How To Get Started With Fusion 360

in today's video we're gonna look at what quite possibly will be the best way for you to learn fusion 360 if you're a new user hi everybody my name is Lance Christensen and thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video so I've been toying around with the idea of creating a fundamentals video for fusion 360 for a while so getting into the CAD portion and what do you need to know to kind of like get going if you're brand new to fusion 360 and I have to admit that I've been struggling a little bit with coming up with what components to use and what did I want to show well a few weeks ago I came across a really great webinar done by my good friend Aaron magnet now Aaron is an awesome guy and he did a great job on this hour webinar so instead of me struggling through this and kind of like maybe don't give you all this great content instead I reach out to Aaron and I asked him hey could I borrow your webinar and of course the guy's a cool dude and it says sure go ahead so what this really is is an intro to Aaron's recorded webinar and I hope you really will enjoy it I think there's a lot of things in there and as always I love your comments and suggestions in the comment area down below so definitely give me that feedback I know I will read them all and a lot of other people eat them too and if you like what you see in the channel do me a favor and hit that subscribe button up there but let's not waste any more time let's jump into Aaron's webinar because this is awesome content again my name is Aaron magnin this is a fusion 360 for beginners webinar thank you all for attending so real quick about me I'm a mechanical engineer I went to the University of nevada-reno I'm Oliver LinkedIn if you want to connect with me I'd love to hear from you I'm on Twitter as well I try to stay on top of that I can't say I'm as on top of that as I am on LinkedIn but that's where I'm coming from in the past I've worked for companies that manufacture safety products safety showers namely I've also worked for companies that produced sheet metal enclosures for power supplies for computers and also I worked in the reseller channel for software essentially for about five years now the goal and I always like to kind of round this out and make sure everyone's on the same page is to to learn the basics in fusion 360 this is intended for completely new users or people who are unfamiliar with 3d design in general so if that's where you're coming from never fear that we're going to cover this from the beginning and get into as much as we possibly can so let's do a quick intro to to fusion 360 for those of you who haven't actually used it fusion 360 has a lot of different facets you can do all kinds of industrial design or conceptual design with the sculpting mode you can see there's this helmet being built area with some t-splines technology there's the parametric design and mechanical drawings that a lot of people who are in mechanical industries are familiar with and currently use there are renderings and animations available there is a whole cam portion to this tool so if you need to actually get your parts produce even if you're not actually cutting the parts you can learn about you know issues with your design that might make it difficult to machine so using these tools you can you can just gain that additional insight that's important for actually going to production there's also a simulation aspect and actually since I was in the software reselling reselling channel I've actually focused a lot on simulation so I do always like to show it it's something that's very interesting to me it's something that I think you know every every designer should be using at some point in their design process I mean you don't need to be have a PhD and you know mechanical engineering to be able to use these tools they're there they're easy enough that everyone should be able to get in and learn something about their design to learn some way to improve them and I think a lot of people already know this already but this is the only you know cloud integrated 3d design tool that's Mac and PC compatible it's because it has that cloud interface it's it's very easy to collaborate it's very easy to access I mean I could log in on friends computer I can install it in five minutes and I can actually see all of my data it's it's really that easy it'll also take all your settings over which is which is always a beautiful thing and you know you're working in a familiar environment even if you're not on the exact same system and it's easy to to update updates happen in a matter of seconds so let's get into the user interface and kind of introduce you to what we're going to be working with and this will make it easier for you to understand what I'm actually referring to so and I'm going to I'm going to try to point out a couple these things in this this slide but I'm going to also try to call it out when I'm in the software itself but at the top of the screen you'll kind of see your traditional kind of file menu where you can open or you can save items you can undo and redo changes to your designs and this little guy right here this is where you're going to access your data panel which will give you all of your designs that you've been working on all your different projects etc depending on your workspace you're going to have a different tool bar that shows up here and this is actually kind of an older version of this we've updated this in in a recent release but this is where you're going to access tools to make your designs to modify your designs to add joints and mechanics to your designs etc in the actual kind of work interface canvas if you will you'll see the actual designs that you're working on and you'll also see on the left-hand side you'll see the browser which represents all the various components or bodies or canvases sketches etc that go into making a design like this in the top right-hand side of this you're going to see a cube of you cube which you can use to manipulate views to change the left view right view top view etc I'll show you some ways that you can actually alter these views because sometimes it doesn't quite orient the way that you want down at the bottom you can see a lot of your navigation settings too you know orbit in certain ways too to pan to zoom in and out etc but a lot of these are actually accessible from your mouse and using keyboard shortcuts and your mouse and in conjunction and then at the bottom I think the the last really important thing here is the the timeline so as you build up your designs you're going to be able to go through and actually roll it back to make changes earlier in the design you can you can roll it back to just see how something might have been built if it's not the design that you worked on and it's a it's really handy tool to gain a deep understanding of what's going on there and this thing this thing is a very handy little guy this is your your Mouse shortcuts if you right click and hold it'll open up these these abilities and it's going to enable you to actually access a lot of you know common commands per whatever design you're currently