Fusion 360 - Secrets of the line command

[Music] hey everyone Kevin from mechanical advantage comm I wanted to use this video to talk about some sketching tips we're gonna talk about some things that maybe we didn't know that some of the commands could do some of the different right-click options and some different keyboard options that we can do to make things happen in different ways so I have two shapes I have this shape that I want to draw and I have an example something like this that I also wanted to show let's start out with this shape first now you can see it's kind of like a little cam lobe or something it's got a 1.75 radius on one end a 1 inch radius on the other end the two centers are horizontally aligned with each other and the there's a two and a half inch Center to Center dimension controlling that to fully constrain the sketch so we're gonna work on using some of the tools in fusion 3 duplicate drawing this we're gonna draw it in a couple different ways I'm gonna start a new design and from the sketch menu I'm gonna choose to do a circle Center diameter circle I'm gonna place my sketch on the front plane some one highlights whites I'm gonna click on it and now I know I'm drawing on that plane I want my left circle to be anchored to the origin point so when I move my mouse to that origin point you see that square appears that lets me know that when I click there that fusion is going to lock the center to the origin so I'm going to click and I'm going to drag out I get the opportunity to dimension this circle right now but as you note it's giving me a diameter and on the sketch that I was showing we have a radius dimension so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna drag out a rough circle I'm gonna come over and drag down another rough circle not being too careful where I place it or its size yet and I do know that the two centers are horizontally aligned so I'm gonna use the horizontal constraint to click on the origin and the center of the circle and now those two centers are lined up so now what I'd like to do is add some dimensions from the sketch menu I'm gonna go and choose sketch dimension or D on the keyboard and I'm gonna click on the left-hand circle and when I do you notice it's giving me a diam 3.84 but what I really want is a radius so before I place this I can right-click and choose to give me a radius dimension instead of a diameter now you can see it says radius 1.9 - I'm gonna left click to place it and type in 1.75 I'm gonna go ahead and hit enter now let's say that we hit D on our keyboard again and we dimension this other side and we place the dimension I'm gonna call this one inch it's one inch diameter when I really wanted to be one inch radius and I didn't go through and I didn't change that what I can do is right-click on the dimension and toggle it to radius even after I've placed it and now I just simply double-click on it and adjust that dimension to be one inch and now I've got that set up okay we don't have the center to Center distance yet we're gonna add that in a little bit what I'd like to talk about now is adding the line that connects these these circles so what I could do is start the line command and draw a line from circle to circle like that you can see you got one tangent and woman didn't so now I could use the tangent command and click on the line in the circle and now those two are tangent and I can do the same thing down here so I'm just gonna click here and here it's coincidence but it's not tangent I'd have to start the tangent command again click on this the line in the circle and the line in the other circle and now everything is is tangent on where the two lines meet the two circles however that was a lot of mouse clicks so I'm gonna delete those off and see if there's a different way we can do this I'm gonna start the line command and I'm gonna put my my line on the circle somewhere I don't care exactly where it's at I just want to see that X letting me know that I'm gonna be coincident when I see that X I'm gonna left click and hold and when I move my mouse you can see any where I move my mouse now the line is tangent to the circle that I'm drawing to when I go to do the second circle as I move my mouse around the circle eventually I'll see the second tangent symbol appear and when I let go now you can see that I have two tangent symbols that were created automatically it took a little input from me but it's much easier than going and adding those tangent constraints manually the other thing we can do is if I click on this circle now I'm not holding down the mouse key anymore what I'm gonna do instead is I'm gonna hold the shift button down holding the shift button down will also make your line tangent to wherever you start when I drag this out I just look for that second tangent command click and now I've got the two tangents I can choose the trim or not I think I will in this case so from the sketch menu I'm gonna go and I'm gonna choose the trim command and I'm gonna click on the two entities that I'd like to go away and now everything's all trimmed out I can do a d4 dimension again and click on the two centers drag up and enter my two inch value in there is my there is my sketch I can't I think I did too yeah two point five so we'll just double click that and make that two point five inches and now I'm ready to extrude that so that's one method we can go ahead and draw this with I'm gonna delete this off and we're gonna draw this a different way so the line command draws lines but what people often don't know is that the line command will also draw an arc so I'm gonna draw a line from the origin or my drag straight up and when I get to the endpoint I'm gonna click and I'm gonna hold the left mouse button down now I'm gonna swing the direction I want to go and you can see now we're drawing an arc and when I let go we're back into the line command and if I were to click and hold again we can be back into an arc so you can toggle between line and arc whether you hold the mouse button or if you click and let go and then click to end it so if you have any questions on that let me know in the comments below and I'd be happy to make another little demonstration about how to do that so to draw the same kind of a shape that I was just showing I'm gonna start out by drawing one of the lines so I'm gonna click a line from there to there now I'm gonna left click and hold swing into my arc I'm gonna let go I'm gonna come out left click and hold I'm gonna swing