Surface Modeling 101

hello out there YouTube land I am back Jason Lichtman here and Aaron magnet on the keys and today in our fusion 360 hour or so we're going to be covering surface modeling now surface modeling is an interesting topic because a lot of people frankly are scared of it they don't know how it works or they just don't understand it overall and they tend to not use it but surface modeling is actually incredibly useful I personally have been surface modeling for a long time for a variety of different products and I'm excited to show you a couple of the different ways that surface modeling is going to help you become a better modeler we're going to start off today with the basics and then we're gonna get into some much more advanced stuff so stay tuned of course ask questions in the chat window if Aaron can't answer them on the spot I'll be able to answer them either at the end of this particular YouTube stream or afterwards either way so make sure to ask questions and I hope you all learn quite a bit we're probably going to use the full hour because we have a lot of content to get through so let's jump right into fusion 360 and start explaining what is the difference between surface models and solid models so let's jump right into fusion itself here so on my screen right now you could see four cubes and the first thing you should always do whenever you have objects on the screen is to find out if those objects are solid or a surface you can do that by looking at the bodies folder right here in Fusion and you're gonna see a gray icon that looks like a cylinder or a white cylinder and that's going to mean that this is a solid right now I have no surfaces or no surface bodies on my screen another way you can check if you don't want to look at the bodies folder is you can actually do a cross section so if you go to inspect and you look for a section analysis you can grab any face on an object drag the blue arrow just a little bit past that the wall of the object itself and you'll see a cross-section of that object if the cross-section looks like this where there's hatch marks going across the model and as you drag this that doesn't really change well guess what this is a solid model but let's go and hit cancel actually I'll leave this on I'm gonna hit OK and I'll just turn off the little eyeball next to analysis and the difference between cancel and hitting okay and just hitting the eyeball is that if I later want to go see that section analysis I don't have to go and set it up again I could just turn it on or at least turn on the visibility anytime I'd like so I have a bunch of solids and there are a couple of differences here well the first two on the Left look like just cubes pretty boring the two on the right look a little bit more interesting and they're both solids but you'll see in just a little while that I can model these completely different methods and end up with the same result so let's actually go back in time a little bit and let's talk about how we can actually model up a basic cube be a solid model actually no before I do that let me just explain what solid modelling and surface modeling is so solid modeling is what most people end up using in fusion 360 and any other engineering ad tool so it's the ability to create an object that is solid but there are plenty of times and we'll cover a whole wide list of why and when you're gonna want to use surface modeling to your advantage but surface modeling is another way to model the same final result potentially but instead of everything being solid it actually is infinitely thin all right it's made of surfaces and at the end when you completely stitch or close up that's the surface together you can convert it back into a solid because once it's closed the software can basically fill in everything that's inside it it makes it whole so let's go and give you a couple of basic examples that'll make this make a whole lot more sense before we get much more advanced I'm gonna go back in my timeline don't forget user is a parametric modeling tool whether you're using solid modeling techniques or surface modeling techniques it's still parametric and we're going to go back in time to the very beginning where all I have is one sketch with three of these boxes and the way that you would turn this into a cube using solid modeling would be to choose extrude from the solid modeling tab choose the box and then grab this arrow and drag it up and type in a value for how tall you want this to be in this case I'm using a parameter that I just called size and it's set to 50 millimeter here I have a box or cube it is a solid body you could tell again by that icon under the bodies folder or via that cross section analysis that we showed earlier and that was pretty straightforward now let's go and create the same box as a surface model and we're gonna go to our surface tab and keep in mind that if you have been using Fusion for a long time you might be used to calling the surface tab the patch workspace it used to be a different workspace so we had a solid modeling workspace and a patch workspace for surface modeling this has somewhat recently been changed when you're designing now regardless of how you're designing you're going to be in the design workspace and then now we have different tabs for the different methods so you have the solid modeling tab for the solid modeling approach or method and then you have the surface tab for surface model so if we switch to surface you're going to see mostly the same tools look at here we're gonna go to create and I have extrude revolve sweep Loft patch and offset and the beginning of this list is actually the same as on the solid tab so we have extrude revolved sweep and loft also under solid just the colors are a little different so we're gonna go and use extrude just like we did on the solid area or the solid tab I'm gonna choose the same square the one on over to the right that's the same size I'm gonna drag the blue arrow up I'm going to type in the same value in this case size and now we have a surface body instead of a solid it makes sense and actually if you look at it and start rotating around let me hide the sketch so you don't see that there you'll see that there's nothing on the top and there's nothing on the bottom more importantly the wall here is infinite then I start to zoom in the wall doesn't get any thicker it's infinitely thin super super super thin really tiny and the idea is that it just represents the outside surface but right now this is just a surface body so if I wanted to create this into a solid cube using surface tools what I next want to do is I'd want to create a patch on the very bottom and hit OK I'd also want to go and make a patch on the very top and hit OK and you'll notice on the left hand side that I'm now ending up with three different surface bodies body 19 which happens to be the first one I made that extrude body 20 which is the bottom and bottom sorry body 21 which is the top and if I want to connect these together all I have to do is stitch them so I want you to think of these surface bodies like pieces of fabric and if you want to connect the fabric together you stitch them together or sew them together you're doing exactly the same thing in the surface tools so I'm gonna go and say stitch and I'm gonna choose all three of these bodies and I could do that from the graphics area or from the bodies folder and when I say okay it's going to stitch them all together see that it's all closed now and automatically turn it into a solid so right now I have two identical cubes there's no real difference there the difference is how I got to the end result and you'll notice that for the solid modeling technique I have one feature just the extrude but for the surface modeling technique I actually have four features the extrude the bottom patch the top patch and then the stitch at the end so the surface technique is definitely longer right there are more steps and on first glance you would probably say to yourself why on earth would I ever use surface modeling if it's going to be that many more steps and I'll tell you that the reason that surface modeling becomes important is because surface modeling can give you a whole lot more control over your models so if you think about what you're trying to achieve if you're trying to be very detailed or very particular about your end result surface modeling might be the method that you're gonna use to get there just as a quick example if I go back to my patch well I'll go and edit the very top patch and I choose my edit feature you'll notice here on the right hand side that it's connecting edge 1 2 3 & 4 right there for sides of this cube so