Fusion 360 T-Splines tutorial Part 1: the basics

hey so I know it's been a while since I made one of these videos I'm very sorry about that I've been traveling a ton for work I might make another video blog about all that stuff I recorded a bunch of footage while I'm annoyed anyway this is gonna be the first in another series of tutorials around how to use T splines so there may be the first video absolute beginner stuff and like how to make custom objects and how to like very quickly ideated stuff so with that said let's jump right in [Music] all right so a couple things before we jump right in so first of all the data set I'm using is the ma chassis for a mini 4wd there's a link in the description below so you can download this data set to work off of it yourself I've also included a link to Amazon where you can purchase one of these if you decide that you want to build one and test it out yourself I'd love to see a few of these happening in the real world and I think if we get enough people doing it we could have a meet-up and have people race their own design bodies it should be fun the other thing you may notice that I am using the fancy new UI preview which allows you to tab out your workflows and consolidates the workspaces I think it's great if you want to try it out yourself just go to preferences and it is gonna be on the preview right then so just switch that on and you'll get the same thing all right with that said let's jump right in so the first thing I'm gonna do is go to create form and I'm gonna start by creating a few different sketches on this guy to help me out then I'm gonna use as my basically um base dataset so I'm gonna create a sketch everything is already midplane that games the origin so it's gonna make life nice and easy I'm gonna click on this plane and then I'm gonna go over to spline and I'm gonna use the new control point splines so I'm gonna use a three point control point spline and if you don't know about CV coves I'm gonna upload a quick tip video that shows the differences between three point five point and then straight up splines as well so just keep an eye out for that so the first arc I'm gonna draw is basically the overall profile of the vehicle so I'm gonna do like four like that and if I just hit escape on the keyboard I can now grab these anchor points and just sort of tweak my first vehicle profile let's just move that back in a little bit pull it up here just a little bit all right that'll do next I'm going to stop the sketch and switch my sketches on so I can see that and then I'm just gonna start a new sketch and this time I am going to do another control point spline and this is for the kind of secondary profile of the vehicles so I'm gonna put that like that and let's just tweak that a little bit pull it forward pull it down maybe just turn it up a little there we go don't have to be too precious about it once you start working in T splines a lot of this will get really really easy don't eat that and then if I click on that spline right click and then hit move I can now move that into position so I'm just gonna drag that mm 15 mil sounds good then I'm gonna go to construct and I'm gonna just put a construction plan right there on the point of the alloy and then start a new sketch which are going to be my wheel arches so for this one I'm gonna go to arc and I'm gonna use the center point arc so I can make sure you obviously it's really important to make sure that you're at the center of this which my origin point is not so I'm gonna hit P on the keyboard for projects just click on that now I have my Center Point then I'm gonna go back to arc and center point arc so with the way the Center Point art works is basically it'll named enables you to draw a sweep of a of a circle so you don't have the full thing so I'm gonna define my circumference might die radius excuse me as 15 mil and I'm gonna start let's go over here go back to 15 and click once so you can see cells to draw an arc around so I can basically define the shape of my we Lodge and I'm gonna go to about the zoom out go over to this guy hit project again so we'll go to create and then auch and then sense the point auch and the same thing again so basically just drawing the profile that we launched me start a little higher this time make sure it's 15 and pull it round and go to about that part of the other reason I'm leaving this nice big gap is when I thicken this out afterwards when you because what I'm gonna do is and she just create a surface when the surface is complete I'm gonna need to thicken that out to give it a volume and so I want to make sure I have some clearance of my wheel arches so next I'm just gonna stop sketch and then jump into the actual modeling so so everything I do for this is going to be using the extrude tool so the first thing I'm gonna do is extrude out this line and just pull it 10 mils good I don't want an angle on that I want that to be 0 and I want eight faces that's great and I want it to be uniform as well so you see if I pick curvature is gonna try and fit the TT splines as best as I can to the curvature of the actual CV Kirby drew what I want is uniform because it's gonna make life easier for me later when I want to start connecting things up together okay and then I'm gonna extrude this one out and let's go five and this time I'm gonna just have it line up with the number of faces I have here so I got one two three four five six so so that one's a six and then lastly the wheel arches so I'm gonna pick this one and this time I'm only gonna go with three because that lines up with this and I'm gonna go to mill in the other direction and I also I'm going to put a bit of a flare on that so I'm gonna set that to a 45-degree angle and if I hold down command and click on the other one I can do the same thing you'll notice here though if you pick both at the same time it's going to go 45 degrees from that new midpoint between the two so you end up with this weird kind of skew if behavior on your wheel arches this is why you have to do them one at a time so that's the first one right click the Pete extrude and just go to switch my sketch back on and the same thing it's gonna remember the settings from the last time I used it and then I can just hit OK alright hide that sketch close this up and now I can start playing with it so first