working on so some really cool stuff there in the top right hand you'll see your your actual like user account and preferences and help options are available there but let's get into that last thing is you know this is just one I mean the interface is actually consistent throughout all these various workspaces what will change is what you're actually doing in each workspace so the one that you're currently looking at is where you probably be spending most of your time which is modeling in addition to the modeling workspace we have a patch workspace which is essentially like you know surfacing if you will if you're familiar with other tools there's the ability to access a rendering environment so you know you can apply your appearances in the modeling workspace will come over your rendering workspace and you can start to generate that really high quality imagery for marketing purposes or you know whatever whatever purposes you really want there's an animation workspace there's a simulation workspace and there's also a camera space so animation just like it sounds you can show how you know something actually operates your simulation workspace will enable you to do those tests on your model to see how strong it is or you know how you might be able to change it to make it stronger and then the cam workspace is where you'll actually go to you know make toolpaths and show how something might be constructed so navigating and I wouldn't try to understand all by just looking at this we're gonna I'm going to show you when we're actually in the software which will be as soon as we're done with the slide but essentially you can scroll by clicking the middle mouse wheel and sorry you can pan by clicking and holding the mouse wheel and moving your mouse you can zoom in and out by spinning the mouse wheel you can use the shift and mouse wheel button to rotate and then you can also use your Mac trackpads to do quite a lot actually I have co-workers that hardly use Mouse's or use a mice sorry that's all right I have co-workers who don't use a mouse to actually navigate their designs which is pretty incredible considering you know how complex these things can get so really neat stuff and let's get into actually looking at fusion so this is what fusion will look like when you first install it when you first open it up I mean there might be a couple little differences I think there's actually some windows that kind of point you to different areas of the interface to help get you started but when you reopen it and you don't have a design open this is what it look like it does always have a design open so you can see this is just an untitled design unsaved as well but I want to open up a model so I can actually show you some of these navigation tools so I'm going to actually do this by accessing my data panel so if you smooth your mouse cursor over this top left icon that's going to give you a tooltip that says show data panel and I would encourage you if you do have questions on what each tool does look at the tooltips let it you know just let your mouse hover there for a moment it'll tell you what every little icon is going to do for you so let's access that data panel and you can see I have a number of different projects depending on what I'm working on from day to day but the one I'm looking for is in this Fusion 101 folder and actually this is these are just folders and designs that I've worked on I actually my projects list is a little bit even more extensive but my fusion 101 my basics class here I'm going to open this up and I'm going to show you the model that we're going to be building up in this and so we'll just double click on this pipe clamp and this is just that model that I found just as an example I thought it was kind of neat it's it's it's got a little complexity to it it's got some mechanics to it and essentially we're going to try to build this up during this one-hour session that we have and that is going nice and slow so everyone can see and understand what I'm doing so now that I have that open I don't need to continue seeing my data panel I can just hit the X up here to close it and then I can move my mouse cursor right into this you know workspace that I want to be accessing at this point so again let's talk about some of these navigation techniques if I click and hold the mouse wheel your icon will change to show you that little hand and that is going to indicate that you're panning back and forth so I'm just going to move this back and forth a couple times just to indicate what we're doing there once I let go the mouse cursor changes to indicate you know you're just back in a normal selection tool if I instead want to zoom in out I can spin the wheel one way or the other and you know you can change what one does or the other does one thing to pay attention to is that wherever your mouse is pointed that's where it wants to zoom into so if I'm down here in this lower left hand corner I'm going to lose my model so that brings up another nice little shortcut if you double click the wheel it actually does is zoom to fit so you're looking directly at this model at a scale that is appropriate for for what we're working with so let's get my mouse cursor back in here and say I want to zoom really close on this guy just pay attention to where that mouse is pointing and spin that wheel last thing is if you hit shift and click the mouse wheel and hold it it's going to indicate that it's orbiting at this point so there there's actually two different ways of orbiting and the one that I'm using is the one that I recommend that you use it makes a little bit easier to handle the orbit that I'm using is this constrain orbit so it treats it as if your model is kind of like a lazy susan so it's going to rotate about like a top plane if you check that the you cube up here in the upper right hand corner you can see it is going to maintain that top plane orientation there's also the free orbit option I'm going to just change this real quick by clicking here and it's in the fit again and now this case when I start rotating it'll go any which way and so it kind of tumbles around and sometimes you do need this flexibility so it's good to know where to access it but I would recommend that especially for new users that you try to leverage that that constrained orbit option and on that note and even talking about zooming in and out and this and that let's check our preferences so to check your preferences we're going to just use the drop down under your name your your account name that should pop up there here you can access your your account your preferences you can look at your profile information you can sign out the help icon up here will also take you to some options to do some additional learning techniques or tutorials or whatever it is that you're looking to do in this case though I wanted to bring you to preferences which will enable us to do things like change you know default orbit type from constrain to free etc reverse the zoom direction I would recommend that that you familiarize yourself with these but on the on your first use I wouldn't really recommend changing many of these the one that I