it makes sense on the screen right now you can see a visual of which edges which and if I change this you'll see I have a little drop-down and right now it says connected which is G 0 that's a really fancy term for how smooth the transition is from one face of an object to another face connected is like a hard edge which is exactly what you'd expect from a cube but if you wanted to make some sort of organic geometry or aesthetically pleasing geometry or smooth kind of shape geometry you might want to start testing out what it looks like when you change these values so we're gonna go and change let's say edge 2 is this one on the right let's go and change edge two instead of connected to tangent and what happens here is a little bit of a blip now the face the the patch that's trying to you know patch everything together on the top now has this requirement that on this edge number two it needs to be a tangent transition from this new surface patch to the sidewall of that cube and it creates this and you can also change this value here that's called a weight and you could change this and the higher the number the more you're going to get in this case like a bubble effect or a smaller value and you're going to get less of a bubble of the range here is from 0 to 1 you're not going to be able to go outside of those the standard is about point 5 so believed that a point if I want to change edge three let's go in rotates you could see that more clearly and I change that to tangent you'll see it's gonna bubble on that edge as well I could do this for all of them let's go ahead and pick tangent for all of them and what I'm gonna get here is kind of a dome effect on this cube just neat I mean this one doesn't look particularly good but I could see applications where that might be really helpful right but I could take it even further and I could change instead of the smoothness to being engined I could actually change that to be curvature and that's going to be g2 so g0 is like a sharp edge g1 is tangent which is like a Filat that you might put on one of your parts and then curvature is g2 and that's like a really high level of smoothness so if you think about like when you last bought a vehicle if you looked at the hood of the car and there were a bunch of hail dents in it you probably wouldn't buy it or you'd probably try to get a really really good discount on that car and then maybe fix the hail dance or not I don't know but the idea is that the hood of the car should be nice and smooth as its intended and so curvature is like a level of smoothness that you would see on something like a vehicle but if you have a box like the one you see on the left side of my screen right now and you just put a tangent I'm sorry if you just put a fill it on it that fill it is likely going to be actually it's definitely going to be a g1 continuous likes transition from these phases now I'll go over into a little bit more detail on that later but just know that when your surface modeling like this patch on the very top here you get to choose how you want it to connect to everything around so I could choose instead of g1 we could go to the really ultra smooth and I'm going to choose curvature for everything and now I'm going to get even more of like a bubble effect in all right so I get more control then when I stitch it all together I still end up with this body a solid body that I can mess with so this is just one example of how surface modeling gives you more control but there are a lot of different reasons that you might use surface modeling to be able to create the geometry you want we're gonna go over or actually know five different reuse cases or why you might want to use surface modeling and with each one I'm going to show you some techniques on how to use surface modeling to your event and then we're going to come back to this cube example and I'm going to show you how you can make even crazier jump just a little bit so let's start with number one so reason number one you might want to use surface modeling is not to make these weird dome shaped cube things is instead to bring in models that came from other software and fix them because sometimes you're gonna bring in models that have import errors so let's go and look at a really good 3d model this one here is that what we call the trail 450 motorcycle dirtbike motorcycle created by our resident expert in CAD models Israel del Toro and this particular bike is what we're going to use for all of our examples for the rest of this particular livestream and we're gonna look in particular add an imported file and in this case I might be designing the motorcycle but I'm purchasing the motor maybe the motor comes from Yamaha or Honda or whatever and they gave me CAD models for the motor let's go take a look at it and see if we have any problems we need a fix so let's go and grab our engine here and it looks like it's going to be in this drivetrain sub assembly and it's a separate component so we'll go and open up that file separate if you're wondering how I got to that I can actually double click on a part and it'll select the whole thing so that makes it really quick and easy here I have my drivetrain but in particular I want to look at just the motor so let's go and open up just the motor and here I have my imported motor right again this is a purchased motor and it looks pretty darn good but if you start to look under the hood so to speak you might find that there are some issues that you might want to Fix so for example let's go and look at this component here and it turns out that this is my carburetor body and we're gonna go and dial in just to this carburetor body let's isolate it so I only see that and when we look at this particular thing it shows a very different icon than the one that I showed you earlier that gray cylinder which represented solids instead here I have an orange cylinder but you'll notice there's a little bit of a split in that cylinder and this is showing you that this is going to be a surface body now a surface body can have multiple faces this would be a face that would be a face this is a face I can also split this into separate surface bodies that have maybe one face per or maybe multiple but this right now is a single surface body with multiple faces and there's something wrong with it because it's a surface body instead of a solid let's go and take a look under the hood for that I'm going to go to my surface tab and I'm gonna go to try to stitch this and this is a great tool for not only taking multiple surfaces or surface bodies and stitching them together into a solid it also helps you identify problems I'm gonna go to the stitch tool and I'm going to choose the entire body and what it's doing right now is it's trying to figure out how many free edges I have and how many edges it might try to stitch by using this tool but more importantly it shows that there are some free edges meaning this is not a completely closed up box right I know this isn't a box but this isn't a completely closed up model and you can see it highlights in red in this case that I have my free edges right here and actually if I look at this in more detail you can actually start to see the surfaces and these are the surfaces all the way in the backside and I could see them through this hole in the model so this model needs to be fixed at least if I wanted to become a solid and again this red highlight makes it easy for you to see so I'm not going to stitch this I can stitch it because I need to have all the different pieces in order to stitch this together so instead what we're going to do is we're going to use our surfacing tab to fill in that hole and then we're gonna stitch that so under create I'm gonna go and use the patch command and the patch command is fantastic at filling in holes we're gonna go and use patch select this open three edged area or hole I get to choose what kind of what kind of edge connection I want between everything else I could be using connected or if I want to make sure that this is smooth and it should pretty much be smooth because I have all these fill it's around it I could switch this to tangent and then hit okay now if you try to go and make this all tangent and you get errors like this one which I did on purpose you guys could see then I want you to back off a little bit because the G to surface curvature continuity stuff I said that wrong let's try that again the G to surface continuity called curvature continuous is really hard to achieve you need to have the right kinds of transitions for that to work tangent or G one is easier but you still need to have the right geometry for that to work G zero is the easiest so if for whatever