How to Create Cables or Wires in Fusion 360

hi guys welcome to this video tutorial this is a fusion 360 tutorial on creating beautiful bundles of cables so it's quite a simple concept but it's very very uh useful to know how to do this so i will be teaching you how to make this load of mess at the bottom you can see that i have a panel which i currently code is in auto it so it should show the the letters uh sorry the keys on my keyboard which i am currently pressing it's um extremely buggy at the moment so yeah i have not finished this remotely and it's kind of a code nightmare probably uh some mistakes in there no doubt anyway so hopefully that just gives you some sort of indication of any hotkeys i forget to mention uh that i use so for example i press l a lot of times to start a sketch even though i am not planning not necessarily using a line anyway so let's get straight into the video so to create a cable what we need to do is create a path path essentially so what we're going to do is uh select we're going to do it in the old-fashioned way so in two dimensions so i'm going to select one of these planes so i'm going to select this one next i'm going to select the spline tool and i'm just going to draw some random shape uh just just for video sake if this was for uh for something like a device that you wanted to fit a cable then you'd make something a little bit more um thought out okay so what i'm going to do here is making sure uh for this instance for this example 3d sketch is off which should be by default what i'm going to do is work orthogonally which means i'm going to work in discrete kind of angles so front right and i'm not going to work in like in between angles like this because it uh would just end up uh just will not be working out for you you'll find out if you ever try whenever you move a point it will actually uh it won't be remotely what you thought it was so if you work orthogonally this essentially avoids it so for now i'm going to select the front face now this can be a little difficult as well so uh i kind of i'm gonna have to be a bit of a liar and go a bit halfway um so essentially what i'm gonna do is select the selection tool and we're gonna hit m m for move uh um let's first select one of the points so we're going to say this one here select m select the point and now we're just going to give this some random translation so this will bring it out of its two-dimensional state into 3d we're going to do the same thing here and i think i have a which is being blocked by that i think i have a setting turned off uh i need to select back on incremental snap i think i think that's the one i wanted so we want to move another point select m let's mess around with it go back orthogonally now we can sort of do the rest orthogonally so we i'm starting one that's got constraint let's try this one here and move this up and let's move this here about um this one there we go so we can move maybe this one as well which is actually constrained i believe yeah you can see this one is constrained by the origin using this coincident constraint so what you can do to avoid that is you can sorry not do that you can select it and hit delete now if we go back to the front view we can make sure we actually have the point and not the path because it's very difficult press m and we should be able to move it wherever we we like so that looks okay for now uh this is only a rough example so now what we want to do is finish the sketch and go to construction and create a path a plane along a path and this is the path we're going to set this to zero and we are going to we're going to hit l or you could create create sketch i'm going to hit l because it's just what i do and i'm going to select this work plane so now we're going to create our cable so let's say i want a 2 mil let's draw if we hit x or we can click construction if you draw just a little line this will help us out we can create our cable so let's turn off construction by hitting x and let's make a free mil cable my fusion has a problem because i'm using windows 7 so we're going to have to type it again now what we can do is we can say actually what we can do after that is go to circular pattern now let's create a pattern and make the center point the origin my phone's going off in the background there and six something like six cables now what we can do is use the tangent constraint and set that like that as you can see the borders of the shape went from a blue which means it's uh it's not fully defined which is not something we should keep like that blue means uh you know we're missing dimensions which constrain it so if i put back the tangent constraint this means it's fully defined because it's black and we cannot move it so after that what we're going to do is go to create and sweep now i'm going to select the path for each of these holding shift um something happened here let's press exit on the path and for the path we're going to select our blue light might take a second because it's quite a few profiles here fusion likes to do this nice black black bar thing which is uh always doing it for some reason um but don't click okay so we have our cables now cables in real life tend to be uh as you can see here we have a line we should have moved but we can do something about that afterwards but uh yeah so essentially this is intersecting but we can fix that afterwards anyway what was saying about the twist angle so cables tend to be a bit twisted in real life so a single twist we can put 360 we get a single twist which will take uh yeah so uh the thing that i mentioned before has actually become a problem so what i'm going to do there we go that shouldn't be a problem no more if we go back to sweep select our profiles you don't need to select control or shift or whatever now select the path select our path also might be worth noting is if the angle is too steep you're very likely get this uh intersection error as you saw me just get last if that ever happens you should try and soften any uh extreme angles that you may have um such like this is a quite a drastic angle if that happens you're going to have to soften it by moving it about it's something that comes with experience so i'm going to click ok for now okay so uh we need to fix that so uh not sorry this thing's in the way so i can't see it i'm gonna have to uh rethink that out for next time i'm going to make a little bit smaller so that i can get past that so uh we need to go back to this add wrong one it's it's actually the first sketch here i made a mistake so as you can see we the problem is in the middle we cross essentially in a very too close to the other spline uh path so you can see this is quite an extreme angle up here so i'm gonna just soften that by doing something like that that should be okay we're going to click finish sketch this is the beauty i've been in a parametric workspace we can go back in time and we can make any adjustments and fusion360 will essentially update to our new settings you can see we've got the same sort of problem here i'm just gonna press m we're gonna move this down a bit click finish sketch so you can see we finally got one that doesn't intersect finally um so as i was saying about the twist angle we can go back into sweep and fusion is going to do its little dance again so now we in the twist angle we can put 360 which means one twist throughout the entire path length and this always takes a long time to do so you just have