need to extrude parts that are not touching each other in order to keep everything unique so i can first do these two then do these two and you'll notice on the second set it defaults to join but i want to change that to new body to ensure i end up with four separate parts to make up the cabinet and we can check that in the browser and you can see there are four bodies one for each panel from here we can start working on some of the other parts of our piece and i'm going to show a few different ways that we can make all of these shapes and parts but just know that all of these techniques can be interchanged depending on what you're actually doing so let's start with the simple vertical dividers we'll need in the cabinet one full depth that goes between the drawers and sliding doors then one that's set back slightly that goes between the two sliding doors to make two separate cabinets so the first way we can do this is by going back to our original sketch and adding in these shapes we can click edit sketch then simply draw another rectangle like we did earlier then extrude out this divider to the depth we need making sure to select new body and now we have one of the vertical dividers another way to do this is to just simply create a three-dimensional box using the box tool the only drawback here is that this shape won't be linked to a sketch which as far as i know means that there are no parametric editing capabilities associated with it but if that doesn't really matter we can select the box tool then select a face that we want the box to start from then select our dimensions and extrude that shape out again making sure new body is selected or of course we could always make a new sketch on its own and extrude the part from that as well so for the most part from here it's the same techniques to complete all the other shapes and parts for this piece things like drawer and door fronts and the parts of the base are really just making boxes extruding them to a specific thickness and we're pretty much good to go so now that we have our piece in rough form and the general shape pretty much where we want it let's get a little bit organized before we move forward this is the stage where i like to take all of the bodies that i've created and start organizing them into components so the easiest way i've found to do this is to right-click on one of the bodies and select create components from bodies this will put that body into a new component then i can name that component whatever i want to then i'll drag all the other bodies that are related into the same component folder there are a couple reasons i like to do this beyond just the cleaner organization first i'm now able to hide larger portions of my model with a single click instead of having to hide a bunch of individual parts separately which really saves a ton of time and maybe the best reason is that i can duplicate components that are identical so that when i edit one of them it edits all of them which can be a huge time saver in some cases and isn't possible with bodies things like drawer and door fronts are perfect for this and obviously this is something that should have been done when we were initially modeling everything but it felt like it would be easier to explain when talking about components so regardless of that if we want to now we can replace one drawer front and one door panel with duplicated components by using the move or copy tool so let's talk about the move copy tool which i use all the time you can right click on any body or component and select move slash copy which brings up an option window the default move tool is free move which allows you to move or rotate apart any direction by a specified amount you can also change your anchor or pivot point so you want to move or rotate from a specific point you can do that you can also check the create copy box which will leave a copy of the part where it was originally located which is great for duplicating things there are a few other moving options and i won't go into each one except for the other one that i use often which is the point to point move option this allows you to select a point on your specified part then move it to any other point on your model which is great for lining things up or pushing things perfectly together all right we have everything where we want it so let's add a few details and i'm going to start with the drawer pulls for this piece we kept it simple and went with some semi-circle cutouts on each door and drawer front so as always there are a few ways to do this but my preferred method for something like this is to select the cylinder tool then select the face of whichever panel i want the handle to be cut into then if i hover my mouse over the top edge and move towards the center it should snap to the center point of that panel where i can then click to start making the cylinder i can specify the diameter then press enter and specify how long i want it to be now because i'm just going to be using this cylinder to cut the door pull it doesn't really matter how long it is as long as it extends past the thickness of the door panel which is three quarters of an inch then we can make sure cut is selected from the drop down box then before pressing done we need to make sure we aren't cutting any other unwanted parts you can see here that it's cutting the semicircle into the top panel as well so i need to go to the browser and hide that and now i can press done and only remove the semicircle from the door panel and like i mentioned earlier because i've organized my parts so that some of these duplicate parts are actually duplicate components then both of the door panels will get the semi-circle cut out with the single action which is nice if you have many of the same thing this is a technique i use all the time for different shapes and applications for example the small reveal on the top edge of the base is done in almost the exact same way except this time i use the box tool instead of cylinders alright at this point we have the piece model enough where i would feel totally comfortable going into the shop and starting to build i have all of my