reason you try tangent and it's not working or it's giving you an error like this simply change this to connected and chances are you're going to get a much better result but we're going to switch this over to connect it it shows me a preview let me zoom in here shows me a preview of that surface patch and I'm gonna go and say okay and now I have two surface bodies they're not yet you know connected to each other they're not closed yet so let's go and stitch this together I could choose the little patch that I made and my entire model it shows me that it's gonna stitch six edges I say okay and just like that it now converts this into a solid body indicated by that gray icon so this is a great use for surfacing even if you're not going to design crazy swoopy shapes if you're bringing in models from SolidWorks CATIA creo NX inventor or Rhino or anywhere else even though we can take pretty much we could definitely take all those file types into fusion sometimes you will end up with surface errors or missing surfaces and what I just showed you is a way that you can patch those surfaces now I made it easy on myself I only had one hole patch you might have multiple but if you use that technique multiple times you will get a great result let's go and move on to another model on this engine that's also messed up from importing and we're gonna go and fix that one too so let's isolate our carburetor body let's also focus in on just the motor itself and I have this component which is my cylinder housing let's go and activate that one let's also go and isolate that component and here we can see a slightly different scenario whoa it looks like I have a lot of surface bodies here it looks like I have around 220 or it might be 219 because I think that first one wasn't labeled body 0-1 it was more like body 0-2 but the idea here is I have over 200 different surface bodies and I can select each of these individual and see what they are but more importantly they're not connected to each other they're not stitched and that's why I have no solid now the reason you might want this to be a solid is because you're used to solid modeling and a lot of the techniques that you're used to using are not going to work with the surface body like the combined commit right taking two different shapes and duelling doing a boolean combine is not going to work unless that second shape the tool shape is a solid body so let's convert this into a solid body and for that we're going to go back to our stitch command in this case we're gonna select everything in this window and it's going to try to figure out if it can stitch this all together and it looks like there are 1052 free edges and it's going to stitch all 1052 of them that's awesome so I'm gonna go and say okay cross my fingers and just like that I now have a solid body and this can be used for all your traditional solid modeling techniques and binding and lofting and everything else that you used to do now if this did not just turn into a solid I would then try to go and stitch this one more time to try to find out where the hole is or why it's not stitching and then try to figure out how to fix it but I wanted to show you at least to start two different ways that you can take an imported model that comes in as surfaces incorrectly in two different ways right one of them is lots of surfaces one of them is one surface body but it has like a hole in it and show you how you can quickly and easily fix both of those scenarios using surfacing and both of them use the stitch command and in the first case I also use the patch commit so remember those now we're going to jump into a different scenario where you might want to use surface modeling instead of solid mop so let's go back to our trail 450 assembly and we're gonna look at the very front here and it looks like I have a number plate and I have a number plate that looks pretty darn good actually it's a nice smooth shape that's wrapping around the very front but I'm gonna go and make a new number plate and the scenario that we're gonna talk about is uniform wall thickness parts and to be clear we do have a sheet metal AB you can see that right over here and sheet metal automatically creates uniform wall thickness parts but there is a limitation of sheet metal and that limitation is that the angles are always straight angles like if you had a piece of paper you're you know bending it on one line but you can't go and make like a really swoopy shape that is a compound Bend at the same time in sheet metal just not gonna work so if you want to go and create uniform wall thickness parts and just a couple of examples could be a composite part that's carbon fiber or maybe it's a vacuum form plastic part or maybe it's an injection molded part in all those scenarios you're gonna want uniform wall thickness and my recommendation would be to use surface modeling to model up the surface that you want and then use the thicken command to automatically thicken it to the right thickness and have the entire thing be that same thing so let's go and show you an example in this case we're gonna go in redesign is very front bearing or number plate I think it's better word for it let's go and grab this number plate and we're gonna go and isolate it so we only look at this and we're gonna go and hide the original design here I don't want that one for now instead we're gonna go and look at my sketch that I have for the shape and this shows me the overall shape of the number plate and it looks like a couple of mounting positions as well so let's go and turn this into a 3d model and we're going to use surfacing to do that and you'll see why this is beneficial second we're going to start off in surface and I'm gonna go and create not an strewed but actually a patch and I'm gonna choose this region right here and we're gonna go and say okay and again I have an infinitely thin surface body at the moment now we're going to go and extrude and we're gonna go and use the surface extrude you're probably used to doing the solid extrude they're very similar to each other I'm gonna grab these two edges and I'm going to drag them backwards just a little bit we're gonna go about say 15 millimeters deep I'm also gonna add a taper angle or a draft angle for this as well let's go with like negative 10 degrees that looks pretty good maybe a little more maybe like negative 15 too much Tenace fine so we're gonna go with negative 10 and now I have that kind of area sticking out okay now if I try to fill it this let's actually go and do that I'm gonna say modify fill it and I try to fill it this edge not gonna work and the reason it's not gonna work is because if you look on the left hand side here every time I create a new surface body I have to stitch it to another one in order to have an edge that is fill it able right because otherwise these are just two different things that happen to line up with each other they're not one thing that I can create a fill it between so what I'd want to do is that same stitch command that we talked about we're gonna go and say stitch this this and the main plate and say okay now I have a single surface body and I can go and hit f4 fill it and this fill it is going to work on this edge now and I'm gonna go with maybe a millimeter that's good enough millimeter now the back edge of this is still open right this whole thing is still infinitely thin this is not 3d printable at the moment not machinable at them so let's go and patch the back half as well so we're gonna say create another patch I'm gonna choose the very back edge you'll notice by the way I cannot patch this side and then also this side at the same time I have to do them one at a time this is a good time to also tell you you know right now I'm making what's basically a flat back to this but if I wanted some sort of bubbling shape this is a great example that first cube that I showed you and I could change this to tangent and I could end up with kind of more of a bubble effect but I really don't want that in this case I do want it to be nice and flat geometric is fine and we're gonna go and say connected okay I'm gonna do the same thing here for another patch on the other side and before anyone comments about this yes I could design this is just half and then mirror this across at the end that would also be fine either way it's fine and now I'm gonna go in stitch this guy the main piece and then this other piece all three of those together and say okay now I could go and put another fill it on this back edge and fill it also does not work on multiple bodies at the same time but in this case I stitch it all together so now it's just one big body and now I could go and add a fill it here as