might recommend you change is that if you're familiar with a certain type of software that you you can continue to use that same you know keyboard shortcuts and mouse shortcuts and view manipulations essentially so here you can see I have mine set to fusion by default but you can also change it to alias if that's what you're familiar with inventor or SolidWorks as well so nice little options there to help you learn and kind of jump right into fusion without having to overcome a big learning curve okay so we're going to click OK to that and I think that we've covered the navigation techniques swell enough so let's let's continue on and talk about this model so this is kind of showing one of the components of this larger assembly that we're going to be building so this is the model that we're going to be building in I'm going to leverage this rule number one and this is something that was taught to me by our forum contributors so guys that have been using using fusion 360 longer than I have and and what they recommend is if you're going to be building an assembly or really they recommend this for any type of design but if you're going to be building something in fusion 360 they recommend that you create a new component and activate it and that might not make sense at this moment but we'll get into that and we'll talk about why you might want to do this as we actually get into the design so the first model that I'm going to do is going to be as simple as I can possibly make it it's going to leverage these what are called primitives and primitives can get you some actually pretty complex shapes I mean sphere cylinder and rectangular box are pretty pretty simple to make otherwise but these other ones like the coil and the toroid these are these are not so easy to make all the time so there are some some cases where you want to leverage these primitives and I'm going to use one in this first example so jumping back into fusion 360 I'm going to change to a new model I'm going to check back on this a little bit later but let's create a new design here and I'm going to well okay let's let's lay out what this model actually is this model is actually a pipe clamp so the first thing I actually want to build here is actually a representation of the pipe and I don't necessarily need to be like you know hollowed out I don't need to worry about wall thicknesses I just want to I'm building the clamp today I just want to show the general pipe size so that I understand what I'm working with so let's get into this and let's make this and to make that pipe I can use a primitive as you saw in that list so I'm going to just jump over to using these primitives and they're going to be found under your create drop-down and so this is where you'll go to create a lot of these different shapes and geometry that we'll build up into you know these extremely complex models as you essentially just add more and more detail to what you're working on so these primitives are located down here you can see box cylinder sphere toroid coil and pipe I'm not actually gonna be using pipe is the funny thing but let's select my cylinder and when you're doing this you'll see it actually kind of tells me what it's looking for it's looking for a plane or a planer face to sketch on to make this to make this cylindrical shape it actually opens up a grid to help me visualize the size it actually enables me to understand you know which plane I might be selecting if I just click out in space so I want to select on this one I want to sketch this from the front view so I'll just click on this face and I can also come around and look at this from the front when I do this and one of the options in the preferences is to actually make it normal to when you actually go into something like this so might be something you might want to look into at this point however I do want to turn on my origin and details as those you know original three planes that are in this 3d and work environment that I can access and see at all times but well I wasn't able to see them then but all I need to do is click this you know light bulb to hide or show it so at this point I'm going to move my cursor over this center point this origin click once and I can key in a value here now right now it's in millimeters and that's really not how I want to be designing this but it doesn't matter we do have some nice options here to work past this so I'm going to say to and type in I n it's going to actually convert that into an inch dimension once I click enter we have created the cylinder and to really visualize this I'm going to rotate around again just holding shift and my mouse wheel button and you can see it's going to currently extrude up five millimeters and I can get in here and I can change that and again I can key and you know inches here I can say 5i n it's going to convert that for us and you're going to see it enables me to create a new body or I could actually go into creating this new component and you know I actually did not follow rule number one I did not create that component to start and that's just because these primitives it doesn't really require a lot of input sketches etc so I'm going to just create this new component here click that button and click OK so we've created this pipe and right now it's showing in my browser is component one and that's not really giving me the information that I need so I can just do a slow left click twice on this and it's going to enable me to rename this and I can call it whatever I want call it pipe and click away ok so that's a nice little placeholder and primitives are good too to some extent but they're also somewhat limiting they're not something that I'd recommend that you use every time you're designing something I mean their name indicates that they'll be easier to work with but really it's it's I think if you if you work in Fusion longer and longer you'll see you'll see there are some limitations to primitives it that you know will you know I would recommend to use other sculpting methods which I'll get into in just a moment so one thing I actually want to do with this is I want to make this five inches out this direction as well so off this back end here just because I want to design about the origin it's always just good practice to do that and it will help me as I go and I add additional features to this so I'm going to use a tool here this is called press pull and I can select that back face and again I can add five inches to the back of this so there we go we have a ten inch pipe with a two inch diameter 10 inch length with the 2 inch diameter and this is what we want to create this pipe clamp form continue on to to actually make the next component on this which is like the saddle piece the bottom piece of this design so to show you an idea of what we're actually going to be building it's going to this guy right here this is where we going to be spending most of our time so you can see it's got some some various shapes there and doing this with a primitive would be difficult to say the least so let's jump back into our our part and let's jump back into our PowerPoint actually for a moment to discuss other ways of