it all the way around to that to that point now I didn't do a very good job I only have two tangent constraints on here so I have to add two tangent constraints there there there and there I'll add a coincident constraint between the center and the origin and a horizontal constraint between the center and the origin again to get everything squared up now I can do D on my keyboard for dimension we'll type in the 1.75 and because that's an arc it automatically assumed it's going to be a radius we'll do the same thing over here make this a one inch radius and then dimension between the two centers the 2.5 so there's an alternate way we can go ahead and draw that out just using the line command I didn't use the circle or arc command to do any of that I drew that entire thing with the line command okay so let's go take a look at the other shape so this other shape is just a circle if we edit the sketch we can see how I drew this I'm gonna start out showing you this method down here and the amount of work that goes into it versus the method that I drew this top part so you can see we've got a two inch diameter circle we're two inches from the origin each way and then we've got a 60-degree included angle between these two these two lines so let's go start a new design I'm gonna sketch a circle Center diameter circle I'm gonna click on the front plane drag this out and right away I can go ahead and make this two inches since we wanted a two inch diameter I'm gonna draw that kind of bow tie shape on the bottom and kind of go about it doing it the long way so the way that I would do that is I would draw a line from the origin to the circle and then from the origin to the circle again and already I made a little mistake I made those perpendicular so I'm just gonna delete that constraint out now I can move one independently of the other I'm gonna move where this two inch diameter dimension is appearing as well I'm going to draw a construction line from the center down I want to use this as my line of symmetry so I'm going to make that a construction line by clicking on it and then going to my sketch palette and choosing construction and I'm gonna use a symmetry constraint now to click on this line and this line symmetrical to my construction line now as I move one the other one moves the same way I'm gonna Defour dimension and dimension the angle here to be 60 degrees and that's the basis I need for completing this somehow I untie GLE those from construction so we'll just remake them construction again now I'm going to start my line and all I really care about is that I'm coincident to the endpoints and come up and drag the rest of this out like that I'll make this bottom line horizontal and then I want to use the collinear constraint between the construction and the other line and the construction and this other line here one more dimension D for dimension I click on the circle and the bottom edge drag this over so that dimension to b2 and there we have if we look at this sketch you can see the same thing 60 degrees 2 inches everything seems to be the exact same drawing these construction lines and do you know that was a bit more tedious than I'd like it to be though so in the same way if I draw a circle and I get over the a line if I draw a line that's coincident to a circle and I left click and hold the mouse the line is staying tangent anywhere I position the mouse I can draw a line that's perpendicular to a circle depending on where I start the circle so if I start the line command when I come to the quadrant and that would be the north south east or west portion of the circle and I left-click and hold now you can see that instead of getting a tangent circle I'm getting a perpendicular circle this only works if your mouse is somewhere approximately at one of the quadrants of the circle so there's there's a perpendicular line I'm gonna hit line on my keyboard again l4 line and I'm gonna come down to this other quadrant point and drag out and now you can see that there's another line that's perpendicular to the circle no matter where I move it so I'm gonna delete that off let me start the line command one more time I'm gonna click here and drag up and I'm just gonna kind of move over and place my line hit escape hit L on my keyboard again come to the tangent point drag up drag over you can see the perpendicular symbols appearing and let go of that now I'm perpendicular I want to make both of these lengths equal and then I'm gonna draw a line from point to point and this line is going to be horizontal in one second as soon as I make this line in this lines symmetric to my construction line now that is geometrically horizontal by because it has to be I'm gonna do D on my keyboard and dimension my two lines place that angle dimension and make it 60 and have one more dimension to go I'm gonna hit D my keyboard and go from the center to the vertical line and I'm gonna go ahead and place it now one other little trick we can do is I could type in two here but let's say I want the top in the bottom to always be equal no matter what we change while this has highlighted blue I'm gonna go and left click on the dimension below when you can see it renames that dimension to be dimension three setting that dimension equal to dimension three which is this two in to mention right here so when I hit enter there we go we have a lot less work to go ahead and draw this top side as opposed to the bottom side and I also link these dimensions together you can tell that because this dimension says FX it's a function of another dimension so if I went and double clicked on this dimension and change it to be 2.5 inches and hit the enter key notice that the other dimension automatically updates so I don't have to remember to change both of them so I hope we covered a few things in this video that you weren't aware that fusion was able to do the line can draw arcs by left clicking and holding the line at the end the endpoint of a line you can right click while dimensioning to toggle between radius in diameter and holding down your left mouse button while drawing lines on circles or arcs will give you different results if you have any questions please go ahead and let me know in the comments below and I'd be happy to take care of anything that you have a question about so thanks for watching and have a good day

Channel: Mechanical Advantage

Views: 73,419

Keywords: Fusion 360, Sketch, Tips

Id: -rm_vtKcpnA

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 31 2017