well perfect so this is looking pretty good and here's where the magic happens I wanted this to all be a uniform wall thickness including these like recessed or pushed in key areas because this is all going to be just vacuum form I'm gonna make a vacuum for a mold I'm gonna stretch my plastic suck it in around my mold and it's gonna be able to create this geometry with close to a uniform wall thickness so let me go and simulate the uniform wall thickness all in one shot we're going to say create thicken I can choose the body from the graphics window or right here in the bodies folder and in this case we're gonna I'm gonna use a negative value because I see the arrows facing inwards and we're gonna say - let's say two millimeters and just like that I have a uniform wall thickness part that is not a sheet metal part be clear I can then go and add my fill it's on my outer edges like this up I think I might have missed selected let's proud again zoom in a little bit and add maybe half of a millimeter and now we have those Phillips's well so this was a really quick way for me to be able to create my part and have it be uniform wall thickness automatically if I wanted to do this as solid modeling believe it or not this would actually be probably more steps in solid modeling than in the surface modeling side and yes if I go back in my my timeline here I could have actually taken less steps to get to this even using surface modeling so don't put any of that in the comments because so so far we have a uniform wall thickness part really quickly and easily and there could be a lot of examples of that I have one that's not motorcycle related I just want to show you another geometric example so this is something that's an ice cube tray and this ice cube tray is driven by parameters in fusion if we go back in time I just want to show you how this was made it's very similar so I created my sketch let me show you that my main sketch I extruded a drafted surface then I went and did a patch on the very bottom it was hard to see let me rotate that um I stitch that together I fill it at the bottom edge in this case I patterned that same thing to make this like a 2 by 5 ice cube tray I then did another patch on the top surface and then also did a little bit of an extrude on the sidewall here we look at the bodies folder I have a lot of different surface bodies at the moment then I go ahead and I stitch that all together now I have one surface body and then I went and added a couple more fill its so I did the top fill it's here and then I believe the fill it's on these edges as well you'll see that in a second and then the most important part is now I use that thick and command to instantly thicken the entire thing to a uniform both another great example so so far we covered great reasons to use surface modeling fixing import errors and creating uniform wall thickness parts that are not female let's keep going we're also going to talk about creating complex geometry some geometry is simply not possible to create using solid line so I'm going to start off really basic I'm going to use those cubes that we started off at the very beginning and then we'll jump into another example let's go to like a real life example let's go back to our cube examples and let me get rid of all this stuff because I already have that model than you and we're gonna go forward in time at the very end and you'll notice that I have two of these cubes on the other end here that look a little bit fun right that top surface is funky now what I didn't do here is simply create a patch and choose my different like tangent or curvature or coincident I actually had to manipulate the surfaces to get to them let me show you how this works let's go back in time before I actually created that it looks like I have to go even further Oh even more let's go even further there we go so here I have my sketch and I'm going to show you the super long way to create the same piece and I'm gonna do it long on purpose because I want you to see even bad practices have benefit so I want you to see them we're gonna go and use that extrude tool just like before but instead because this is a surface extrude you'll notice that chaining it has a checkbox if I leave that on it's going to select the entire perimeter and make a profile just like I did before but instead I'm gonna deselect that and unchain this uncheck the chamber and now we can pick a single edge but now you see I have my single edge and we're gonna call this the same length as before and then I'm going to do that again uncheck the chaining I'm going to do this edge we're going to drag that up and type in the same size as before I'm going to do that two more times give that just another second we're gonna say size and then another one and this is our last one thankfully I don't want you guys to wait perfect so by doing it this way I ended up with four separate bodies one two three and four and the reason I did it this way is because now I get more control over editing just one at a time that's pretty cool so let's do that we're gonna go and select let's say this face here and I'm going to right click and say create a sketch and I'm gonna draw some sort of funky shape and I'm gonna go and say from here I'm going to use a spline to draw this and I'm gonna go and draw something like that now I have my spline and we're gonna go in the surface tools under trim and now I'm going to teach you about trimming so you can create a sketch and use that sketch to trim you can also use another surface to trim to be clear but for now we're gonna go and use that sketch I say trim select my sketch and I'm going to select the area of the surface that I want to get rid of and hit OK and now that area is gone let me hide the sketch you can see a little more clearly now looks interesting right this is definitely different if I were to draw that same sketch on a solid body let me actually do that so you can see this here and I'm gonna try to try to draw it relatively similar it's not gonna be something like that it's close enough if I were to take this I can certainly extrude cut as a solid this area or more importantly the top area that's what I really meant but nothing I can change here is going to end up with the crazy shape that you saw before I change my time I could just tell you right now you're not going to be able to do with that because everything that's happening here is affecting the sidewalls as well as the back as well as the top altogether because it's treating that solid object is one object in this particular case with surface modeling I was able to effect just that front face this one right here let's do that again a couple of times let me hide that other solid hide my master Skagit on that or this so I'm gonna go and create another sketch here I'm gonna go and use another spline I'm gonna rotate so I could see this and snap it a little and here I'm gonna go and make another spline like that we're gonna go back to the surface tool keep in mind there is a scissor or trim tool and sketch it's different than the surface trim tool you want the surface trim tool pick your trimming area like your sketch pick the area you want to remove and hit okay Mouse looking great hide her sketch and do that again we're gonna go and select this face create sketch I'm gonna go into another spline this one's gonna be a little different I'm only gonna put an end point and a start point but now I'm gonna mess with these handles a little bit just you could see that this is possible and say finish let's do another trim using this guy and I have to do this one last time I'm gonna do that again Oh yep there go and say let's do blind from here to there and there and there perfect so let's go back and do one final trim here using this tool and there we have it so let's hide those sketches and let's look at what we have now as crazy as this particular shape is I now have a collection of surface bodies that all happen to meet each other in the right places and is relatively smooth and like transition because I made sure when I created my splines to pick those other points but this isn't a solid at all so let's go and make this a solid to do that we're gonna use the patch and patch the very bottom all right we have to patch the very bottom and you'll notice that it picked the wrong edge because patch is looking for closed loops and the closed loop on this particular surface body is around the surface body which is interesting it's not a around the connection of all the surface bodies because they're not connected they just happen to be near each other right so what I need to do here actually is I need to stitch those together first we're going to