making geometry so looks like I did just adhere to rule number two even though I missed rule number one on that first guy well I'll try to remember on this next one and I'm still new to this rule it did just get introduced to me like actually like two weeks ago now so something that you know just takes a little time to make automatic into your design function but starting from sketches is another way that you can make more complex geometry that's actually easier to edit down the line which is really important because a lot of times your designs will change you know whether it's something you find out in a prototyping phase or you know you just don't like the looks of something it could be as simple as that so using sketches to make 3d objects is a really powerful way to do this and you can use things like dimensions to drive this to the actual size you can use things like relationships to ensure that you know your design intent is followed so continuing on let's look at some of these various shapes and how you might want to approach them so if you look at the box one way to create that is to sketch a square right if you squash this sketch the square and then extrude it out you have now a box if you think about a cylinder all you need is a circle and the same thing you just need to extrude it out if you think about this thunderbolt so if you if you think about how you might design that there's a couple of different ways but you know obviously the easiest way is to look at that cross-sectional cut if you look at it from the top view and extrude it one more time but extrude isn't the only way that we have to make things this item that you see right here could not be made with an extrude or at least not yeah well it would be in with an extruded require a lot of other features to actually get that shape so instead you can think about a different way to make this if you think about you know the shape that continues around this axis you can sketch out you know a cross-sectional profile once again and instead of extruding it you revolve it so you revolve it about that Center axis which I'll just highlight with my mouse cursor there make this play button there we go so really nice really handy different ways to approach this is going to give you that added flexibility that's required to make these things okay so we're back in this and the first thing I want to do here is I want to make that new component because if I forget again I'm going to be very upset with myself so I'm going to select this button here this is going to Nabal you to create a new component and the reason why we want to do this is that this next piece is actually separate from the pipe right this is actually the thing that's going to be holding the pipe so by doing this I'm going to select the button to create the new component and it's going to enable me to to you know bring in bodies or existing components or something into this you select your parent which in this case the top-level name of this the sexual design that we're working in is considered a component so that's our parent component we can give it a name so I'm going to call it subtle and we can activate it as well so by activating it it makes it the active component and so if I go and I add sketches if I insert an image in here to use to design around if I add in you know anything it's going to go into this saddle component that we're working on at this moment the way that I can tell that it's active is this icon right here it's showing me that this little circle is taught as essentially toggled right if I look at the pipe you can see it's not filled in if I look at the top level here it's not filled in either so let's make this saddle so I'm going to start this from a sketch so I'm going to select to insert a sketch and you can see again it actually enables me to see the origin and different faces that I could start from so because I actually have some planar faces like on the ends of these cylinders I could insert the sketch here but I want this centered on this existing pipe that's why I actually added the five inches on the back end of this so let's select the plane at the center of this entire design this origin so it's selected and I can go and I can look at this from the front and when I'm in my sketch mode it actually opens up the sketch palette to enable me to to add constraints and various things to kind of tie this thing down so let's sketch this out and I'm going to leverage some other some of these shortcuts so my mouse shortcut if I right click and hold and bring it straight down it enables me to access my sketch commands which will enable me to do things like add circles or rectangle splines or dimensions so I'm going to select right through this one and just let go and now I'm in my circle tool now I have actually five different ways of drawing circles so I could use a two point circle I could use a 3-point circle etc I can you know do a lot of different things but the center point circle is what I'm actually looking for and what I want to do is I just want to place it at the center point of the entire design sketch it out to copy essentially the existing sketch there and you know that's the start to the sketch now from here I want to actually offset from this existing design so in this case I can just hit the O key on my keyboard and that's going to bring up a keyboard shortcut for offset now I don't expect you to learn all these keyboard shortcuts that I'll be using and the mouse shortcuts so I do want to show you all of these options are accessible from the drop-down up here on your toolbar here you can see I could get into my circle command which I could actually leverage by hitting C on my keyboard you can see all these ones that have shortcuts have a keyboard have a key essentially next to their name offset is an O that's what I have access here so I'm going to select this curve and in this case I want to offset it quarter inch so this is getting annoying always doing this as it typing in I n all the time so let's do a quick change here let's actually just change the design environment to use inches at this point so I'm going to right click on my units here in my browser I'm going to change the active units by selecting the icon if I move my cursor over here to the menu that popped up I can change it to whatever it is I want to use and look at that it updated that you know six point two five millimeters or whatever was okay so at this point I do want to sketch out some lines and in this case I'm going to I'm going to use the drop down just to show you how to do this so we'll grab the line tool and we'll start right from the the origin of this and I'll sketch all the way to the right and I'll do one more line that you'll see that actually ended that line because it ended on another entity we'll do the same from Center to the left side okay so the last thing I want to do is I want to do is circle get a center circle so I'm going to use my keyboard shortcut once again here so I'm going to hit the C key on my keyboard it brings up my center point circle and I can Center it on this point and I want this to be tangent to the center circle and that's