Learn Fusion 360 for Beginners, Woodworkers, & Makers

tired of using the free version of Sketchup want to make renderings like this or maybe you want to improve your workflow from design to finished product how often you need to change a design for a client it takes much longer than you expect well fusion 360 is free and the answer [Music] hey it's Justin if you're new here I'm in Portland see and see a CNC shop in Portland Oregon I'd love to tell you about the benefits of fusion 360 you might be asking yourself why should I trust this guy well I went to design school and have yeesh nearly 15 years of experience with CAD software fusion 360 and Sketchup or CAD software I use this kind of software every day for my work and often for fun too anyway this is going to be a series of videos on how to start using Friesen 360 if you're a woodworker or maker quick hit the subscribe and the bell you'll be notified when we make more in this series it's probably most helpful to download fusion 360 now check for links in description keep in mind there's a totally free license and it's quick to install on Windows or Mac why use fusion 360 well you've probably heard the phrase work smarter not harder fusion 360 is a computer-aided design software or CAD that runs on Windows and Mac what's different about fusion is it uses the cloud to sync your project files like most other CAD software a fusion includes many types of software inside you can use design tools you can render and make animations simulation testing you can make manufacturing output like cam like we do or you can even produce drawings that was a lot of features and may sound overwhelming we don't worry we'll break it down and make it easy to understand the takeaway is Fusion is powerful but you can use what you want of it and ignore the rest when you first get fusion 360 installed it should look more or less like this I'm running the Mac version but there's no functional difference between Mac and Windows let's go over the basics so you can get familiar I mentioned that fusion 360 as many types of software built into one when you launch fusion 360 a new document will load and you'll start in the design workspace if you click the design drop-down you can switch between workspaces for today we won't dig into any others but go go ahead and play around with the rest when you have time the bar across the top is the toolbar or ribbon this is where your tools live you can click any of these icons to start using the tool you can also set up keyboard shortcuts but we'll get to that later on the left of the screen is the browser where all the things you create will live in an outline like list there's nothing really here now but soon we'll change that across the bottom is the timeline this is one of the most powerful parts of fusion 360 fusion uses parametric or history based modeling this means you can always go back and make a change to any part of your design while the history is turned on moving to the top right is the viewcube you can change view settings and it gives you an orientation reference for your model clicking your name in the upper right corner you can find account info preferences etc click the question mark and you'll see a bunch of useful help items the quick setup being one of the most helpful as you can quickly remind yourself of how the controls work and easily switch between different styles personally I use Tinkercad because it's most similar to Rhino which is what I came up on ok let's get to making something first up is sketches if you're coming from Sketchup or really any CAD software the most basic form of a CAD model is 2d lines or points in fusion 360 sketches are important to what comes next because fusion is a parametric modeling software that means that objects can have a relationship that you define that can be as simple as dimensions or as complex as formulas that automatically change like say how many shelves are in a cabinet based on the width dimension for now let's keep it simple and just begin with a basic sketch to start a sketch head over to the button that has a series of line segments and a green plus on the toolbar next like a plane to draw and let's choose this bottom one is essentially a plan view alright we are in sketch mode now so our toolbar here changed and we have the sketch commands available there's more if you do the drop downs the normal one is line which I commonly use L on the keyboard but we'll do it the click play for now so you can start drawing anywhere and part of what's great about Fusion is it doesn't really matter where you draw at first you just kind of want to get it down so I'm just drawing kind of random lines here that's kind of a mess I didn't dimension any that but that's fine so we can go over to dimension say I want to make from here to here 8 inches it's close to 8 let's make it 10 so I type in 10 inches hit enter we've defined that I'm gonna go to the top view here a little more clear so I can still move these around pretty easily because they're not constrained in any way this has been constrained as a right angle and the constraints are up here so that just means you know do I want to constrain a line to be only horizontal or vertical or parallel to another one or in this case this is perpendicular so if I do parallel between here and here it's going to snap that to be whatever this one is permanently you can change it if you need to so I want to make another dimension let's go up to dimension I want this side to be six inches that's good and actually going to keep this at an angle that's fairly interesting so I click dimension dimension here and then here and we get an angle which is pretty nice so we want some kind of crazy angle like 86 I don't know why you do that but why not so that's interesting we've got a good start maybe we want to draw a circle in that so Center diameter circle and instead of worrying about where it is I just draw my circle and I can dimension it afterwards so I hit D or dimension click the circle I want a one point two five inch circle that's a diameter it's kind of floating out in space so let's do a dimension again and click here which is going to go from the center to this wall that's weird so let's make it 2.5 inches and actually want it to be centered on this wall over here so I'm going to click horizontal and then hold shift on the keyboard and you're going to little thing that pops up and allows you to select the midpoint of this line and then I'll click here and so now we've said I want two horizontal line that's invisible between here and here that's a little bit of an advanced trick but I really love that and use it all the time so now any of these things are totally changeable if we didn't like how they got set up this could be 1.75 inches we could change this to be 3 inches what's really great is we can say I want this one so I've got it selected I've double clicked on it and I click up here it's going to take the dimension D 22 the representation and I say divide by 2 so now whatever this