thing we're gonna do is with edit form I'm gonna double click that full edge so it grabs it and if I hold down alt or option on the keyboard depending on whether you're on a Mac or a PC I can start to grow phases out so I'm gonna do a little bit like that I think this is too close so I'm just gonna grab that edge and just like that shrink it down and let's see you so pulled that down a little bit I think that's good next I'm gonna bridge up across here so I'm gonna go to modify and then bridge and we've got one two three four five six and inside too one two three four five and six and now you can also define basically how many faces you want I'm gonna go with two so you'll see with the preview switched on that pranks that in now I can maintain a crease edge basically you'll keep that edge shop and keep that edge shot but I'm gonna end up with a really weird looking vehicle so I'm gonna leave that off and just hit OK you see that blends those together pretty neatly I'm just going to pull this face forward clean this up a little bit that's better and then I'm just gonna grab that and start to strain it out and you'll see this is why I'm not particularly Precious about what's going on here however I have noticed that while I'm doing that it's making this area of the vehicle go weird so I'm just gonna cancel that and then just grab these two and give them a little rotation also bit bizarre clean that up and if I type 0.01 then I'm gonna do the same for here grab these two 0.01 okay and that's starting to give the vehicle some character it's giving a little bit of shape I like what's happening I do need to extend this out though because I want to clean these up make sure that these to meet the vehicle in the right place and I also notice I've got too many faces here so I'm gonna have to just delete that and do it again so using the same alt trick if I hold down alt on the keyboard or option and then just grab this I'm going to pull that out once and then pull it out a second time like that and then just grab both of these and just pull this way a little bit for now next I can go to modify and then I'm gonna go to weld vertices and I'm just gonna connect that up like now it's got a little weird and maybe not too clean so the next thing I'm gonna do is just go to utilities and then go make uniform click on it and hit OK and basically it's gonna like hunt down for any weird areas in your model and essentially fix them so I don't need this anymore so I'm just gonna get rid of those because there's too many faces again one of the best things about working with t splines is if something doesn't work you just throw it out do it again it's really easy and it doesn't take a ton of time to get back to what you want so I'm gonna switch that to four faces let's see we've got one two three oh it's kind of stretched out let's just drop it to three no loses its shape of three so if I stick it with four I've just got to pull this out and just kind of clean these areas up and then let's just repeat that on the back so make sure that's a full okay so I think I'm gonna do the same thing on the back here I'm just gonna pull this out just to connect this up again and so I'm gonna use edit form and I'm gonna come out three times this time so I've got one two three faces so it's one two and three like that okay and then again on the modifier will go to weld vertices and just clean this up alright cool so starting to build a little character out with the vehicle it's starting to make a little bit more sense look like it actually is a car less so much like a kind of just weird little oddity then I'm gonna go to modify and we're gonna use bridge again and I'm gonna take my four edges here and I'm gonna connect those to my four edges yeah I think two faces is good for now hit okay yeah that's something to look like something it's got a little character to it I'm gonna clean those areas up on the back later and let's bring the front out so again using that same trick just holding down alt whoops that's one let's just pull that back a bit line them up as best as I can and that's two and then it's weld those vertices again so what this is gonna be nice and easy I can just drag a window across them like that and I'm done cool all right and then let's bring these together so we'll go to modify bridge it's one two three four and then side two again one two three all right starting to get some character obviously some weirdness going on over here this is starting to look more and more like a vehicle so let's let's start to give this some definition so I'm gonna pull this down twice so I've got something to clean this area up with so again I'll just go alt you know it's one and that's two and I'm not gonna connect that bit up I'm gonna leave that as it is so I got modify we want to weld vertices again one two that's one two now we've got something good going on but the wheels have gone kind of weird so I'm gonna get rid of the wheels and I'm also going to just clean this t-spline out because this mega line like this is not ideal so I'm gonna double click on those use that same trick from the four and if I just said that to 0.01 it's gonna straighten it out and then I'm gonna get rid of those wheel arches because they've just not really worked and they're a bit gross so yeah do you want are the easiest ways to get rid of it because I want to maintain the stuff the faces from the other side if I just double-click that edge and it's gone and then I'm gonna do the same thing here double click that edge and it's gone I'm just gonna make sure that I don't have any weirdness going on around the other side and I think I'm gonna get rid of this through here don't like what's going on there now obviously this is caused some issues where we've got a surface that's gone bizarre so we could try our trick would make uniform didn't really do anything so I'm just gonna get rid of those bring them back in with the undo button and then just play around with it a different way so this time what I'm gonna do is this line here this face is kind of superfluous it's not really doing anything so like get rid of that it's just gonna give me a little bit of wiggle room to play with and then I can grab this edge and under modify there's another tool that's called slide edge which is here and so it's slight edge it does exactly what it