dimensions and any of the small details can really come together as i'm building but let's say we want to do a fully modeled replica of the finished piece we have a bit more work to do and i'm going to kind of just go through a few different things at this point and just know that each of these techniques should be done on multiple parts of the model to get us to the same finishing point so for example our sliding doors need to be set into grooves on both the top and bottom so first we need to set back both doors to give us some room on the front edge then space them out so we can have a middle divider between them with the doors placed properly i can use the press pull tool or q on your keyboard to make both doors taller so that they extend into the top and bottom panel by specified amount so now that the panels extend into the top and bottom i can use the combine tool to begin cutting the runner grooves if i set the cabinet top panel as my target body and the door panel as my tool body then set it to cut and make sure keep tools is selected it will cut a recess where the door is now in order to finish off the grooves we need to extend them to the ends of the panel where the doors will be sliding and we can once again use the extrude tool or e on your keyboard for this for the front groove we can select the end of the groove then drag it to the outside of the cabinet making sure cut is selected and now we have a full groove for the inside one we need it to extend back to the divider panel so we can do the same technique only this time i can select to object from the drop down then click the face of the panel and it'll cut the groove to align with that face the next thing we can do is size our drawer fronts properly by adding some 1 16 gaps around them and again we can use the press pull tool to take 1 16 off of three sides of the drawer face then 1 32nd off the bottom and top edge here since those combined will equal 1 16. all right now let's say you want to model some of the joinery in this piece the vertical dividers would need some tenons and dadoes for example so let's talk about that first thing i'm going to do is add a tenon onto the top edge of the panel and i can do this with the box tool i'm going to make a box that stops short of the front edge by a couple inches and is half the width of the panel and maybe a quarter inch tall now when i make this box it's going to be off center so i need to make sure i'm making a separate new body first then once it's created i can move it to be centered on the top of my panel then use the combine tool to make it one with that panel so now that i have the tenon i can use that to cut the dado in the top panel which is simple by once again using the combine tool and selecting cut and keep tools and now i have a perfect stop dado cut into the top panel and we can essentially rinse and repeat all these techniques across the piece until we're happy with how it's looking there are plenty of other tools that are incredibly useful but this long video would be even longer if i went into all of them but things like roundovers and chamfers are really simple this is all stuff you really just need to play around with and you'll get a feel for what everything does as you use them more alright now that we have a pretty complete modeled piece of furniture one of the more fun things fusion can do is add some textures and lighting to make it look even more real if we go into the render workspace we can see the model takes on a slightly more realistic look and by using the appearance and scene settings options we can make it look even more realistic this is another area where a lot of messing around and experimenting with what looks good is really the best way to figure everything out but just to show a bit about it the scene settings is where you can control the environment things like where the light comes from how bright it is what focal length the image is at are all things that can be modified and once you have the scene settings dialed in you can apply some textures to the model using the appearance options fusion has a pretty good library of textures and appearances which are all easily searchable then with a simple click and drag you can apply them to each part once again duplicated components makes this a bit quicker here you can see that sometimes the texture is added in the wrong orientation so if you right click on the part then select texture map controls we can do things like rotate the grain orientation or move it until you like the way it looks it's all pretty simple and intuitive and like i said just some experimenting will get you comfortable with tweaking this stuff the last thing to do here is to export a finished rendering this is what you can send to a client or hang on your fridge and to do that we just click on the little teapot here don't ask me why it's a teapot and we can tweak a bunch of settings for different output types screen resolutions and render quality then by selecting local renderer you can save a copy to your computer print it out find your favorite magnet and put it on your fridge so that your family will finally be proud of you for spending countless hours learning a computer program to make little pictures of the furniture you've designed anyway at this point i feel like if i try to cram any more information into this video my ears might bleed and i also feel like that might take us beyond the scope of this video which is really just meant for someone who maybe has never even used fusion 360 before so i hope i covered everything to help get you going leave questions or your own tips in the comments and we can all talk about 3d modeling until we can't take it anymore and thanks as always for watching and letting chris and i get a little techy on our woodworking channel i'm going to go and actually make something in real life now and you should too you

Channel: Chris Salomone

Views: 47,494

Keywords: fusion 360, furniture modeling, how to model furniture, how to render furniture, 3D modeling, 3D model furniture, skillshare

Id: YF3Yob2yNoE

Length: 25min 29sec (1529 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021