one is go away little box whatever D 22 is or 10 so I want that to be 1012 now now it's going to be 6 down here get my origin out of the way so there's a couple little tricks to get started that's that's a small example of how you can get into sketching let's finish the sketch and we'll see it in this view it's just back into the design design workspace outside of the sketch mode so you can see it down here we've now got a sketch that's setup down in our timeline and it's also in the browser here so that's sketch one I like to change these names right away so I just click twice click once click twice and we're going to call that the plan so I can turn that on and off with this little eyeball it's a good idea to save so we're going to save this as WW sketches so obviously we're not just going to do something with a sketch but let's say we wanted to make this some kind of weird sculptural piece so we're gonna click extrude which is essentially the same if you're familiar with Sketchup you do push-pull a lot well extrude is the proper name for the kind of generic thing you're doing you're creating the thing out of a profile so this is the profile and it's kind of letting me know that this is where we're gonna select why when I hover over it and once I click you're gonna see over here that the little dialog window there's some tips if you hit the little I let's bring this over here in the center it's showing me I have one thing selected so this is very much like what you're used to if you sketch up or even Rhino so if I click and drag I can pull this up as far as I want so it's very dynamic I can do fancy things like taper it I don't really want that right now so we're gonna say 0 on taper it so over here you can control really any of these things or you can do it kind of manually by clicking and dragging and let's connect this 8.25 inches and there's a whole lot of settings here that you can get into where are the starting places if we offset it down so let's say we wanted to start an inch below two inches below that profile this is very useful stuff but maybe a little bit advanced for the moment you can do symmetrical let's just say that's good for now I'm going to actually change it back to profile just keep it simple so we're eight and a half inches above and we've got a pretty basic little shape here okay well that we don't really like how that looks it's kind of goofy so we're gonna go back and right click on the sketch down here who's you now see we have an extrude too so I can get rid of that by dragging it back dragging a little current time so this is like your bar here is where you are in the model timeline so we don't like that we're going to go back and you can edit any of these things at the bottom there also over here and your browser so like your file explorer of your of your parts of your model right click on the sketch edit sketch and we're back into editing that sketch so what's really awesome about this is this is constantly editable you can see how this would be super useful if your client comes to you and says oh man actually this piece is eleven point eight eight or eight can't type eight to [Music] eight two one five seven six inches and now everything is dynamically updated we actually want this to be eight inches now and this should be seventy four and we actually need another circle over here it's bigger so we've done all that we push finish sketch and our totally updated model is ready to go so you can see how if we had a bunch of features here the one thing we have to do is go back and edit our extrude because we're missing that other box so you can hold a command or m-man control I believe on Windows I'm not sure or you can just get rid of this and click again in the box inside the boundary of the sketch and we actually want that to be ten inches now with a five degree taper let's go the other way to degree taper that's crazy okay and we're back into a perfectly modeled piece let's say the next step is we want to round the edges so we click fill it up here and now we've got a dialog box asking what do we want to fill it and we select the edges here on the top so we can select all the edges we want let's say the top ones we only want selected we're going to make those 375 a 3/8 inch fill it maybe we actually want this part to the upper upper edges what we're doing is the second piece so we push this plus and now we've got two different Phillips we can do at the same time we're gonna make this one an inch so it's really great is these are totally dynamic now and they figure out how to merge all these corners for you and you didn't have to think about it back in your sketch I actually I'm gonna add one more let's let's round these guys over even we can get real crazy and break it so that's a two inch on the inside there it's kind of a cool feature well if that makes sense so essentially what I've done is if we start over make a sketch extruded that sketch by going up to extrude we've extruded that and anytime we make a change in this timeline it's affected from the left to the right all the way through so we've added these Phillips and maybe we don't want those Phillips anymore just momentarily we can right click suppress the feature and they're gone so we can play around with this in a different way let's start another model go to this file here click new design turn on your origin we're going to create some parameters so that's essentially what we were doing when we're making drawings before anytime we'd make a sketch here the other file these are parameters we were just doing them in the model space so what we're going to do in our new file is go to change parameters under modify so this is just like a little spreadsheet where you can type in anything you want and it's a definition for something that we can use later so click plus I'm used for user parameters we're gonna make a little cabinet here I think it's going to be a good example of how to do this quickly and something we actually do quite often type in width is your first one we're gonna make that 60 inches you could change your units here we're gonna use it inches this is a place where you can make a note like overall width to remind yourself later click OK click plus make another one we're gonna do a height that's going to be 35 inches click another one will make depth 24 inches another ply 0.72 inches click ok so now we've got a definition these are what we're gonna remember to type in okay we're going to make a sketch click the front face or draw in the front view click the front of the viewcube over here so I'll turn our view here now we're going to use the rectangle command and draw the outside of our cabinet so you can start anywhere click a corner you can see as we drag this out we have two different dimension items type in height here tab to get to the other box and that is width obviously so type width and hit enter you can see our parameter pops up we push enter it accepts it so now we've got a box that's defined properly as our width and our height and