just to make that little lip that's on our our saddle so I'll click once on the other side as well and there's our sketch and I can continue to add other dimensions and other details to this I can use my right click drop down and access my sketch dimensions I can say you know I want this to be a certain size I can make things equal to one another by selecting them and using these sketch constraints you'll see that it won't even allow me to do that because they are being forced to a certain size by the relationships that I added there so I think we're good with this sketch let's go ahead and just stop the sketch at this point and let's make this into some geometry so I'm going to rotate around just so you can see where we place that sketch and it doesn't really look like what we're we're after at this point but you'll see that as we make these changes as we actually turn this sketch into geometry we'll get that shape that we're after okay so let's do this and in this case I want to jump up to my create option and actually the top-level one here is extrude this is the one that we're going to be using here but again I did want to show you this full list there's things like the revolve that we showed you sweep is to do you know you make a profile and you can have it follow a path any which way ribs to strengthen your plastic parts etc but extrude is what we're looking for and then once I'm in this tool I can select you know what it is I want to extrude so there's a lot of different profiles here but the ones I want are the circles on both sides of two small circles and this area here so I can begin to select these so I'm just selecting a lawn just left clicking each one of these different profiles and let's say I start to extrude this out and so I just click on the arrow and it starts to actually make it a solid so that that's looking okay but I did mention that I did want to try to keep this centered so I'm going to do something here I'm going to change its direction from one side to symmetric and then again I can define a distance to follow here so I want it to be two inches wide so we'll just do one inch and that's going to use that symmetric but I forgot to add a couple of these profiles here and I did that on purpose not all my mistakes are genuine so at this point I want to add some additional profiles here so to do that I'm going to use my ctrl or command key and you'll see that my tooltip is actually stolen my thunder it's telling me telling you to hold ctrl if you're on a PC or hold the command key if you're on it on a Mac like I am so I'm going to hold command I'm going to click this region here I'm going to click this region here and once I let go it's going to enable me to preview that once again do a quick zoom to extents double-click the mouse wheel looks good okay so so we're off to to a pretty good start here the next thing I want to make though and and we'll take a look at what what it is that we're going to be adding next is this bottom piece so somewhere to attach this guy so let's do that let's jump back into my design and there's a couple different ways we could do it right we could sketch out a profile from the right-hand side that takes that you know rounded shape and it comes out like that and I could just use an extrude there we could sketch out a square and then we could use like a fill it tool to round off the edges but in this case I want to do something kind of special here I do want to actually create an offset plane and then run this next feature into the saddle piece that we've built so far so it'll make more sense when I actually get into it so I'm going to use the drop-down under construct here to create an offset plane this is just a way to sketch out in space right now I don't really have any planes that I could sketch off of the bottom here so using the the existing origin planes I can select one and just kind of drag it down and get into the general vicinity I want it and then I can key in a value I think 3.25 probably makes sense for this so now I have this plane down here and I can use that to sketch out this next feature so I'm going to grab my sketch tool I'm going to select this plane that I just created obviously and I'm going to rotate partially down but then once I can see this on the haveyou cube I can select it from there to get a nice clean look at this directly on so at this point let's sketch out a rectangle and I want a special type of rectangle I don't want this you know two-point rectangle I want it to be centered once again and I have that origin that I can leverage so I'm going to use the drop down here to grab my rectangle tool and I'm going to select my center rectangle and again if I was in the normal rectangle tool the two-point rectangle tool the default I could always change from one to the other using this dialog you see here anyway using this I can click on the center point and I can sketch out this rectangle very quickly and I can add a couple dimensions to fully tie this thing down like maybe I want to make the thickness of this a quarter inch just click to add the dimension select the item you want to add the dimension to and just drop it there and that's it that's a really simple sketch but that's all I really want to accomplish at this point so once I'm happy with that sketch again I can stop the sketch or I can even I don't really need to stop the sketch if I hit the e key on my keyboard it takes me to that shortcut to my extrude command and I can again select that profile to actually extrude out now the reason why I built this this way is that I can do something nice here I can say I want this to not go a specific distance I want this to actually end at the existing body and let me let me show you why this is not a good idea to do it this way so I'm going to actually do real quick side note here so if I say I want to join those but I do it by distance if I go later and I actually move the location of that plane down further there's a possibility we could just we could disconnect that from that piece so you have to think about your end constraints of how the model how the feature is going to end and this is why I built it this way it just helps build in a little bit of intelligence so I'm going to just do a command Z two times to undo that but this time I'm going to do this as I intended originally I'm going to extrude out this guy I'm going to say I want it to go up to an existing body so using the extent stop drop down there I can change it from a distance which we use previously which you saw has some limitations and I can go instead to a body which I can just select from the graphics area now no matter where that plane goes so you can see I can access the plane creation from my timeline here I can just double click or right click and edit the feature no matter where this thing goes it's always going to end at that right location okay so now to round out the bottom here I'm going to do a fillip so not all features that you do require that you you actually make a sketch and do all that as you saw with the primitive but a fill it is a really common command it's similar to a chamfer but it enables you to round off your edges