stitch them together just like this just pick them but okay now when I go in and hit my patch tool and I select this bottom edge it knows that this is the open edge because everything is connected that's my surface patch that looks really good now we're gonna get to the fun stuff we're gonna do another patch I'm gonna pick the top and it sees that this is all connected and now it's giving me this very complex aesthetic shape whether you like this or not as your choice right this isn't a real part but you get the idea that it creates this automatically and it's very different than anything I could have created with solids this is a great example and if I want this to be even crazier I could go and pick like tangent or anything or any of these options but for now let's just leave this and say okay this is still not a solid because I have three bodies I have the side walls the bottom and the top but there still happen to be in space and touching each other but they're not connected yet so we need to use that stitch tool again stitch all of these together and voila now we have our solid that's pretty cool now you can accomplish this with solids sort of you're gonna have to use a combination of solids as opposed to everything just in surfaces until the very end when it comes into a solid or turns into a solid so I'm gonna show you that too and I hope this doesn't confuse you the whole point of this is to show you that there are so many ways to do the same thing I want you to know all of those ways because when you run into problems in one way you now have other ways you can try so let's go and look at our master sketch again actually no I'm gonna cheat we're gonna use those same sketches so I don't have to go and redraw them and waste all of our time we're gonna go and hide this solid body I'm gonna go and use the solid tab here and I'm gonna use a solid extrude we'll drag this up for the same size as everything else and you'll recall I have all these sketches about that one I have all these sketches that are around that cube when they were services but you know it's fine it's the solid now and we're gonna use them to achieve the same result slightly different method so we're gonna try to keep this as solid as long as we can as opposed to creating all these individual surfaces and then stitching it together we're gonna try to keep it a solid for as long as we can so for that we're gonna use under solid modify split face I'm gonna say split this front face using that sketch and say okay and let me hide those sketches for a second you could see it's still a solid you could see that icon right there but now I have this split which happens to be exactly the top edge of what my surface one we're gonna do this a couple more times so we're gonna say modify split face I'm going to split that face right there using this sketch and say okay we're gonna do that again using that face and of this sketch and then we're going to do that again using this face and scared nice okay so let's hide all over sketches and now you can see again I still have a solid but it has that funny split all the way around this is where it's going to get interesting because although I have a solid I'm gonna end up turning it into a surface you don't have to just create surfaces from scratch you can convert a solid into a surface pretty much anytime you want you probably are used to using direct editing I hope the infusion because direct editing is awesome right if you have a hole in a model you can select the face of the hole and just like hit delete and it just goes away you might have accidentally been in the surface tab and hit delete and gotten a very different result than you expected because the Delete key on your keyboard is going to do something very different if you're in the solid modeling tab versus the surface modeling with solid modeling it's basically a direct edit trying to delete that area and keep it a solid with surfaces sorry if you're in the surface tab is just going to delete those faces so I switch to the surface tab I'm gonna select all of those faces I want to get rid of I'm holding ctrl so I could select multiple at the same time and I'm gonna hit the leave and it got rid of all and you'll notice that it converted my solid body into a surface body now I could simply say create my patch pick the very top choose the options I want then lastly to stitch this back together and end up back where I started with a solid so the cool thing about surfacing is that it's not one way or the other it's not black or white there's a lot of gray a lot of it so keep in mind that you can use both to your advantage when it's appropriate so the reason I bring all of this up is that surface modeling is a great way to achieve geometry that would be near impossible or completely impossible to achieve using just solid modeling alone and it's not just about one or the other you can use them both together it's called hybrid modeling and it's very very common most of the advanced CAD users out there that are designing consumer products are hybrid modeling analysis and give you an example of a model that looks really simple that actually is easier to create in surfaces because of this like complex geometry and it's not even that complex let's go to our trail 450 and let's say I wanted to go let's actually lips completely unlicensed or the whole model let's say I wanted to do a rendering of this design and I want this rendering to look really good so I want to make sure that I use like a real-life background and maybe even a real-life lure or in this case ground you don't bring your motorcycle inside your house so let's go to my data panel and I have a field stone or a cobble stone or brick whatever you want to call it that is a little bit of an interesting shape that might make my rendering look really cool this shape happens to be an octagon no not hexagon here and you'll notice that the very top is not flat there's like a like a dome kind of thing going down now if you were to model this through traditional solid modeling or at least try to go back in time a little bit you would first create a quick sketch of your hexagon pretty straightforward then you'd probably use an extrude command and you end up with a brick that looks kind of like this now even if you ignore the fact that there are no fill its and my model had fill it's the reality is the top surface is just not what it's supposed to be I wanted this like pointy thing that goes down so if I were thinking out to myself how would I do this what I could do is I could select this top surface and hit efore extrude and it automatically grabs that profile so I don't even have to draw a sketch which is awesome if you didn't know that now you do if you hit E on a surface or it hit extrude and then select a surface it will automatically take that profile and that's what your extruding and I could drag this arrow down it'll automatically know that I'm trying to make a cut and if I change this the draft angle or taper angle I could change this to be a big enough taper angle that it ends up making like a pointy thing which is kind of like what I wanted actually it's exactly what I wanted so I could do that and be happy but what if I need to have this point in the middle to be an exact value above the very bottom or below the very top right it's not that unreasonable so what I could do is I could try to mess with the math here I could change the depth and I could change this angle and I could try to figure out which angle and which tape sorry which taper angle and which depth are gonna give me this point in the exact right spot but I'd be doing a lot of math and although I like math I try to do as little of it as I can because I want to make sure that I am as fast as possible and I'm always accurate and my math skills don't don't talk to my old math you but let me show you another technique and it's pretty straightforward and it's just using surface modeling to help you I'm gonna cancel we're gonna get rid of that extrude and I'm going to show you a slightly different technique to do this so I have my standard extrude here and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go and create a new sketch and that new sketch is going to be kind of like through the cross section I grab this plane create a quick sketch I'm going to bring in an intersection of my model like this it's slightly different and project but in this case it would give me the same result I'm gonna hide my body here I'm gonna take this entire section thing and turn it into construction because I don't really need that I'm just trying to be able to dimension to it and now I have a line that has a point that I can control where it's