How To Convert a 3D Model into 2D Templates for CNC, Laser, or Print in Fusion 360

welcome back to rc cad to vr my name is terence and i would like to welcome you to the final and eighth episode in our tutorial series where i show you how you can design your own rc model airplane using fusion 360. this episode i'm going to show you how you can go from the 3d design that we've been working on over all this time and convert that into 2d sketches or 2d line drawings that you can then use with a cnc machine a laser cutter or where you can print them out on sheets of paper and then cut with foam whichever method you choose to use this method that i'm going to show you is going to teach you how to do that now i do apologize for those of you that have been waiting for those of you that are joining for the first time lucky you you didn't have to wait for this episode there were some changes that were made in fusion 360 where the way that i was able to get these designs out into two-dimensional models is no longer available in the free version that does not mean however that it can't be done i'm going to show you two ways that you can do that the first way is using the native tools built into fusion 360. now they do require you to have a subscription and i strongly recommend that you do get a subscription specifically for this feature if you can't that is perfectly fine i'm going to also show you how you can do this without having to upgrade or getting a subscription now the first thing that we have to do is we have to make sure that all of our bodies within the in our model are converted to components and those components can only have one body in them so we're going to go through make sure all of those are done you probably want to name them as well so that way you know what you're looking at and then the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to make sure before anything gets exported that we don't have any interferences now one of the problems that can occur while you're designing is that your parts might actually be inside one of one another and that will create a problem for you later on when you actually go to cut these pieces where they're not going to fit correctly so we're going to do that first let's go ahead and dive in and see how this works i'm going to be using the forward section of the plane that i've been designing which is the l1011 now you'll see there are a lot of parts here and i'm going to hide most of those because they're not needed for this tutorial so i'm going to go ahead and hide all of those so that way i'm left with just the frame now before i move any further i want to point out that it's very important that all of your components only have one body in them so when i expand this we can see that this bulkhead only has one body in it now one note all of the all of the tutorials that i do there is a corresponding web page that i put together that has all of the resources and many of the questions that get asked on the channel i actually put the answers there so if you ever get caught up on anything make sure that you go and check out the website because the chances are that the answer is there and the link is available with every single tutorial video moving on the thing that i want to do first is check for interferences so i'm going to zoom in here to be able to select a couple of parts now before i do that i'm going to make sure that i have my component priority selected now if this is not available for you in this bar across the top you can click select and you've got the selection tools the selection priority here where you can select them now if you want to pin them to the top you can simply click on these three little dots here and then say pin to toolbar and that will bring them up to the top so i'm going to make sure that this is turned on now the next thing is i'm going to select one of my components and then i'm going to hold shift in order to be able to select multiples so holding shift i'm going to select these components here and to check if there is any interference between these what i'm going to do is i'm going to select the interference tool and if it's not available there you can click on inspect and you will find it here so i'm going to click on this now this part isn't very intuitive because you would think that by clicking on ok that that would check for the interference but it's not going to do that as you can see it's grayed out so in order to check whether there's interference between these parts i'm going to click on this little compute icon and as you can see it says there are no interferences detected but what does this look like when there is an interference well let me go ahead and close this out and i'm going to turn off my selection priority here and then i'm going to long press here until i can select this face which is the inside face and i'm going to move this in like that just to create an interference i'm going to reselect my component priority and i'm going to select these two parts and interference check and compute and now you can see we have an interference here and this is what i just pulled into the part now you can remove the interference by having the remove volume checkbox selected here and that will remove it however i don't want to do that i want to have more manual control over that but if you did want to remove this automatically when this is selected you press ok and it will remove it but i'm going to do that manually so i'm just going to go ahead and undo what i did and i'm going to check it again and we can see that the interference has been removed so let's go ahead and close out all of that one other thing to consider now when we were designing this uh one of the things that i did not cover in the design process is tolerances i prefer to do my tolerances using kerf instead of actually modeling them into the model itself that's because i knew the medium that i'm going to be using which is three millimeter plywood and so for that reason the tolerances i actually added as kerf values when i did my laser layup now if you want to add the tolerances into your model now is a good time to go through every single part and every single fit and add the tolerance that you think you're going to need so what if you're wanting to actually check the interference for every single one of these components well the first thing that we're going to do is under select we're going to make sure that the window selection tool is activated and then i'm going to go from the bottom right corner across to the top in order to make sure i select every single component and here you can see they