so let's grab my Phillip command and we'll select the edges and you'll notice that when I'm in this tool it automatically wants to select edges it makes it really easy to apply these features so I'm going to select this edge here and I'm going to select this edge over here I can even select through is what I was trying to highlight there but my angle is not really advantageous for that so let's apply this at one because I know the thickness of this thing is two inches and you can see that does a perfectly rounded bottom for this and just like that we've we've rounded this thing out let's go ahead and just okay that and then again I'm going to use my mouse tools and you can see that's just another one of these little options that you can access from right clicking and holding all right so let's go ahead and add a hole to this edge here and a hole to the opposite edge here if you look at the finished model there it's just to hold the pins that are going to kind of tie this thing together so jumping back into my model I'm going to do this again with another applied feature so if I hit the H key on my keyboard or hit the hole button it's going to enable me to to actually drop this hole into the specific location without having to sketch out a circular shape to begin with so I'm going to just move my cursor into this area here and I'm not worried about placing it perfectly on the first drop once I just drop it in there I can get into playing with the size like for instance I do want this to only be you know a quarter inch so I'll just type in 0.25 and then also I can play with the location a lot easier once it's been drop right so if I click and hold on the center icon there it'll enable me to drop this in locations and you'll see that because there's actually center to the circle here it enables me to snap to that point very easily and I can also make sure that this goes through this again is one of those times where if I don't define this in the correct way if I want this hole to always go through I need to actually do this properly if I use a distance here it might not work if I make that that saddl wider so let's change this to all so that'll just ensure that no matter where this no matter how what why this saddle gets it's always going to have that hole through so we'll just okay that real quick and I want the same thing on the other side and let's just do this really quick using another tool so I'm gonna hit the S key on my keyboard this time and this brings up another tool box and this is modal so because I'm in a modeling design environment I can see some different things that I can do from a modeling standpoint if I were in a cam workspace and see something different if I was in a sketch I'd see something different as well what I want to do here is I want a mere or that feature right I don't have to redo the whole feature once again I'm going to select my mirror tool I can mirror this as a feature I can mirror it as a face as well so here's where I can select my pattern type what's what I was referring to us faces bodies features or components in this case I just want to mirror the face really that'll work for me and then I can select the mirror plane and this is again one of these reasons why designing about that Center workspace is a good idea it helps you out in long run so once I'm happy I can click OK and there we go we can see I've created that hole on the opposite side there okay so I am a little bit behind schedule one thing I do want to show you is that I do want to do a cut here and then we'll start to assemble this together real quick so at this point let's go ahead and and create that cut to account to to accommodate both the the pins that I'll be making and also the the top piece of this saddle or the pipe clamp so at this point I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to actually expand out the saddle component from my browser I can expand out the sketches so I can see those two sketches that I use to build it so far and I want to use this guy and I'm actually just going to reuse it to do a quick cut so I'm going to grab my extrude tool once again and in this case I can select to just to do some profiles once again and I can select these three profiles here and at this point I do want this to go both directions but I want to show you real quick what it's going to do so if I click and drag that it's going to automatically want to remove material the reason for that is that it recognizes there's already body there so if there's already a body there it starts to remove material if there's not a body there it starts to add material so what I was saying there before those I want this to go both directions so I want it to be symmetric and just like that I can reuse that sketch to actually get in and create some more details to this design now I can add additional features I can add Philips and various other things kind of round this thing down maybe that's a bad example there we go and this is another one of these features where if you if you actually start to preview it if you if you want to add additional edges to round off you have to hold the ctrl or command key to add those additional edges so add those edges there we will add these edges here and just like that you know we're getting this to look appropriate for what we're trying to accomplish there okay so we're good with that let's go ahead and add the pins to this so in this case I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to create a new component once again I'm going to select not the saddle as my parent I want to make sure that I always select the top level if this is just another part and not a you know piece of a sub assembly and at this point I can give it the name the pin name and click OK so this pin I'm going to do really quickly I'm going to just use one of these simple pieces here primitive and I'm just going to extrude this through this and I want to say I want this to be negative two inches long and pay attention to the you know positive negative that's going to play into how this works but just like that you see how quickly I was able to create one of the pins for this piece that we're working on now this is going to have two pins obviously right so let's let's copy this pane ctrl-c and ctrl-v well let's activate the top-level name here let's ctrl-c and ctrl-v this guy and then I can slide this new version of this over once you paste in a component that you might have copied it actually gives you this move command it's always accessible later on down the line I'm going to hide the pipe at this point so you guys can see this a little bit better but at this point I want this pin to be located in this location right so the way that we're going to assemble this is with joints in fusion 360 joints are extremely powerful you're going to see how quickly and easily you're going to be able to design and build your models up in a very short amount of time so let's go ahead and select to do a joint and this is going to be accessible from the drop-down under assemble so I'm just like the joint here and here I'm going to select the two components that I want to join together and as I scroll this