Fusion 360 Tutorial for Absolute Beginners— Part 1

fusion 360 is very powerful CAD software but with great power comes great responsibilities and it can seem a little overwhelming in the beginning and there is some best practices to get a good model in this basic video I will take you through those basic steps and I will model up apart from start to finish hi everybody my name is lars christensen and thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video this video is the video that I wish I have come across when I started using fusion 360 taking apart like this this is a plastic conduit might find a few of these around in your house and model it up from start to finish but not just click click and then be done we actually got to slow down a little bit and talk about some of the why we're doing certain things so if you are cabining yet this video is probably not for you but if you're brand new to fusion 360 or if you have a certain areas that kind of like confuses you a little bit well then sit tight lastly before we get started I love your comments and suggestions down in the comment area down there I know many people read them I can promise you that I read them all and if you like this video do me a favor and hit that thumbs up if you don't well if the thumbs down and if you haven't already I would really appreciate hit that subscribe button so let's get going here so the first thing you're going to make sure of is that we are in the model environment inside of fusion 360 this is like what we call parametric modeling second we also want to make sure that our units is correct now you can change the units in the Preferences up here in the drop down so they always default to whatever you want but you can also change it right here on the fly I think that's another important thing to know and we're going to do this in millimeters okay for that and now we are in millimeters so if you're looking at this conduit we can say that it has four parts that is kind of the box there's a lid and then there is two screws now if you're coming from another CAD system you might be used to that we would create each component and then merge them together later on assembly file we actually don't have to do that inside of fusion 360 we can do it all in one file it is good practice though that if you are going to do that to kind of like decide to do that up front so what we're going to do is you're going to create a component that's going to be the box we're going to create a components can be the lid and then we actually just going to bring in the screws from the McMaster catalog that resides right in of fusion 360 now before we start drawing anything we're going to go ahead and create those components here in the tree we're going to do that by just going up and right click and say new component now as soon as we do that then we will see we get a component here and the top component exit kind of like shows us an assembly icon now if you are looking for more information about components I would recommend that you watch the video there should be a card coming flying out here and I've also put it down in the description for the components video I created so if you really want to dig deep into that check that out so the first component here is going to be the box so we can click on that and we can actually rename that I'm just going to call it box and then I'm going to go up and create one more component up here by right-clicking and say new component and that one we're going to call the lid slow click it's going to call that the lid so what we have now is we have a master top component or assembly and then we have the two components right here now you will see that there's a little I looking at you next to the name that depends on what component that is active so whatever this fish is is activated on right now the lid if I go up and I activate it on the box now the Box component will be active and we're going to start out with the box here to model this pod up now what each component here we saw has in it is it has its own origin and I actually prefer to turn that on so I have made sure that my units are right I have my first component created here the box and I make sure that is active so when I start drawing now I'll make sure drawing within that component and I have also turned the origin on so I can kind of like see that because that's one of the things that is important when we start sketching inside of fusion is that we tie our sketches down to in origin it's kind of like mailing things in place in space so to start and the first energy on this part it's kind of like to rough out the outside perimeter of the box so when you start a sketch within fusion 360 a 2d sketch you always have to start on either a face or a plane we will create a 2d sketch that we then will extrude into 3d space now that scads gotta be either on a face or a plane that's a rule now in this case here we don't have a face because we haven't started a sketch it we don't have anything 3d in the model yet so we have to start on a plane so we have three planes we can pick from I'm going to select this plane but it's not really important but plane you select for this now you could go up and use the menus up here on top and there's a bunch of drop-down menus here but I really don't like hunting for these and I don't think that it makes any sense for you as a new user to start up in here in the drop-down and then later on learning all the things I think you might as well just learn the quickest way to start with so that is to go over here on the plane and right-click and if I right-click right here I can create the first sketch so I'm going to click on that and when I do that automatically the plane will Co normal to where we are sketching so that's why you saw everything spinning and you will get this menu over here that shows you our sketching constraints with the topping these in a little second you will also see that we are starting down here in the bottom to capture the history so this is one of the powers as she's going to see as we're modeling up this little box here is one of the powers is that we have this history now just to go back up to the menu up here if I hit the drop down you will see that we have different sketching tools and ear helpers so we have some different types of rectangles we have some different types of circles and so forth but like I said before I really don't like to have too hot in here that's excellent easy away now if you scroll down to the description area you will see the list of shortcuts that I'm going to be using in this video and you can write them down a piece of paper or something and put them next to your monitor honestly I don't think it makes sense to learn the software by hunting around and all the drop downs and then later on switching over to the shortcut there is really just a handful you need to learn and I will make sure that doing the whole video they will pop up every time I'm using them so I'm going to start by hitting the S key on my keyboard when I do that this little sketch tool box shows up and this will actually change depending on where what you're working with in the software as you will see now you will see that there already is some different types of sketch tools available in here but you can access also search for some of these so right now there is a rectangle called a two-point rectangle I actually want a center rectangle so I'm going to start searching for that one so I'm going to search Center and you can see that it's sitting right down here now if I click right here I will activate the center rectangle but you can X also hit the little arrow over to the right and now pin it to that s menu so when we hit that s Keys I'm going to do that for this one here click that now you will see that that is now part of this menu and again I got this menu by hitting the S on the keyboard here so it pops up wherever your cursor is really handy so I'm going to go ahead here and hit the center rectangle and like I said before it's extremely important that you first sketch a tied down to the origin it's kind of like that nail in space so I'm going to hover over the origin and I'm going to click once and then you will see that this rectangle appear now you will see that the dimensions are appearing on each side of this box what is great and you will see one of them is light blue that