if we wanted to make a border of that we double click modify offset and now we've got a box that says what do you want to make that size and I want to type ply so you can see it moved us in 0.72 inches and I click enter we've got now our proper plywood thickness by our length and our width height and our and our width sorry let's make these mitered corners just select line go up here in the corner and click from the inside of the outside very obvious push escape to get out of that so now we've got mitered corners on all our corners let's click finish sketch I'm gonna save this as cabinet example so now here's what we need to do if we right-click you can pivot around and we're gonna go to extrude again select two of these two sides opposite each other I'm gonna do the left and the right and that we're gonna type depths and we get the depth we put in as that parameter earlier which I think was 24 inches click OK do that again if you want to repeat something you can right click the first last thing you did is right at the top repeat extrude or E if you know the keyboard commands the top and the bottom obviously type depth enter and it's gonna immediately tell you to join so join the left and the right pieces that we actually don't want that because we want to represent these as actual pieces we would make of a cabinet so click on the drop down new body and that will keep it from joining the other pieces click OK we turn off our sketch here open the bodies up you can see we now have four distinct bodies could turn these off see the miter we made so that's pretty simple another quick fix we could do here we go into the sketch again double click if we wanted to make de toad dividers we could offset that like we did before right double click left click mmm doesn't like me anymore hold shift and select the outside border one at a time go to modify offset type fly / - so that's just having the thickness of the plywood which is a hefty dado okay and now we've got something we can draw from I like to just click a line here select the inside line of the data line the halfway mark make it make sure it's straight all the way down you see that perpendicular so we've now drawn one I'll do an offset with O type ply enter so now we've got a divider that's exactly the same thickness as our plywood and it has a dado depth so we can dimension that with D here to the outside let's make that 12 and we can do that again a couple more times very basically if we could draw that out by hand I resist doing this because it's not the right way to do it in fusion it still it's the kind of like dumb doing too much work version so I've got another one I could make these twelve apart again yeah I don't like that I'm gonna delete all that crap go up to create rectangular pattern so now we've got essentially an array command and we can select both these pieces and we can click a direction which is left and right we can say we want the spacing to be a distance had to be spacing so between each piece we want that distance to be 12 inches it's going the wrong way so you just to put a negative in the front let's say we wanted five of those four of those that'll be a little better push okay so now it's dynamically gonna update most mostly if I want to change something I can just change a couple things instead of having to redraw each of those items you could do the same with dimensioning each of these things but we didn't to draw each of those fish finish turn on our sketch again let's extrude those select all of these a couple ways to do this we actually did a advanced parameters of YouTube video that all put a card to here it's probably a little above where you're at right now if you're like watching this video but I did an example just like this where it dynamically updates all of the dividers based on the width the height so that they're all evenly spaced kind of in perpetuity no matter how you change the parameters which is pretty nerdy and fun for me so we want to extrude those to the depth parameter again which is the same as typing 24 but this is better type depth depth doesn't work for some reason extrude make all my selections again I don't know what happened there if you actually select the wrong thing you can hold ctrl or command and get rid of it with that selection again let's try this again type depth enter it's going to ask if you want to cut or not that's essentially making the dedos which is kind of interesting I would say make new bodies okay and from there turn off that sketch we've got our pieces made up for us if we want to go back into parameters at this point we could change the height to be 24 inches and everything updates for us and all of our spacings are perfect say we wanted the plywood to be 1/2 inch for some reason perfectly updated say we wanted the height to go back the depth to be 18 okay you get the picture all of that updates perfectly to quickly make those data as you go to modify and combine which is a bad name for boolean and we would select the target body being the top we'd select tool bodies each of these we'd keep the tool so it doesn't disappear on us push okay repeat that right click repeat combine select the bottom one each of these it's already pre-selected push okay so now we've created our data's you select all these push V it's visibility it'll hide all those we've got data's so that was a pretty easy model something you could do real fast and get yourself a nice model we can then make drawings from that by right-clicking and creating drawing but we won't go into that right now yeah there's a good example let's let's throw some materials on this and that'll be the last thing we do so a is appearance let's go to walnut just for the hell of it and here let's do unfinished walnut so I'm going to click on that drag it up here say we want all of these pieces we just select shift or shift and select all of those click walnut drag it on it's a little busy I'll put some maple make this real fancy drag that guy up I want this to be applied to bodies okay there we go so we've got a case that's walnut and a bunch of dividers that are maple pretty cool go up here to render let's get this view right so you can see the power of how simple this is to get a quick representation of some kind of client idea or a thing you want to make for your house or just really any project you'd like to do this could legitimately take me probably less than ten minutes five minutes depending on what I was trying to do [Music] that wraps up this video I hope this was helpful if so hit the thumbs up button and let us know in the comments if you have any questions there will also be a blog post with the fusion file example and other links and helpful things so check that out in the description make sure to subscribe so you can catch the next video in the series we're planning to cover more advanced modeling renderings drawings and a bunch of other stuff I'm shooting for weekly uploads on this so typically would be on Sunday mornings I'll catch you in the next one thanks

