Fusion360 TOP 10 Mistakes made by users - Great TIPS

[Music] welcome back to the design creativity and technology channel my name's Erin today's video I would like to share with you my top 10 common mistakes made by fusion 360 users and these are mistakes that I've come across during my time as an educator and or vocational trainer now these are common mistakes made by many CAD users and even though my focus today is on fusion 360 these could easily be transferred across to other CAD software packages to make it easy for you only include a topic selection and timeline so you can jump forward or back in any of the topics I present here today not to mention I'll also give credit where credit is due to those who have showed me the error of my cad ways before you go about your design you've really got to ask yourself a few serious questions so what is it you're trying to make how you're going to make it what processor you're going to use to make it for example I use subtractive manufacturing process or you're going to use an additive process is that a single part is that a multiple part is it a main assembly or a sub assembly how would you like it displayed when you take it into a 2d drawing should you use parameters or shouldn't you use parameters which sketch plane to start off in now these are all common questions asked by the novice or even the seasonal CAD user I highly recommend that when you start your design that your first point of contact with your mouse for what it means you try to sketch is actually the center point which is called the origin if you snap to the origin you will anchor that point there okay and the sketch won't move from that anchored point and that's the first starting point and I strongly suggest you do this is snap to origin so my second topic here today is under defined sketches many many times I come across students who get they can't get their 2d drawings right the measurements are incorrect only to go back to their 3d model to find some very simple common problems such as an under defined sketch so what are under defined sketches okay so if we look at this rectangle I drew here you'll notice that the left hand line and the bottom line of black black is good ok blue is bad and blue is under the finer we need to fix that now a simple way to fix this today as you could see we're to put a dimension on it so I can put a dimension on the bottom and a dimension to the side and once I lock that in you'll notice that the sketch turns black which means it's fully defined the other reason we keep fully defined sketches is because throughout your model when you try to rebuild the model by clicking play on the timeline if you have under defined sketches the fusion will want to go back and calculate that all the time if they're fully defined it doesn't have to recalculate that I want to thank Kevin Ellingson for that tip so topic 3 I'd like to talk to you about is when and where to use parameters and for those that haven't used parameters before they live up here under modify you come all the way down to the bottom where we can change parameters so this little model here is the interesting little model it's very very basic in its design and it's a model that I use to show students saw an introduction to joints especially and also to parameters now this model was this one hull model he was designed off the simple three parameters here so you can see I've named my parameters thickness grid and holes okay and if we take a look at that sketch at the very very start you can see my basic sketch consists obviously of a square and a grid pattern within that square now our parameters are represented by the letter FX in front of them and so they link anything with FX links back to that perimeter and you can also link dimensions to other dimensions within a sketch as well but I'm not going to talk about that here in this video now a good design when you use design intent properly I should be able to change my parameters and this model shouldn't fall over and it should work so if I come down here to modify change parameters and I'll change my grid pattern here to 40 and I'll click OK and you can see that my model is updated okay so I'll change the thickness of the material now and let's make that 10 mil plastic so what I usually do with this after the students design it we take it into the laser cutter and they get to cut out their shape and glue them together and keep their dice all right we can also alter the holes so the size of the holes in this model so we'll change those to 8 and and as you can see my model hasn't fallen over install all in one piece and everything works fine so that's a good example of when to use parameters and within your design you don't have to use perimeters all the time but it makes it easier if it's a part you're going to mass-produce and you may want to change the size of it so a really good design that I saw this a long time ago was by an autodesk employee called taylor stein and taylor designed a desktop laptop stand which you laser cut and depending on your perimeter you setup you can change your material size and bang hit enter and it updates and populating your model so it's a really really good tip so the next topic I'm going to use is patterns and when to do those patterns now we should always use patterns in the feature and not in the sketch and the reason we do that is because when we do a pattern as a feature it's performing a boolean operation it doesn't have to do this huge mathematical calculation I'm not going to go into what boolean means you can look that up yourself and there's lots on the internet about that now here's my first one and I've done this demo a and demo be alright now demo a you can see that I've performed the pattern within the feature and in demo B you can't I've got the same model it looks like Danny cool ok but I've performed the pattern in the sketch now there's pros and cons to this like I was saying before if you do it in if you do it in the feature it's a boolean operation when I've done it in the sketch I can't