have all been selected now we can do a quick interference check and it will do its compute and it says that my model has no interferences perfect now that we know there are no interferences in our model now we can start moving our 3d model into the 2d space now this first method that i'm going to show you is using the arrange tool in the manufacturing space within fusion 360. now this does require a subscription and i'm going to tell you why it's probably a good idea if you've got a larger model why you should go ahead and upgrade and this is i'm not affiliated with autodesk or fusion 360. but i'm going to tell you why it's beneficial when you go to do your layups if you make any changes to your model say for instance you find a piece didn't fit right or you need to make a modification for any reason by using the arrange tool in the manufacturing space any changes that you make in your primary model are automatically going to update and they will rearrange themselves in order to fit properly in the nesting that you did using this method if you use the free version all of that benefit goes away now that doesn't mean that you can't do individual changes and then do your manual layups but for consistency purposes and to make things easier and faster that is one of the main reasons why i do recommend you upgrade to a subscription now again this is going to be the subscription only if you are not willing to upgrade or you are unable to upgrade i do recommend that you go ahead and jump forward to the free version the time codes are down below in the description the way that we're going to move from the design into the manufacturing environment is up here in this menu we're going to go down and select manufacturer to get into the manufacturing workspace now it's going to do some work as it's calculating the model and once it's done and you can see down here it's saying computing once that's done then we can start working within this environment so let's talk about the manufacturing model real quick one of the key benefits of using this is you can have multiple manufacturing models in your actual design and they're independent from one another yet they also pull in the design from the original design so say for instance you want to have two types of of material say for instance you want to do balsa and you want to do plywood and the sheets are of different sizes or you're scaling it differently you can create two individual models and they won't affect your core model but if you make changes to the core model they'll be reflected in your manufacturing model and any changes that you make in the manufacturing model are not going to affect your core model or the original design that we had so that's why we create a manufacturing model it basically separates them and allows you to make edits and changes without affecting the core model and that is a huge benefit when we're working especially on something that is as complex as the model that i've been working on so anyway let's go ahead and get back into working with the new manufacturing model and starting to arrange our pieces okay so it's done doing its computing and if your model disappeared all you have to do is select the core model here which will turn the model on and off this is our actual model that's come over from our design space but what we need to do is we need to create a new manufacturing model and the way that we're going to do that is select setup and then at the bottom of the menu we're going to select create manufacturing model now it's going to take a little time as it's computing and recreating a new model and why this is so powerful is it's actually going to create a copy of the original model but it's separate which means we can make modifications to this model and it not affect our core model however if we make changes in our core model those will be reflected in the manufacturing model so in order to get into the working environment for this model we need to right click on the manufacturing model and select edit manufacturing model and what you'll notice is across the top the toolbar here we now have many of the same tools that we use in the design environment before we go into arranging and nesting our model we want to do a quick check to make sure that we've got our selection tool selected correctly so let's go ahead and press select and under selection filters go ahead and turn on all and this will save you a lot of headaches down the road the next thing we're going to do is select the modify drop down menu and then click on arrange this is going to activate our arrange tool and in this palette we're going to have two tabs shapes and sheets let's go ahead and switch over to sheets first and turn on our origin if it's not already on because we're going to want to select this here and i'm going to select plane and this is just the way that i prefer to do it if you want to use a sketch face you can select this but for this tutorial i'm going to use the plane and then i'm going to select this plane here and that is going to basically arrange and nest all of our parts flat along that plane the next thing i want to do is i want to specify the sheet size the sheet size is the actual sheet size of the medium that you're going to be cutting from or printing on and i'm going to go ahead and say on the x-axis i'm going to use 650 millimeters and 500 millimeters on the y-axis the sheet spacing is how much space you want between each sheet so i'm going to leave that as is and as my frame width i'm going to say seven millimeters and that's how much space is going to be from the edge of the sheet into where the parts are actually going to be arranged the other thing is make sure that this preview checkbox is turned off while we do this because what ends up happening is when you're selecting parts it's going to recompute the entire range and that's going to take a lot of time so for that reason go ahead and turn that off now we're going to switch back to the shapes tab i'm going to zoom in here and now i'm going to select these shapes so i'm going to come in here like this and select these faces like so i'm gonna do this quickly so i basically selected all of my bulkheads and my formers now to see what this looks like let's go ahead and press preview and what it's going to do it's now going to calculate the nesting of these parts all right so this is now the start of our nesting for our sheets and this is what this is going to look like so i'm going to go ahead and fast forward and go ahead and do this to all of these pieces and once you're done all you have to do is select ok now here's a quick