sounds like and basically just move where the edge is happening so if I pull it up a little bit to this side it's gonna change the profile of the vehicle it's also gonna give me some breathing room which is really the most important part here I'm also going to grab these three and before I put the wheel launches back in just pull that down it's a bit much let's go - three and then double click the edge and if I look at this from the top you'll notice obviously it's doing exactly what you expect it's pulling around and following the profile of the vehicle it's just a little bit too much so I'm just gonna clean it by straightening it out so I think that's good then I'm gonna pick these three to give them a flatter profile and then this is just like coming way too far down around the front so if I grab those two constraint it like that and so I've got something interesting happening with the profile if I just tweak that a little bit now I'm in a good position to bring the wheel arches back in so I'm gonna do that and so I will go back to my extrude tool grab this I'm only gonna go one mil this time and make sure I'm not using full faces that's great and then I can always just move this if I feel like I'm too close I will extrude the other wheel arch out and I'm gonna move both of them just a little further away so full faces again this is set to a 45 degree that's what I want hit OK and then just to move them all I gotta do is double click yes so the double click trick this is something that catches me out sometimes as you just saw the double click trick only works on a single surface so if I click on this one now if I hold down shift and click on the other one it's not gonna work because what it's actually looking for is a surface continuity so there's a surface continuity here because it's a single surface but then this one is a whole separate thing so nothing's gonna happen the other easy way to just move them is to right click and then go to move slash copy and then I can just pick one pick two and gonna move this let's go to mail out that's how it looks good yeah that's giving a little bit more breathing room for the profile of the wheel so next I'll use bridge again I'm going to modify bridge that's one two whoops let's try that again actually pick the right edges this time one two three four side to me one two three four and I'm only gonna use one face alright that's much better and then I'm gonna bridge on the other side so we'll go to modify and bridge that's one two three four and then side two is gonna be one two three and four alright so we've got a little bit more definition we've got more of an actual car profile going on it's starting to look like it's got some character to it so next thing to do is merit across easy way to do that is to go symmetry mirror duplicate and then you can just pick the body the mirror plane is gonna be that plane there so I can get to it by long-pressing with the left mouse button press okay you can activate weld which will automatically turn it into back into a single body and then just hit OK alright so we want something starting to look a little bit more like a car it's got some character to it but there's some like weirdness going on here I think this doesn't look particularly good I could add some creases in for some definition so I think that's what I'm gonna do next so one of the other things that's really important with the mini 4wd is making sure you've got easy access to this back here now right now I don't have easy access to that back there because it's kind of coming over the top of it a little bit so I'm gonna these first and just use that same straighten out trick make sure I'm actually using perspective little faces there we go make life a bit easier and let's just flatten that down so 0.01 and then we'll look at it from the top and just do the same thing just flatten that out 0.01 great go to the home view and so now I'm going to use the Edit tool and basically just pull this up a little bit it's gonna give it more of a kind of muscle car look you'll see from the side just by changing the profile here you get very different feeling vehicles and then just pull that this way a little bit so it's a little bit more exposed around the back and then I don't need it to be that exposed obviously that's kind of ridiculous so I'm still using the edit tool so I'm just gonna grab through here and use alt and just pull this down just once like that and then weld the vertices again all right and then I'm gonna straighten that out again cuz it's kind of funny-looking that's also helped me kind of create a little bit of a spoiler on the back so you can see I've got a pretty clearly defined edge here which is something that I can now grab and I'm just gonna exaggerate this as a feature like that and now I've got a cool little swagger on the back of my clock so next is really just cleanup and then would be ready to leave t-spine environments so first thing I'm gonna do is just sort of flatten this area out because this is just just just too wobbly so just do that like this so 0.01 again and because I'm using the the mirror function you'll see that it's mirrored that same feature across I don't have to do it on both sides that green line is basically got me covered then I'm gonna just straighten this out a bit so I'm gonna go to these two and just flatten that profile out and have a quick look from the top alright it's starting to look more like something it's got some character going I'm going to pull these three in just a little bit just to give myself a little bit more profile and then I might actually just pull these are out just a hair like that starting to look good little concerned about this you can see there's this weird kind of crease happening and that's because of basically just the way that this piece here is now folding on itself so you can see it's like it's gone around at a corner like that so again I can clean that up so just grab these two just there we go and you'll see that is becoming less exaggerated it's kind of a concern though because if you play around with it too much I'm sure if I hit finish form here yeah it's gonna warn me that there's something happening here so this is a really great tool when you're when you're working with t splines for the first time because anything you do if you create a self intersecting