gonna go and I could put a dimension from the bottom like that or instead I could delete that and I could put a dimension from the top but either way I have a point with a very specific position that's what I wanted I'm gonna say fin then I'm gonna go in and show my body here and we're gonna go and create a 3d sketch it's pretty rare actually that I use 3d sketches but this is a great time to use one so I'm going to create a sketch I can pick any plane I want to create a quick sketch I'm going to turn on this check box for 3d sketch in case it wasn't on and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to project some geometry that even though 3d sketches on if I just hit P for project it's going to take let's say this vertex that I'm selecting and project it to the plane that I was drawing on it just does that by the full but what I can do is use a fancy tool here called create project and then include 3d geometry never use this now it's your introduction I said that funny introduction there we go so we're gonna say include 3d geometry I'm going to select a point in the middle I'm gonna select two of these corners here and I'm gonna say finish and now I wound up with a sketch that has 3d points all right let's actually hide my body I have these purplish pink points in space but I'm not done so let's actually go back to my sketch here and all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna connect these with some lines so let's say create a line I'm gonna connect that pink one with this one this one with that one and then that one with this guy and now we're gonna jump over two surfaces I'm gonna say surface create a patch using this boundary and hit OK now fusion gave me a warning that I created an object that's not visible and that makes sense because I hit my brick before I did this but I didn't hit hide just a brick I actually hid the entire bodies folder I shouldn't have that's my fault I'm sorry guys but I'm gonna go and turn this on I see the brick but I'm gonna hide the body and what you could see is this triangle that's going down to exactly the right point so now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take that solid body we're gonna make sure we're in the surface tab and just like before select this top and hit delete and it's gonna delete just that face that's it let's show that triangle patch that I made and you could see that right there then what I could do is say let's make a pattern circular pattern of this face or body doesn't matter in this case and we're gonna choose the center axis here and we're gonna say I want six of them and hit OK again this isn't a solid yet right I have all these salt surface bodies that happen to be near each other but they're not connected so now we'll go and use that stitch command select everything that's in here hit okay and it turns it back into a solid that easy right so now we could go and take this and add my fill its add my material properties make it look like a really cool brick and then I can make a pattern of these bricks and use it for my render so this is just a quick and easy way to see that surface modeling can still be used for super geometric shapes like this it's not all about the swoopy organic shapes it can easily be used for geometric shapes as well just like this and again I could have done this via solid modeling but I don't think I would have had as much control over the position of that vertex in the middle there is another way I could have done this with solid modeling where I would shop the hexagon hexagon into just a triangle it's also possible I could have drawn a quick sketch like this project just this edge and drawn a line like this here I mean the point is that you have multiple ways to do the same thing so I could have projected sorry I'm like flexing around here a little bit I could have said you know what I only want to keep this region here that's good do an intersect then I could have drawn a side view like this and I could have drawn a side view and then dimension this exact position done another extrude cut and intersect right just keep this region and then I could have patterned that that's also doable but again the point here is surface modeling is another great way to be able to control your geometry really really so I'm gonna go and hit the finish from right and let's go and jump to the very end will hide most of this and that's my brick so so far as a summary we covered fixing import errors we covered uniform wall thickness parts that are not sheet metal and then parts that might have some complex geometry and this one isn't even complex let's also talk about some other aspects maybe it's machining or mold making right the manufacturing side of things this is not always just about the design the cool thing about fusion is that it's cam and it sorry it's CAD and it's also camp right you could design things and then you can make them so I'm going to show you two other use cases that I think are great for surface modeling and the first one is going to be mold making right and we're gonna start off and just talk about a basic mold nothing too crazy so we're gonna go back to our trail 450 and we're gonna look at a part that I have in the very back this mud flap alright we're gonna go and find this mud flap in our browser let's go and find that in the browser there it is we can go and say let's activate just this mud Brown mud guard let's also isolate it like we did for all the others so we don't see anything else we don't want and what I'm seeing here is a part it's kind of similar actually to the name plate right this is a uniform wall thickness part it's going to be made in carbon fiber and or maybe it's vacuum-formed but probably hopefully urban firework is cool but we're gonna go and make a mold for this now the mold is not going to be the exact shape and size as this particular mud flap I want the mold to be bigger because I'm gonna lay out my material I'm going to mold it to shape then I'm gonna trim all of this edge work and I'm going to trim all of that so I want to make sure my mold is bigger than this now we have direct editing infusion in there is awesome I can make a copy of this mudguard and let's go to our bodies here I could take this make a copy of the mudguard and then take the copy let's rename this stuff original and then hide that and I can take this copy and try to pull these surfaces out if it works but I have the feeling on this particular design it's not gonna work so let's say I grab those surfaces and I try to pull it I just don't have high confidence this is going to work it helped me make my mold and more importantly I don't need things like the fileted edges here and I just really want the bottom surface to make so once fusion figures out that it's not going to be able to do this and I can cancel it I'm going to show you how we're gonna use surface modeling to be able to grab the underside surfaces of this model and turn it into a mold real quick and easy it's taking a little bit longer than I'd like I'm gonna give it about oh thank you okay if it was gonna take any longer I was gonna crash fusion on purpose and then we're gonna go and do this the restart and just do it from scratch but let's actually move on to making this looks like yeah I'm totally just gonna crash this and start again this is not fusion crashing on itself this is me crashing it on purpose because it's a live stream we don't have time to screw around we want to show you the good stuff we're gonna restart fusion here and I'm gonna get back into this 450 we're gonna take and let me explain what we're gonna do so we're gonna take the underside of that particular part that's going to be like our mold surface we're gonna offset that surface and then we're gonna be able to extend the surface now the reason I picked that particular part is because there's a nice billet between those two areas let me show me instead of my screen here there we go so there's that nice fill it between them and fill it's notoriously mess up things they're difficult to extend so it's gonna be a great example I think of like a challenging surface that we're gonna have to figure out how to work through so have fusion restarting it's about done so I can hopefully finish dancing on the livestream I'll take this opportunity it's rare I usually I'm just going too fast I'll take this opportunity to check to see if you have any questions that I could answer so far and it doesn't look like I see any that need answering so that's pretty good and we're going to jump back onto my screen and then we're going to get to the rest of surfaces okay so we're gonna jump into that mudguard same thing like before we're gonna go and say find