to be patient so as you can see we have a single twist down the entire length which is almost a bit too difficult to see so what we can do in this text box we can actually do multiplication so using an asterisk sign we can times that twist by two and then fusion will graph uh make a really slow there we go fusion's going to take about an hour to do it um yep it's going to crash as well almost so as you can see after 2 twist we have two twists somewhere in there so we can click ok once it loads again possibly because i have uh photoshop in the background it's going to load again so yes going to wait for that so you can see now it's loaded uh what we can do is either add the conductor of this cable or my favorite part is coloring the cable so we can hit the key on the keyboard a for appearance so i'm going to look for different typical color cables so i'm going to start off with red i'm going to look for a red glossy red and what we're going to do is because it's in one body which we couldn't we might have done it differently where with all separate bodies but i chose to do this one but it's what i'm going to do is select faces so now i can apply to in individual faces like this so let's say we want the blur let's type in blue if it doesn't exist we can create our own from one of these presets but at the moment they do exist in what we want let's try green green plastic let's try uh i don't know uh orange okay orange doesn't exist so what we can do is duplicate that one um we can edit this and we can make orange ourself so we should have a kind of a pale orange there but we can add our orange there we can do the same thing again let's um let's make let's make a let's make a purple it's a bit of a strange color for cable but there's a purple um let's do it one more time and let's create a nice uh cyan it's pretty ugly let's put it on there so we got oh i think we're missing a couple more okay i'm gonna be lazy and let's uh let's you reuse the green which doesn't appear to have worked let's uh let's try reusing the blue yeah that works let's reuse the purple pretty lazy anyway so let's say we are happy with that um we can actually do a render afterwards but before that i do want to make a conductor as well so what i'm going to do is hit c or l or one of those shortcut keys for creating a circle or sketch i use c or l a lot of the time and i'm going to select one of these faces and the beauty is we only need to do once and then we can we can create a circular pattern so let's make the circle here means it's the center of the circle we can create let's say we're going to make it 1.5 mil this is a pretty pretty typical conductor size in real life and let's say we're going to extrude it by about 20 mil i haven't already have my unit set up as millimeter as you might have noticed let's zoom back in okay that's a little bit too long let's try 10 which is fine um we can select join which will make it all part which all part of the cable which is what we want you can see is one because it's stated as just that one body but now what we can do is we can color it beforehand if we want let's go down to copper so i'm going to say polished copper and again we need to select faces and i'm going to select polish copper and select it on there we're going to do the same thing here we can even press f to fill it this surface here just a little bit but this is not really necessary 0.5 should be enough but because it's a different face we need to press a again and we need to drag that polish copper onto this face as well okay so now what we can do is go to circular pattern and we're going to select this feature and this feature and the axis is going to be well it's not going to be that but what it's going to be is if we go back to our sketches from before what we can do is what we can do is turn on back the old sketch and keeps going off um okay sorry about that i had to pause uh to work it out because normally we have a circle to revolve uh sorry to create a pattern around but in this case we don't so what i did to come over overcome that is to create a um a sort of an axis manually so what i did is select one of these faces and we're going to project this face uh the uh the opposite and just like that that should be enough so now we can draw a line from here to here press escape and draw a line from here to here now we can go to create point and we can select a point in the middle there so what we can do with that point is go to construct and select create a axis perpendicular to face at point so we can select any one of these faces and we can select this point you can see we've created an axis that we can use to create a pattern around so if you go to circular pattern we can select the features we want to pattern and go to axis and select that axis so now we change that to the same amount of faces that was six and we can see we got perfect pattern in the center of each face uh we can now zoom out um we can have a look at what this looks like in the render workspace normally it looks a lot better in the the in the render workspace like that we can go to uh render we could set it up the scene settings but i think we don't need anything too crazy probably just rim highlights double click that's already selected we can select any of these if you like maybe white that's great um i normally have this uh 90 90 is fine you can zoom in as well if you want it's really up to you okay so if we click render we need to save this first so cable tutorial and we're going to click render we just need to give it a moment for it to save is it ready now okay that's not the one we want uh we could use that um that's up to you uh but i like to use the in canvas render which is just um a bit simpler i can use this setting here um just give this a moment and the fusion will begin to uh essentially go through various passes to render this now you can control this slider here uh the more you go towards infinite the better the quality and the more passes it will do so i'm just gonna excellent for this tutorial will be fine i'm just gonna pause the video uh and then we'll resume when it's ready so you can see that a fusion has got to excellent but it's still quite a bit grainy so i will just put this up to final and pause it now to see how much better it gets so you can see fusion has uh refined it a little bit more now uh what i'm gonna gonna do is go to scene settings and change the light because it is pretty much a crap light right now um i'm gonna just go to something which is probably better because that was a little dark we can essentially change it with uh the settings here the the brightness or the exposure but a lot of the time i'm a little lazy and i'd choose to go straight to uh just to a different lighting setup so as you can see it's created some very nice glossy looking cables so we can go back in design and we can turn off the sketch for if we press uh control four we can see without any lines uh go back to control six to turn them back on so yeah i hope uh that helped you can use this sort of idea uh um which i will probably cover more later in different tutorials but you can use this idea to connect cables in say if you had different electronic devices you could create the cables to show off how they are connected so yeah

Channel: CADTricks

Views: 8,935

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Id: y6BErkpJgQs

Length: 23min 32sec (1412 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 20 2021