geometry that wouldn't work it's going to warn you and the other thing that's really useful is you'll notice that this geometry here is now crashing out you can see it's ghosted out through it letting me know that this design won't work because if I try to build this it's gonna collide with an existing piece of geometry so I'm gonna make life easy for myself I'm going to try first getting rid of these arches that looks better it's got more of a kind of mean look so like these big rear fenders I'm gonna grab these and go to modify and then slide edge again and I'm just gonna push it like there alright that's better and then let's just flatten that guy out so it looks more like an actual wheel again there's some just kind of weirdness going on there so actually one of the easiest things to do is if I just grab that and get rid of it do the same thing on the other side it's gonna clean that up it's gonna lose the sharpness but actually I think that adds some character and then if I want to really exaggerate that I can then just grab these faces here so these four faces are my well wheel arch and then go to modify and you'll notice that it's actually modifying it from a great position to do this so now I've just added just that little tweak is just add a little bit more character to those wheel arches back there and I think I'm gonna do the same to the front so I'm just gonna double-click that edge I could probably get rid of this one let's see what happens if I get rid of this one well first you got to get out ahead of form yeah see that that didn't really make a huge difference if I leave it in because of the character that's going on here so I need to keep that for sure so I'm just gonna get rid of that corner get rid of that corner a little bit more character going on here and then slide that edge yeah about halfway is good yeah that's starting to look a little bit more like something interesting is happening and then again just go whoops just give this a little bit of a pop like that all right I'm pretty happy with this so the last step for me is gonna be just sort of like cleaning these edges up I won't keep going through that through this video I think you guys get the gist but I want to just add some sort of definition areas using a crease so I'm gonna go to modify and then crease and I'm gonna crease those wheel arches first because I think that's gonna look really cool so let's just do that yeah that's giving it a little bit more pop and then I can always grab those edges and just to like really exaggerate what I'm talking about just use the global scale and just just pop it out like that a little bit more yeah so you can see it's got more of an aggressive line on it I'm gonna do the same with this edge so just double click that guy and go modify and then crease so you've got a nice shop spoiler edge on the back there and then lastly sort of like a definition of a cockpit I'm gonna crease out a line for where the gloss would go so I modify crease and I'm just gonna pull across like this and let's try all the way over the top - yeah I like that so hopefully everything is clean and I haven't messed anything up I just grabbed this corner and just push it this way once there we go so with that I can just hit okay and then finish form if there's anything wrong this is where T splines will tell me it looks good it did forget to clean that area up though so I can just go back to my T spline and just to like give it a little bit of breathing room all I'm gonna do is grab these three hair and just pull them like that not too much and then same thing here if I grab these three and I'm just gonna move them basically until they're out of the way now this isn't working super well because and basically if I look at this from the side you see basically what I've done is just kind of winged it out like that it's not super amazing if I wanted to give this more definition and what I can do is go to modify and then subdivide and just pick with all these three and hit okay and then you can basically just grab that edge and start to pull it more like that and now I can pull this one back and it looks better you got a cool looking feature happening over here now of course if you don't like it you can always just hit OK and they just get rid of that one and that'll simplify things alright so I'm gonna hit finish form and then there's just a couple steps left to turn this into a mini 4wd so first thing to do is go to create and then thicken because right now this is just a patch surface I'm gonna pick the body in here and then define to it minus one that's great it's giving it a thickness you'll notice over here that I'll now have a solid geometry and the patch from the t-spline as well so you can see that's hidden this is my final piece I noticed here obviously that I've crashed into it if I was making a longer tutorial I would just spend some time and clean that up but for the sake of this I think it's fine then we're gonna combine and then join this is my target and I want to combine it with that and with this one hit OK and then all I have to do is just pick that surface and that surface and I'm done and that's all there is to it easy right already sees you when you know okay guys so I hope you liked that video don't forget to Like share and subscribe and leave a comment if there's something that I missed or something you want to see in another video I do keep a list of them I know that I'm not putting videos out as frequently as I would like to that will change the promise while you're still here don't forget to check out the fusion 360 official learning portal there's a ton more tutorials on there and if you're an industrial designer there's a ton of who's heard of specifically made for you so link in the description below probably somewhere around my face right now is screengrab of some of their tutorials you find on them so until next time see you later seriously please do like share and subscribe it really helps

Channel: Paul Sohi

Views: 36,990

Keywords: fusion 360, t-splines, t splines, automotive design, industrial design, mechanical engineering, solidworks, autodesk, mini4wd, tamiya, ma chassis, tutorial, fusion 360 tutorial, t-splines tutorial, t splines tutorial

Id: NjWUf5xxuVg

Length: 33min 50sec (2030 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 13 2018