means like next to stop typing in that dimension right now so that dimension is going to be 34 so I'm going to type that in now to jump to the other the length of this box I'm going to hit the tab key on my keyboard that's going to take me right over to that one and the length of this one is 83 and now I'm going to hit enter and you will now see that I have the box displayed I have the box displayed with my 83 and my 34 and then you will also see that there is some other symbols showing up around my sketch here they are called relationships and you will actually see these relationships are all listed over here to my right in my menu now relationships are rules for our 2d sketches so think about that our sketches can all move around in that plane they're placed on and the relations will kind of tie them down so think of it as rules now the way to work with this is that whenever you sketch something up Lin fusion 360 first we apply relationships such as vertical so if you're gonna make something perpendicular and then we're going to add dimensions afterwards you will see me using relationships all through the video and it's important to remember that the main goal for this is to turn our sketches from blue to black what's going to turn them from movable tool having all tied down and locked down so with this I am ready to take this 2d sketch and extrude it into space now again these menus up here have all the commands that you want to use but I think you're better off just out of the gate start remembering some of these shortcut keys so you don't have to learn these later honors using the software to extrude into space I am going to use the cue on your keyboard so I'm going to click that one like that and you will see that now I jumped out of kind of that sketch menu and I'm now in something called press pull now I'm going to select what I want to extrude it to 3d space and that's this rectangle here and then I get a little arrow and now we're going to start dragging my part into this 3d space now I'm going to make this part here 30 inch tall so I'm going to type in 38 in that little box there and hit enter there we have it we have now created our first true solid on this part here now I said before that when we scared within fusion 360 we either sketch on a face or a plane now the first sketch we put in was on a plane now we can exit sketch on faces because we have some so what we're going to do now is we're going to carve out our this the center portion of this box so I am going to right click on that face because I can now start a sketch on that and say create a new sketch you see it goes normal - I'm going to zoom in by rolling the mouse wheel here and I could go ahead and hit the S key and select another Center rectangle and I could go ahead and find the origin again like we did before and sketch another rectangle like this but on my drawing it's as specified not the size of the rectangle but the size of the wall so I rather want to use that and I really like to be lazy when it comes to Ken and cam so I'm going to use I'm gonna offset the outer edges the full millimeters that is required for that wall so what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit my s key and then I max it going to offset so I can start typing in off set and as soon as I hit the Oh F you would like to see that the offset command shows up right here so I'm going to click on that and when I've done that you will see that menu appears here I'm just going to click on the edge and as I do that I get a indication that I now can offset that edge okay if I go on the outside here it's a plus command if I go on the inside it is a minus command so we're looking for - for millimeters I hit enter and now I have a full millimeter wall created all the way around you will see the sketch is black so we can go ahead and we can we can extrude that or cut that and we're going to again use the press pull so the press pool is used both to extrude and subtract so I'm going to click on that and now I'm just going to select that bar or that inside here and you'll see if I pull up it adds material but if I pull it down then it would actually cut it away pretty smart now I'm not really sure what the depth is on this pocket I know that it's four millimeters all the way around and if I look at my drawing that is so I should actually say if the box is 38 tall - fall but that's a lot of math and I want to show you one of the real cool things about parametric modeling because I know that I want it to be four millimeters on the bottom of the box like the sides I can actually go over here to the menu for this extrude or cutting command and you will see down here I have something called distance so that is that distance you'll see that that distance here will change as I'm pulling this little arrow here and I could do the math but I will actually rather change this drop down to a object and then if I scroll over and I click the bottom face I can have an offset and I can actually go in here and I can create that - full millimeter right here so that means that the card is going to go from the top to the bottom - fall so that's actually kind of like doing the math for me that's it okay to that and now you will see that we have this here now let me just do a section view for you so if I go over to inspect and say section analysis if I click on this face here but as you see I can do a little section view what this means is that it will always keep this to be four millimeters even if we decided to make the Box taller so this is really one of the powers of parametric modeling by using objects select the bottom and offset by fall we are assuring that there will always be four millimeters on the bottom just like we did the offset on the side this means that if you ever have a design chains what we're going to make the Box taller we don't have to worry about that four millimeter that will always be on the bottom if we had just done a subtraction from the top and down if you make the Box taller then we'll get more material in the bottom so this is one of the things that makes parametric modeling you know very powerful that we can set these rules and other thing you will see is that we are keeping on growing this little lot of this little history lying down here so here was our first sketch then we excluded that to the box then we created the sketch on top and then we cut that down and again if I go in here to edit that feature I just right click and hit edit we did it to an object and we selected that bottom face and created a four millimeter offset from the bottom okay so this is really powerful to know some of these functions in here now at this point I am actually going to add a couple of fields to the pot and again I'm going to hit the S key and you will now see the s key looks a little different because we are not inside of a sketch so now we actually get some other tools and the first one here is to fill it so I'm going to go and select that and I'm going to start with the inner fill its of the box so I'm just going to hover over here and I can actually select right through geometry it's smart enough to know that I'm probably aiming for these inside corners just by hovering over here and I'm going to go ahead here and just make these three millimeters hit OK and you will see that now we have to fill it down on the corner now I'm going to create another fill it on the outside so I'm just going to hit the S key again and go and again remember that you could hunt these down up in in the area down here the feeling is also down here you could also just hit F that's another shortcut but as hit to fill it and I'm going to select outside here make sure I get the back side I could of course just turn the pot around and I'm gonna make the outside yeah I'm gonna make these six alright so just a quick recap if you're modeling something up like an assembly go ahead and make the components first before you start sketching always sketch on either face or plane that's the rule and make sure that you take the time to fully define those sketches I know you're in a big rush I know you want to get things done but it's very very good practice so take a five minute break go and get yourself a cup of coffee then come back here and check out the second video where we're going to finish up this box and I'm going to show you a couple of great tips so hurry back