tip if you're running into a problem where pieces are not aligning correctly that could be an indicator that the piece is not properly formed meaning either one of the sides are off or something is not quite right about it you'll have to go back to your original model or you can make the change in the manufacturing model to see what the issue is but if something isn't aligning correctly it's probably because there's something wrong with that individual piece and it will require some extra investigation to figure out what's going on now also one of the things that you'll notice is there is a white arrow this white arrow tells you the orientation that will be up when you're arranging them now if you don't do that it will arrange them any which way now there's a lot of features that are involved in this and i'm not going to go through all of them feel free to experiment and see how these features work when you're actually doing your arrange anyway i wanted to kind of talk about that real quick just in case you get tripped up and and that happens to you let's continue okay now here is our completed flattened out model and you can see i've got these two individual sheets here the next thing that i need to do is i need to get a dxf file of two individual sheets the way that we're gonna do that is we're gonna actually use the sketch tool and the way that this is done is selecting create new sketch which will bring up the sketch panel and i want to use this plane here and then once i'm there i want to create project include and project or you can use the keyboard shortcut as is here which is p so i'm going to go ahead and select project now what i need to do is i need to project every single one of these items onto our sketch surface and that is easily done by simply clicking on all of the top facing surfaces like so okay so i have gone ahead and basically projected every single one of these surfaces down onto our sketch surface and once that's done i'm going to select ok and that's going to go ahead and complete the projection it'll do a little bit of work and then once it's done you will see the entire sketch of this model so let me go ahead and turn that off and you can see right there there is the entire sketch that is nested for that sheet the only thing that's left now is to export this item out so i'm going to right click on the sketch and then save as dxf and once you have that saved out you now have a dxf file that you can use with a laser cutter a cnc machine or that you can use with other tools all right so that is how you get your design out of fusion 360 into the two-dimensional space from the three-dimensional design that we made now for those of you that don't have a subscription to fusion 360 i'm going to show you how you can do this without a subscription it does require for you to install two separate applications one is an add-in that is a save dxf add-in for fusion 360. the other one is called deep nest i o and it is available for mac and pc you will need to install those in order for these next steps to actually work for you so go ahead and get those installed and come on back and we're going to go ahead and move forward with that i wanted to take a quick break before continuing because this series is completely free and it takes a long time to put these together and there are some people out there actually there are a lot of people around the world who have made very generous contributions to this channel to help support the work that i'm doing in order to make this accessible to everyone instead of having to put this behind a paywall and those guys really deserve a special thank you because they really helped make this possible a huge thank you to jeff dell of australia terry blake of michigan keith freeman of north carolina and andy wright of the united kingdom guys huge huge thank you for your very generous contributions now you guys aren't alone there are several others that that also deserve a special thank you because the contribution they made was also very very generous anthony kalotti of oklahoma yurum shalev of israel eric c of florida tyron dagen or dagen i apologize if i'm mispronouncing that of new jersey las beta of germany and clau festan of reunion island as you can tell there are people from all over the world who really enjoy this hobby and are wanting to design their own model airplanes and they have made very very generous contributions in order to help make this series possible for everyone so guys thank you very much i really appreciate it also there's a lot more names down here of people that also made contributions i want to thank you guys as well and um yeah i just you know every time every time these tips come in i'm completely blown away that people really really value this anyway let's go ahead and get back to the tutorial so what we're going to do is we're going to use our model and we're going to use our add-in to export every single one of our pieces out into dxf files now it's very important that you label these dxf files in a way that you will be able to remember what part is what and then we're going to use those files and import them into deep nest so let me show you how you use this say quick export file and then i will show you how you can use deep nest i o let's get started all right i'm going to be using the forward section of the plane that i've designed just like i did in the earlier part of this tutorial but before we continue the first thing that i want to make sure is that i have got my add-in here under the create menu so you can see at the bottom here save dxf for laser cutting is installed now if you don't see that quickly check by pressing shift s and then under the add-ins tab we want to select dxf for laser and if it is not set to run on startup go ahead and turn that on and then you can either restart fusion 360 or there will be a run button here that you can press and that will activate the add-in so now that we've checked to make sure that that is ready to go now we can go ahead and start working with getting our three-dimensional model into a 2d space that we can work with for print laser or cnc machines so the first thing that i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and turn off all of these extras so that i'm just working with the frame and the way that this works is all we need to do is create a sketch for each individual face now the way that i'm going to do that is select create save dxf for laser now that is going to start that add-in and you'll see we get the little box here off to the right and the first thing that i'm going to do is i'm going to select the