Channel: Portland CNC

Views: 17,375

Keywords: learn fusion 360 beginners, learn fusion 360, cnc machining, autodesk fusion 360, fusion 360 cam, fusion 360 tutorials, fusion 360 for beginners, fusion 360 lessons, fusion 360 tutorial, fusion 360 woodworking, fusion 360 cam tutorial beginner, fusion 360 tutorial beginner, fusion 360 for woodworkers, fusion 360 for, Portland CNC, fusion 360 for begginers, Learn fusion 360 fast, fusion 360 woodworking cnc, Fusion 360 for absolute beginners, fusion 360 tutorial 2021

Id: YAIlMUX9VLg

Length: 27min 40sec (1660 seconds)

Published: Sun May 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/pdxcnc]

Hey all. I have had quite a few people ask for a more beginner Fusion 360 tutorial on getting started. Typically, we don't show all the steps of using Fusion 360 in our videos so we decided to step back and start from the beginning.

If you know someone that wants to get into Fusion but has resisted, this should be a good starting place for them (that was my intention). I plan to post on a fairly regular weekly schedule, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

[u/andrefhs]

Thanks a lot!

[u/scraberous]

Thanks for posting this helpful content. I'm trying to model a set of curved plywood furniture shapes, do you have a favoured method for recreating twisted and bent laminated materials?

[u/scraberous]

Thanks, I’ll check out the T-splines. I managed to create the shape using loft and centreline, but it’s not mm accurate.