us in the browser we're going to isolate just the mudguard itself we're going to edit it there we go so what I'm gonna do to start off is I'm going to say surface create an offset and I'm gonna choose the I like to uncheck the chain selection so I could be very particular of what I want and I'm gonna choose these three surfaces because those are going to be helping me make my I'm gonna go and say okay now I get to hide the solid body and I have my surface and what I'm gonna want to do here is to extend this so that I can like you know make my mold wider so we're gonna go and choose modify extend choose let's say this edge right here and maybe this edge over here and we're gonna drag this and see if we can extend now you're gonna notice that I'm extending this a lot and yet the surface doesn't get a whole lot bigger and I'm guessing it's something to do with my selection and this isn't always the case surfaces are also notorious for being like kind of like a buggy or they it work weird and that's part of why some people stay away from surfacing but don't be afraid of surfacing it's fun stuff you're gonna get through it so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to deselect this other edge and now let's play with this arrow and now it's actually extending quite a bit more now it's extending in like funny directions that I might not have expected to be what it would do but it is extended so that's good something was selecting both sides was funny but let's focus for a second on this Philip I do have to select this little sliver edge there and then the fill it itself and then this little sliver edge there and then this guy and when i zoom out you'll notice that as I start to extend quite a bit the fill it's gonna do some funny stuff here and I don't necessarily like that in general you're gonna find that extending fill it's generally problem at this doesn't work as well as I'd like so in this particular depending on just in general Phil it's don't extend verb so what I'm gonna do instead is say let's let's try a different approach let's split this into two different surfaces let's take the fill it and just get rid of it hitting that delete button now let's extend each of these surfaces and dependently of one another because we could always trim them together and get a nice edge and then we can add a new filler that easy so we're gonna go to extend and I'm gonna go and extend this edge right here and then also that edge and there must have been that sliver that I missed so we're gonna grab that too we're gonna go over here and grab that edge and that's sliver on that side and let's see how far we can extend this funny stuff happening on that side so let's deselect that edge and I'll get rid of this sliver too for now and we're gonna see how far we can extend it pretty good decent like 90 millimeters you know several inches that's good enough I'm gonna do that extent again because even though it wasn't working when I selected both sides it may actually work when I select them one at a time it's kind of a weird thing but that is true and so now I have that one working and you'll notice that it was doing really weird stuff when I started extending on this side too much but I might even be able to try extending this one again and that may actually give me a good result that it does so the surface looks all funky right it looks like ridiculous actually and if I look at my original model oh it looks like I still need to extend that area because the whole point here is that it's bigger so let's grab just this region here and extend that and maybe I'll add this area there and there we go and I don't pay attention to the fact that the surface looks super ugly I don't actually care I just want to make sure that it's big enough because trimming surfaces is actually super straightforward but extending them is actually harder so let's start by doing the hard part let's extend them all and then we can go and trim them later and make up nice and clean so here I have my surface then we're going to go and show the underside the other surface that we haven't like messed with yet we're gonna extend that one too let's rotate around let's hide my solid there's my other surface by the way if you want to be able to see them very clearly you can just assign them to be different colors and I'll just go and grab a couple of colors of random here so one's gonna be blue now this one's gonna be like a reddish orange or something and now I could see them clearly relative to we're gonna go and extend these surfaces that's quite a bit odd actually and hit OK and you'll notice that they actually across each other so that's that's good that's what I wanted now I did also already make a sketch I kind of cheated I didn't want to waste all my time on this live stream making sketches that are pretty simple so I have a rectangle that represents where I want my multiple so I'm gonna go and use that and we'll go and use the tool that we already showed you that trim command and I'm going to use this as my tool and I'm remove everything on the outside just like this and we'll do that again using this tool and we're gonna choose everything that's on the outside of this model and say okay and now I have this both trimmed at least in width so the width is trimmed now what I could do is I can stitch them together but I can't stitch them together when they're crossing each other they need to have a nice connection so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to trim these as well so far I've shown you how to trim using sketches now we're going to show you how to trim using surfaces we're gonna say trim this is gonna be my tool and it's gonna trim this part but this is the area I don't want so I select that and hit OK nice let's do that again but the opposite this is my tool this time this is the area I don't want it okay nice lastly we're going to stitch them together because we already learned that we can't fill it unless we stitch them together first so we're gonna stitch these two together it okay and now I could go and add a fill it just like this and type in a value now I type in five and I guess I don't know what the correct size is so let's go and measure it and then I'll just update that value is after all this is parametric it's updating but let's go and hide our sketch let's show our solid body like the original design let's hide the surface and let's do a quick measure on that fill it so I'm going to hit I for measure or you could just go to inspect measure it's fine select the fill it and something funny is happening over here you'll notice that on fill it's that you create on models you've created yourself it'll show up with a radius right so like if I go back to I don't have anything else open let's just go and make a quick box again so now I have a quick box and I'm gonna go and add a filler to this box you know if I go and hit I for a measure and I select that fill it you're gonna get a radius and a diameter that's what you want but on this model it doesn't show me that let's go back and look at that again it shows me the area and it shows me the loop length but it doesn't show me the actual radius and that could be really frustrating it's also common when you're importing files that were created somewhere else there are a lot of other reasons as well this one was created in fusion but if you have that problem here's another quick trick so we're gonna go and create a sketch for this design let me turn on my sketches I'll just hide the existing ones we're gonna show my origin of this mudflap create a sketch in the side view here and we're gonna do a projection but I like the intersect protection for this we're gonna do an intersection of my plane and this model and let's hide the solid body now I have a sketch and I should be able to measure that fill it and unfortunately it's still not measuring and that would actually make sense why it wasn't measuring the 3d is that for some reason this is not met is not showing up as a true arc right because you have splines and you have arcs splines can sometimes look like arcs even though they're not art so this is not really an arc that's why it was a measuring in 3d it's not even measuring in 2d here's your trick of the day you can select that area and turn it into construction then you could go and draw a new arc like a three-point arc in this case and select the same endpoints as that original arc I'm gonna go and pick a dimension for this thing but I don't want a driving dimension that forces this arc to be a certain size instead I want a driven dimension that allows me to constantly measure what is the size of this arc and I could drag this and you'll see that number