really modify that now ok it's theater stick then the only way to modify it if I did it would in the sketch has come back to the sketch here I'd have to delete what I did previously ok and then reapply that feature where simply if I do it within the feature I can come back to this quite easily edit the feature and I can change that from five to six hours to five holes and update the model very very quickly but more importantly to prove the point and now this like as I was saying this is a tip that I got off kevin Ellingson and let's look up here in my downloads and let's just get some file sizes here for a for you to have a look at if we look at the file size of these two documents here okay 10a so this demo the first time I showed you where I did the pattern within the feature take a look at the size of the file now if you have a look where I've done the patent in the sketch is interesting to note that it's actually a bigger file and if we just take one more look at that model again you'll see there's a lot more going on on the timeline down here then there isn't this one here but it's interesting to note that this file size is actually bigger then when I perform the pattern inside the feature for tip number five I'm going to suggest that you use the whole command over sketching holes and then extruding them now the reason we do that is because fusion knows the proper size to build based on the fastest you want to use for example it may be a through-hole you might want a countersunk I'll counter borehole maybe even a tapped hole in this example here you'll see me working on a simple t-nut design where I insert a threaded hole additionally when you use the hole feature this is going to help in your 2d drawings as well because eventually future will suck across any information that you created in the parametric model into the drawing notes additionally you can also in the cam fusion we'll see that that is now a tapped hole and I can pop in there with a with a tap and Richard tap that hole to the correct size so topic number six is about fixing any yellow that you have in your timeline now these yellow could be attached to a feature or to a sketch now yellow means that usually the yellow means that you've lost a reference okay so down in here you'll see my CNC machine table that I drew in fusion 360 and really I have this happen to me but I exported this then brought it back into fusion and it gave me this error down below and I think it could have been I originally had this built with the vise and everything on it so if I come down at the time like right-click on it and go review the warning it actually tells you look you've lost a reference so there's zero distance in there okay so you need to fix that even though fusions rebuilt that model everything looks fine trust me don't go ahead go back and fix the model and this is a common mistake I find when I teach students and also adults for that matter and other teachers that they have this in the timeline they don't quite understand it and they don't go back to fix it because they they think well look at the model still there I'll just leave it everything's good well it's not so if I come down here right click on here and go edit my feature you can see there that fusions lost the reference for extrusion now to rectify that if I type in negative 400 millimeters and as soon as I click okay the model Bree will rebuild and everything's fine when I press play in the timeline you can actually see the strategy or the method I used here to do this and there we have it once again you saw me mirroring those features and not doing it in the sketch okay the next topic I want to take a look at is a common one now I used to do this and I was in a habit it was probably an old habit that I brought in from the PTC days when I used Pro desktop and it was grounding so here's my little steam engine that we do with my engineering students where they make one of these and it actually runs and works and you can actually rotate the flywheel and it will turn over but when I go to rotate it you can see that it moves away and I drop out a spring and that sort of thing now commonly a lot of people want to do this they come to the base they right-click on it and then when I go ground okay and once I grounded I think okay everything's apples should be right but you want to stay away from grounding your part you actually want to apply a joint so when I designed this I designed this in full top-down strategy so I had other geometry driving other geometry okay and when I first drew the base and extruded it I put a joint to the origin and I'll turn that back on I had it suppressed here and I'll unsuppressed that and once again you can see I'm back to where I am so stay away from using ground now where I got this tip from was from Scott Moyes Scott works he's Autodesk expert elite like Kevin Ellingson and he works for CAD Pro and Scott put a really good tweet what not a tweet actually a post on Instagram about why and and this is the reason Scott was saying this is the difference between using ground and Richard joints to anchor your first component in Autodesk fusion 360 ground is in a local state and doesn't survive instances of the components whereas a joints are global and survived in Seng so I think that's a really really good explanation and it got lots of lights from other people especially from Marty in Autodesk Tim who's also it from Autodesk as well and of course myself now that brings us up to tip number eight today and this is another common thing that I see a lot and that's I've actually titled this this one sketch to the max and I'll show you why I've done this so you've got two models here they preferred model you can see it's out but I'm going to explain why and the sketch to the max model so if we come in here and edit that sketch all right you can see that now this is very very common so it's sort of a leftover from old fashioned geometric drawing so when you actually use the drawing board and the t-square inset squares and where you did two construction