How to 3D Model a Mobius Strip in Fusion 360

in this cat for newbies tutorial I'll show you how to make a mobius strip in fusion 360 let's get started as going guys angus here from makers muse reza over on patreon got in touch and asked this hello angus i've been trying to design a mobius strip with three twists on fusion 360 so far it has been a challenge I wonder if you can make a tutorial but what is a mobius strip anyway well here I have a piece of paper this strip of paper imagine it has no thickness its 0 thickness is a single surface if I just fold it around itself like this you end up with a loop with two surfaces and two edges however a mobius strip takes on those ends and rotates it around 180 degrees and now you end up with a single surface and a single edge so no matter where you start if you go around and trace the shape you end up back where you started and I remember back when I started University the first CAD class I had I was a bit cheeky and I asked my tutor how do you 3d model a mobius strip well it turns out you can in fusion 360 but it doesn't really like it so let's dive into the software so far out fusion 360 and start with a blank workspace and to model our mobius strip we're going to use the sweep command I've talked about the sweep command in a previous code for newbies tutorial here but this command lets you take a profile and sweep it along a path so what we're going to do is take an edge and sweep it along a circle to produce our Mobius strip so we're gonna start with that circle which is our path so I'm going to draw a sketch on our top plane create sketch top plane here and hit C for circle and draw it out I was gonna make it 100 100 there you go millimeters in diameter stop sketch now we have our path we to draw our profile and I'm going to do that on our XZ plane here which is the front plane click and go there hit alpha line and draw a line now positioning this line is important I've just drawn it here it actually needs to intersect with our path really to be done properly so to do that I'm just going to hit pee while highlighting the path and P does a project which actually will project that circle but from the side view into our current sketch we're not going to use this for actually drawing any geometry just using it to actually locate our line so click the line again and hold down shift select that point right click and midpoint I have another tutorial on relations but midpoint means that this line will be forever locked to the midpoint intersection of that circle and we just need to give it a length so just hit D and then select the line and that's going to make here let's go over 25 that looks good and we're done but before I go I like to make geometry I'm not using into construction geometry so it doesn't get confusing for what the suite needs to do so I'm going to select that projected line and just hit X it becomes dashed and you see those dashed lines that means it's a construction line and it's not going to be part of our final geometry and that's the basis for our mobius strip but to draw it as I said imagine this has zero thickness we can't do that in the model workspace we need to jump over to the patch workspace in fusion 360 so select over here on the left hand side model and then go to patch patches our surfaces they have no thickness so it works very similar to the model workspace you go and drop down from the create menu and we have a patch sweep so here we have the window for patch sweep we can select our profile which is the line and a path which is the circle there we go so just like we did before with the paper that's just a normal loop but we want to make it a mobius strip so you want to rotate one of those ends 180 degrees and to do that we use the twist angle so we select the twist angle box and make it 180 degrees and there you go we've now drawn a mobius strip in fusion 360 however I did mention that CAD programs don't like this sort of thing and you can see that fusion has solved this with this really weird artifact so when you have these surfaces in in CAD software they have facing direction because this is going to be a single surface now when it joins up because you can trace all around the whole shape it doesn't know what to do when it intersects when it ends and it's doing this really weird artifact and in fact if you export this as an STL file and open it in something Mac like mesh mixer this is what you end up with so it's taken that profile and swept it around and it has produced a mobius strip but you notice that this this lines these lines here that's the the other side of our triangles in the mesh hit W to show the triangles STL files have a facing direction from those triangles Tilden called a normal and this is what they face they face out to this gold side and the other side is the reverse side of those triangles and when it interfaces doesn't know what to do there so how can we get around this well just like the real world this paper has a very minut amount of thickness so if we jump back to fusion 360 and go back to our line here instead of being a zero thickness I'm gonna make that a construction line now I'm gonna give it a very small amount of thickness so go back to model because we're going to now be drawing a solid even though it's very thin so sketch rectangle Center rectangle hang out draw it out using the original line as a guide so just going to add a midpoint you could just draw it from scratch again but just going to make sure that middle middle part of the rectangle is on that on that circle intersection I'm gonna make it like 0.05 so 0.05 millimeters incredibly thin but there is still something there stop sketch and now I'm gonna do another sweep for this time it's going to be a edge remodel sweep so create sweep again select our profile and select our path and then twist angle will be 180 and there you go so now we have a mobius strip which doesn't have that weird artifact however it doesn't seem to ever want to join it perfectly and seamlessly it always seems leave that seam that even though this is a single body as you can as you can see indicated on the side there and if we export that out into mesh mix that we end up with this so this is our mobius strip with the 0.05 millimeter thickness so it's not a true single surface it does have thickness now but that outside surface will still trace around the object and end up to the same place you started and you can see that seam there it doesn't have the same uniform triangles but really if you went to use this for something else or rendered it you wouldn't notice that that's just a anomaly that kind of annoys me as a designer I wish I could see it and visualize it completely seamless of course if you wanted to make your mobius strip rotate more than 180 degrees you can in residential request he wanted it to go around three times so if we did a twist angle for example three times so every 180 and 360 then 540 so five four zero there we go so it's rotated around three times and then terminated again like before once again we had that little seam there but it is a solid object with a small amount of thickness but if that allows us to draw it in the first place I'm okay with that I usually design for 3d printing not just for pure theoretical zero thickness surfaces if you find mobius strips beautiful then you definitely need to go check out dissing offs web page so dissing offers an amazing 3d artist and he has taken the concept of a mobius strip and pushed it very very far with mathematical art and these are 3d printable files you can download and print bear in mind they would be extremely challenging to print on an FDM 3d printer but his work is incredible and definitely deserves a shout out when talking about the humble mobius strip so thanks for watching guys hope you found this video useful on designing a mobius strip in fusion 360 again this is part of the CAD for newbies tutorial series here on makers muse there's a whole list of them go check out the playlist and I look forward to you again very shortly catch later guys bye

Channel: Maker's Muse

Views: 42,266

Keywords: mobius strip, mobius loop, how to 3D model, fusion 360 tutorial, cad for newbies, guide, tutorial, education, free, autodesk, maker's muse, angus deveson

Id: AFzLHNXiwx8

Length: 8min 46sec (526 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 06 2018