over various items you can see it's going to able me to snap to maybe the center of this or it's going able me to snap to the end of this cylindrical cut it makes it real simple to select and orient these things in this case I want to select the end piece of this and also this edge here and that's going to place that in the correct location and you'll notice that once it got into their correct location they kind of animated there if I hit the play button once more you'll see it once again what this is saying is that these two bodies are actually going to be kind of fixed to one another they're rigid to one another so that's what I want in that case I don't really care if that rotates it's not going to help me visualize the mechanics of this system so let's go ahead and just click OK to that and that's been jointed into place on the other side here if I click and move this guy and now all I did is like clicked and dragged it's going to not maintain that location it's because it doesn't have that joint that ties it into that location using this position tool I can revert it to that original location or if I do it one more time I can hit ctrl Z to undo that when you design a model like I have here where it's actually in the exact location where I want it I can use a really simple joint operation it's called an as-built joint and you'll see that you'll use this all the time especially if you're working with imported models because a lot of times you you design everything in context to one another I mean this is a single modeling environment I don't have to use assembly style you know files I don't need to use part style files to actually build this up I can actually do everything within the same environment and build out components in parts sub assemblies etc using the methods that I've been showing here so using an as-built joint all you really need to do is select the two parts you don't need to worry about what joint you're selecting or what edge you're selecting to create this you just select the two components it sees how they're oriented it enables you to create that rigid joint once again okay so in this case I do want to speed it up a little bit there's some other pieces I want to drop into this the top clamp piece so there's a case where you know you might want to design something in another model and you want to reuse it in this case it's this top clamp piece I just don't have enough time to build it so if I right click and select imp sorry insert into current design oh it's making me save I should probably bin this should've been saving a lot more often but it's always a good idea to save it'll actually build up versions in the background when the really neat aspects of fusion 360 so we save that now I can insert this pipe clamp top piece into my current design and you'll see it actually pops pretty close to where I want it but I have some issues there and I'll I'll just move it out of the way so you can see what I want to do here so you know obviously one of the big issues there is that it's not wide enough to accommodate it the way it is right now but let's do a joint here and let me show you a nice little feature to join something like this together so I'm going to hit the J key on my keyboard to capture the position I'm sorry to create my joint you and in this case I want to use the centerpiece here and you can see if you have trouble selecting the center edge that you see here one thing that I'd recommend that you do is that you you can hold command while you're over like this cylindrical face and it'll keep it highlighted so no matter where I go now it's going to enable me to select that midpoint of that face to just make sure it's dead centered on this so again you can do it without it but it does if you hold command or control on your keyboard to enable you to select that center edge real easily and that one as well so that's going to Center that but Ridge it's not how I want this guy to be made right I'm going to close my data panel so you can see this I do want this to rotate so I'm going to change this from Ridgid to revolute and that's going to Nabal this to rotate around that edge so that's great that's exactly what I want right so that's the one degree of freedom I want to free up and that's what you do with using joints now I do need to make a change here to accommodate that a little bit better and let's see what feature was that I think it was this guy right here right so if I'm not sure I can just scroll over my my timeline it'll highlight and I select it it's going to show me what they are by right click and select edit feature I can make this a little bit wider to accommodate that little too wide but that's alright now on the other side here I do want to add another piece of hardware and again I'm going to do this from an existing design so I'm going to insert into current design and again I do want to place it out in space so you can see how to join it together now this this piece has actually got some additional geometry if you will in the center of this and I want to get rid of that and to do that I need to actually unlink this so if I right-click I can break the link and that will enable me to make design changes to this piece of hardware within this context but one of the things I absolutely love about fusion 360 stability to make design changes like this so if I want to get rid of this I mean I could sketch out a circle or I could do a cut but this is really simple if I just command or control select both of those phases that represent the bottom phase in the cylindrical face of additional piece I hit the Delete key on my keyboard so yeah I just need to activate that you can delete faces very easily and it works with like fileted edges like here I can select you know that the edges that go around this guy and if I want to just get rid of that Filat I just need to select all the faces once I hit delete it's going to undo that and you can actually do things like add threads really simply in models in fusion 360 so in this case I mean hit my S key to bring up my model toolbox once again and I'm going to just search for thread and this command search is going to save you a lot of time a lot of trouble looking through and trying to find specific commands because you see how easy it was for me to actually find that once I find that I can select the model that I want to add threat to and I can actually model this and if i zoom in here you'll see it doesn't look very good on the bottom here because it does that full length so I can change that and I can have it just go a particular length this is a little more accurate to life true-life all right so let's join this together using my joint and we'll quickly just place that there and the last thing that I want to do is I actually want to bring in a wingnut for this right this needs to be removed and added and you know just easy to alter basically so I'm going to activate the top level component once again here and I'm going to use a really cool tool that I recommend that you all look at if you're not in fusion or if you're in fusion already and you're you're making things like this but I'm going to go up to insert