Channel: Lars Christensen

Views: 2,440,130

Rating: 4.8981104 out of 5

Keywords: Autodesk, Fusion 360, Tip, Tutorial, Beginner, CAD, CAM, CNC, Lars Christensen, Autodesk Fusion 360, 3DPrinting, design, Free CAD, free for students, akn_include

Id: A5bc9c3S12g

Length: 19min 55sec (1195 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 20 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/vapescaped]

I watched a couple tutorials before this but they all expect you to know terms and concepts that I'm pretty sure are completely made up. But this 3 part series was incredibly informative for those of us who know nothing of CAD or proper grammar :)

[u/DinnerMilk]

I just started watching this and so far it has been great. I have dabbled in Blender and other modeling tools but Fusion 360 seemed very different in comparison.

Unfortunately I made it to 14:45 in the video and got stuck. When I did a new sketch, set the offset to -4mm and then used Q to extrude down, it didn't rotate back into 3D view like his did. I've retried a couple times and it just isn't working. Was fun up until I hit that road block though!

[u/swordfish6975]

got fusion 360 last night never used it before...

Its good, better then sketchup

I made it crash a twice (cant remember what I was doing)

I suck at the timeline stuff, if I go back and edit a sketch it brakes everything most of the time

I extruded some text and cant figure out a easy way to remove it all?

When I pull the STL in to cura they always need to be rotated?

My models are just three bits of plastic to hold a small circuit board and button in a product I make, previously designed in sketchup

[u/megablue]

His Fusion 360 beginner videos actually saved me from the Sketchup hell hole. I had easily overcome the learning curve in just a two days with his videos.

[u/Keithywhites]

Ive only had experience in any designing using tinkercad. But last week i tried using 360 and this was the first video and thing i did. I followed step by step and couldnt believe i made that box thing. So much to learn but its a great program. I just saw they just released a web version of fusion 360.