face so i'm selecting this face first and then it's going to ask me for the kerf now you can add a curve here if you know what the kerf is for the machine that you're going to be using or you can just leave it to zero i prefer to use zero because i like to do this in my laser layout light burn which is what i use in order to set the curve value the preview allows you to see what the actual sketch is going to look like before it's exported and then output multiple layer go ahead and turn that off and then clean up on success turn that on what that'll basically do is keep your model from getting cluttered in the browser so once that's set we're going to go ahead and click ok and i'm going to move this out of the way really quick and you'll see here is the sketch and this is the preview that we turned on to make sure that our sketch is correct and then i'm going to go ahead and save this so let me go into here and i'm going to create a folder called dxfs create and then i'm going to call this one bulkhead doubler and let's see press save and now that is done now here's a little trick because when you have this many parts it's very easy to forget what you've done what you've not done so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and select this and if you notice i went and selected the component priority and then once that's selected i'm going to press v to hide it and now you can see it is gone v a quick way to remember that is visibility it's either visible or not visible and that is the v key so then i'm going to go ahead and do the next piece which is this bulkhead here and i'm going to leave that as is save then come in here again and then hide that so that way we know that one is done create another one and then hit ok we see the preview and we're going to save that and then let's go ahead and hide that piece and we're going to go through the entire model doing this until we have every single part created all right so now that we've got all of our dxf files out the next thing is to actually work on the layout of how we're going to lay these parts out for either print or for cutting or cnc now i'm going to show you how to use deep nest i o it's really quick it's fairly simple nothing too complicated one thing that i do want to note is i have not used deep nest in order to create my layouts so i cannot vouch for the accuracy for the dimensions of all the parts so you might want to check that and i'm going to assume that it's perfectly fine but i can't say for sure whether this is going to work for you with absolute precision that's something that you're going to have to trial on your own if you do want absolute precision parts i recommend that you use the built-in tools for fusion 360 to do the exports and then using a tool that is specifically designed for this type of work like adobe illustrator where you can get guarantee uh that your dimensions are going to be absolutely accurate so with that being said let's go ahead and get this wrapped up so here we are in deepness dot io now right now there's not a whole lot going on and it might seem a little bit confusing but i promise it's really not that difficult the first thing that we're going to do is we need to create a sheet and the way that we do that is down here in the bottom left corner go ahead and press that plus icon the sheet is the actual medium in which that your nesting is going to take place so in my case i'm using a millimeter wide sheet by 500 millimeter height of sheet and i'm going to say add and now you can see up here is the sheet that is going to be available where we're going to use this to nest within in order to make sure that this is defined as a sheet i'm going to go ahead and press sheet this tells deep nest that this is the sheet and the dimensions in order to nest our parts now comes the tedious part we're going to click import and i'm going to go to my dxf's folder and i wish there was a way to select multiples however these need to be imported one by one and that is unfortunate but again this is a free tool and it's not going to have all the features available so i'm going to go one by one and add these in okay so here are the four pieces that have been added in and we can go ahead and close these out because we don't need them they're already referenced here on the side so i'm going to close this now as you can see the sheet has been selected as the sheet and i can say i want one two three or four or five however many sheets i need of that same thing is if i'm doing multiples here i can do multiple of that particular piece but i'm going to leave these all to one and once i've got all of my pieces imported all i need to do is click on start nest and this will start the entire nesting process now it's going through and using the sheet that we had and is nesting all of these parts and finding different configurations for this nest so as of right now i've got two different options that i can choose from now this can run on and on and on as you can see it now found the third one but this is plenty for me so i'm going to go ahead and click on stop nest it'll take a second and then it's done now i can cycle through these by clicking on the different nests that were available and i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to say i like this one and once that's done i can click on export and select svg or dxf file so if i go ahead and select dxf i can say this is the nest in my dxf folders all right so now you know how to get your 3d design out of fusion 360 and into a 2d model that you can now manufacture and create your own airplanes huge thank you again to all of the people that made generous contributions on my tip jar on rc cad to vr.com guys you guys have helped make this free for everyone around the world and i mean everyone i hear from people from all areas of the planet from reunion island all the way to india from canada to australia new zealand everywhere people are learning how to get into this hobby and guys because of your contribution you guys have helped make this possible thank you so much that's going to do it for me and i really wish you guys all the best in designing your own model airplanes let's go ahead and continue now and let's build this sucker all right take care [Music] you

Channel: RC CAD-2-VR

Views: 7,221

Keywords: RC Airplane, Airplanes, RC plane, Aerospace Engineering, CNC, Laser Cutting, Fusion 360, Manufacturing, Tutorial, CAD, how to, fusion 360 tutorials, fusion 360 tutorial, manufacturing engineering, machine shop

Id: FwBBkbOv8-M

Length: 30min 30sec (1830 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 20 2021