lines to find holes so this is a bit of a hangover from those times and you usually find people around my vintage doing this you know we didn't learn cat at high school we learnt our fashion hand drawing technical drawing and I didn't learn CAD Tasi my mid 30s so you can see here that they've got construction lines everywhere they've put four circles this is a basic could be a blanking plate or something like that that dimensioned every circle the other thing they've done there Phillips in the sketch and that's something I tend to shy away from these days anyway we'll do finish and look although the model is built and then they've gone in and threaded the holes is another common thing I'll see them thread every single hole instead of holding beyond the control key on a PC or the command key on a Mac and getting all those four on one hit now the preferred method is this one here I just simply designed the sketch you know do the sketch push your dimensions on it's fully defined the lines are black extrude it put my Philip's on the side and then come into here now and get start the hang of using constraints more okay and constraints live up here in the sketch palette and you know you've got a coincidence you've got horizontal vertical tangent equals parallel 90 degrees perpendicular they came midpoints all this sort of stuff so a simple one that I find very very useful and I use a lot is horizontal vertical now all I've done here is put four points on my sketch and now I can just simply come in and one two that learning is in line one - that one there is in line one two that's in line then we want this one and that one to be in line you can see now that I'm fully defined all my points are black so I know that's going to work finished sketch and what I did in here I used once again the whole wizard from the previous tip I told you about and in my whole was that I told it to pick up those points that I put on there and straight away I want to tap tile and everything like that and you can see what I mean it's a much neater I can come back at any time and change anything on one or two whereas before it's a little bit more difficult the next thing I want to talk about is capture position okay and this is very this is quite common it usually happens with you know assemblies and what they'll do they'll import a lot of the a lot of parts into one file and then I want to start assembling them and they'll grab one and pull it out and grab another one and pulled out a setting and that's understandable well you want to do that another way they could be doing is just simply just by turning off the eye okay instead of moving the bit anyway when they move them out here and then they go to hit joint and it comes up with capture position you want to stay away from capture position it's just it's just eating up computer memory and came down the time line I've seen students with probably 40 and 15 maybe even 20 capture positions and they want to know why they're there models so slow you know when they try to rebuild it and that sort of things so try stay away from capture position where possible and this is at once again this is there's another tip from my good friend Kevin Ellingson okay from mechanical advantage okay the final tip the final finale and this is probably really right down at number one it's always save your work before you start all right you'll see that infusion anyway if you want to start doing an assembly fusion will prompt you to save you to sign before you start importing you know other bodies and that sort of thing okay all right so when we're in here now there's a couple of little tricks here you'll notice that I've used a constraint here so this is building on from that constraints so I've put an eco constraint here so if I change that whole to 20 the other long populate as well a neat little trick and that I saw recently and Kevin saw this from one of his students actually that showed him was how do you put an angle dimension on though on those two holes so you can do this quite simply by picking the points one two three and come out and there you have your angle so we can have there 125 that's a neat little trick so another little trick I want to show you and now this is something that I've really mucked up in the early days of fusion 360 and I actually did a video on it and it was how to do a paperclip and I do realize now and no see you will know this tip and it's not you know it's it's quite a simple one and it's when you're sketching that if you're drawing a straight line if you hold the mouse and then move out you'll get an arc now that took me you won't believe this that took me a long time to master or to grasp again and of course depending on the way you do it you know you can get different arcs and that sort of thing bring this one back down here so alpha line can't continue up here and you may remember this paper clip that I did back in the day all right a little bit more all right and now we can finish sketch and pop back into our next one for the circle on their little circle finish sketch he'll come back over and then we can sweep that and as you can see I've got an under one sketch this is just a real quick one to show you guys okay the profile will be that one and the path will be that and then we have our basic paper clip all right so look once again hey thanks for hanging in there I hope you learned something feel free to comment below I'm sure other fusion 360 users will be reading the comments and you know if I can answer you I will if not feel free to jump in the comments and answer some of the questions yourself have a lovely day and we'll see on the next video bye bye [Music] you

Channel: Design Creativity & Technology Channel

Views: 6,104

Keywords: Autodesk, Fusion360, Computer Aided Design, Top Ten, Top 10 Mistakes, Top 10 Tips, Learn from doing, CAD for education, Best CAD Tutorial, Aaron Powter, DCTTeacher1, Design Creativity & Technology Channel

Id: FkBXZwFuPs4

Length: 20min 0sec (1200 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 12 2020