I'm going to select insert mcmaster-carr component and this brings up my mcmaster-carr you know full directory of parts it doesn't mean that every single part in here will come in to fusion 360 but all your your main pieces your knots here will be your you know bolts your all kinds of stuff actually casters if I doing a search for a wingnut and find one here select the type and then get into maybe the size the quarter-inch size I know that I have hardware is quarter-inch I select product details here and down below here if it if it if they have 3d models you can see there's all these various types that you can use I found that the these sat files I want are what are those are they paired they're not pair of solid sir I'm going to double check that the sat files work the best are they I just know I just has its own name anyway if I insert this in here you can see how easy it is again to manipulate and move it around it actually takes on the mcmaster-carr part number so if you need to go and order this thing later you can do so very easily but again I can just you know join this together using my joints and just kind of tie this thing down you know actually I probably could use a washer on this or something to place a little bit easier but I'll just place it there I can flip that and then I can play with the offset to kind of place it a little bit closer to where I want it I am missing the washer that wouldn't be a good thing to add in there but just like that you can see how quickly and easily it was for me to actually make this model up but that doesn't include you know every piece of fusion 360 there's there's quite a lot that we can do you know if I ground the saddle component I can now you know slide these things around the things like the revolute joints that we created I can build a slider joint that actually placed that if I jump back into the the finished model here and I spent a little more time on this one obviously but I can slide this thing up and down I can rotate this guy can open this up and you know by building these these designs within this 3d environment you can learn quite a lot about them as you're building them or you know as you're designing them one thing that I like to show here is that you can do some things to understand you know how well it's going to work essentially so if I if I do something here I can enable contact sets and then add a contact set between say this part and this part and once I do that when I slide this you see it's actually going to bottom out you see it's actually going to hit the edge of this because I built that up a little too tight so one thing I can do to fix that is I can just edit this offset feature that I've created here so I can slide this up and I can actually build up a little space there and just like that I can jump back into sliding that then I can continue to drag it till it hits again so you can see you know just how much information we get by this and you know if I want to understand why that's hitting now I can do maybe a different way to interrogate this design maybe I want to inspect this and look through and see what the what's going on in a section analysis level so I can slide this section view through here and I can see where that inner interference is happening and you know this could be you know I could just round off this edge and get a little bit more clearance there to open this model up if I click OK it's going to keep that section view open I don't necessarily want to keep it open I'm going to go ahead and just hide that section view using the the light bulb here to hide or show items I think the last thing I did want to show here is that using these these inspection tools you can also learn about whether or not you have interferences between parts so if I click this interference tool I can select you know every single component in this design I can select to compute interference it's going to show me in the graphics area where I might have some interferences so this wingnut hasn't been modeled properly it looks like again I could delete those out to fix that up and in this case I hadn't fixed that hardware so that extra piece that you saw me remove before is still there for that interference actually I could I could fix that with a combine so I'm going to just hit s and do a quick combine and this is going to enable me to combine my target body which is this guy this is the part I want to remove the body from my tool body which is going to be this guy but I'm going to say cut and I want to keep the tools because they're actually both components I really want here once I click OK I can dig in and I can show you that that additional piece that I previously had there has been removed with that feature when your designs done you're not really done right like you have a lot more things you need to do I didn't get into drawing creation and get into rendering here you can see some renders that I created up this model you can actually build in the mechanics which you did see me demonstrate but you can actually build animations like this to maybe demonstrate to someone how it is assembled or how it is you know opened up a lot of very crucial information can be translated this way you can see I've done a simulation here to understand you know what kind of displacements we'll have with a load on this you can also use cam although this part probably isn't made from a solid block of aluminum or steel or whatever I'm using in this example but you know water jet we have the ability to do we have lading options there are quite a lot of different tools that we can use in the cam side what I recommend to you new users is you know get into the gallery maybe the fusion 360 gallery open up some existing models and actually just use that slider at the bottom the timeline slider you can learn a lot about how someone built something and you know understand quite a lot that way so additional resources going forward I mean obviously try to attend these webinars if you can there's there's actually a full learning web site that has you know I think it's it's up to like 10 different videos at this point to help you understand subscribe to our YouTube channel we're always you know every Tuesday we put out a new quick tip we put out tutorials you know sporadically and I mean I'd say probably you know one or two a week actually so sporadically is probably not the right term the user but quite a lot of information subscribe to our YouTube channel get on there get on the forum there's a lot of information that can be very helpful to you so I want to thank everyone for attending sorry I went a little long there I usually actually cut it about 45 minutes that's my attention span again appreciate it once time if you did ask questions I didn't answer them I will do it by email I always do that I guarantee it to you so again thanks everyone for attending I hope everyone learned something today have a great one

Channel: Lars Christensen

Views: 38,406

Keywords: Autodesk, Fusion, Tip, Tutorial, Beginner, 360, CAD, CAM, Lars Christensen, Aaron Magnin

Id: DVtzuj7_F9g

Length: 59min 54sec (3594 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2016