changes here automatically and then what I could do is select the original and this and hit tangent and it'll snap to be the same size as that original and I could look over here and see that this is a radius of two Mon cool that's awesome so now that I know that that's a radius of two I could actually get rid of that sketch I don't need it anymore and I'm not using it to build anything so I could just get rid of that and then I could go back and edit the filler that I was creating myself and set that to be millimeters go and do that so my surface Oh soom out quite a bit we're gonna change this fill it to be two millimeters and now when i go when i show my solid you're gonna see these match up perfect and more importantly this fill it itself is perfect as it continues to the side so that's awesome and the reason is because we created the fill it after we extended all those surfaces instead of trying to just extend the fill it it sometimes works but more often than not extending fill its is problematic so this is a little bit more advanced but i think you guys would still benefit from this but here's the important part now that I have my surfaces like this I could take my sketch of like my mold shape like this I can extrude this even as a solid you'll see this in a second this is going to be a new body just like that and I could use another command in the surface tool that you haven't seen before we're gonna go to surface and we're gonna say modify split body if you recall when I was showing you the cubes we did split face that's a little different we're gonna say split this big body using this surface and when I hit okay it's gonna split it into two let's hide the surface I the original I have a top and a bottom I only want the bottom so let's go and remove this and this can be my mold and if I show my actual part now you can see the part inside the mold and this is perfect because I can make my part oversized and then I can trim this to the exact correct size great way to do it so that was method number four began to summarise fixing import errors making uniform wall thickness parts creating complex geometry or even not that complex but sometimes still better to do with surfaces and extending edges for things like making molds last one of the day because I know we're going over our goal and the last one is going to be really machining really so let's go back to our entire model let's hide all this extra stuff go back to our trail 450 tire model we're gonna uh nice elate the mudguard and we're gonna look at another component in this design that we're gonna go and CNC machine so let's go and make that happen earlier so here I have my entire motorcycle and we're gonna focus on right now is this component right over here let's go and find that in our browser and it looks like it's part of our rear wheel sub assembly so let's go and open that up give that a second magic now we're gonna go and find this in here and it looks like it's sprocket under wheels back wheel wow this is a little bit of a crazy assembly tree here it is under sprocket I'll go and activate it and maybe even isolate it and now you can see is this part by itself now we're going to switch over to manufacturing and I'm gonna show you some tool paths that I have already set up on this let's go and it looks like I have to regenerate so let me go and regenerate quick the one we're gonna look at is the very first so let's say I wanted to C&C machine this on my milling machine right I'm not gonna go and I don't have like a fancy lathe with live tooling so we're gonna just go and mill this I'm gonna go and do all my roughing operations and now I'm up to this surface finishing right to do like the really nice work I'm gonna use in this case a spiral tool if we zoom in what you're gonna see is happening here is that the tool path is going around the part all the way around but it's dipping into these regions and then coming up above and out and then it's going around and then dipping in and around and about there are some cases where you might want to have these dipped regions be their entire own operations and what you want to do for the spiral is to just spiral all the way around the part but to use these surfaces as though the like the recesses did not exist so you can use surface modeling to be able to make that happen so let me show you what I have in my model let's go back to design for a second and I have in my bodies folder quite a few different thing I have my original part and then you're gonna see I have all these tiny surfaces one for each of those regions and I'm chef making them all show up here there it is and what I could do in the manufacturer workspace which is pretty cool is once I create those surfaces that perfectly transition from let's say this edge to that edge all the way you know multiple of them I can make another spiral tool path and this time under geometry you're going to see here you can check model and you can select those model surfaces like those little tiny pieces the one showing up in like black color and then also include the setup model and when you hit okay it's going to create your tool pass but these are going to be a little different than the original the original if you recall is going down into the hole I bet for a second you can see it going down and there and then I shouldn't have that off there we go and then for this one it's actually going all the way around and not dipping in so if we hide those sliver surfaces just so you don't see them it'll be a little easier to see the tool path give me a moment here - really there we go by selecting these individual surfaces what's going to happen on my tool path is instead of just going and dipping in now it's gonna go across I'd there we go now you can see it it's going across now you might want to do that for just those regions you could also do it for these regions as well and so I actually made one more surface you can see here and I made one that was even bigger so I basically did an offset of the top and I extended all the edges and then once I have that surface I could then go and make another tool path that just goes and shows me following these surfaces and you can see that it's ignoring all the dips including around the outside edge of the sprocket as well so this surface is really handy it's not just about importing models for designing models and also be used on the cam side of things this is just one of many different ways you might use a surface because you can use surfaces to contain tool paths or to make sure that the tool is always having contact with that surface like I'm showing here there are a lot of different ways you could do it but the key is surface modeling is a great way to achieve it so I showed you a lot of different ways you can use surface modeling I want to just recap some of the tools and surface in the surface toolbar and how they work but let's go back to a new design let's switch over from solid to surface and I'm going to remind you that most of these tools are exactly the same as in the solid tool extrude revolve sweep and loft those already exist they're right here under solid in addition to that though we have patch and we have offset I use those a lot so patch and offset are fantastic patch is going to be what I already showed you to patch a closed loop and then offset is going to be to basically make a copy of a surface but that copy can be with a zero millimeter offset or it can be offset by a certain amount so that could be really helpful as well and we also have here pattern and mirror that is already in the solid modeling tab thickened which is in the modeling to solid modeling tab boundary fill which is very awesome also in the solid modeling tab so really the only surface specific tools that I have here are patch and offset in addition to that I have the modify menu the modify menu also has a lot of the same tools as the settle of modeling man as pull that's their billet and chamfer that's there to trim extend stitch on stitch and reverse normal those are the fancy new tools let's go over those again trim is used to trim a surface using a sketch or using another surface extend is used to extend a surface and it could be a bunch of edges if you want at the same time but if they become a little funny you can do them separately or extend them separately stitch we used a lot unstitch we haven't used yet so let me show you how that would work and I have a great example for you for unstitch and this example actually goes back to the very first thing I showed you which was importing models that have errors so let's go back to our trail 450 let's go back in particular to the motor assembly let's go and find that motor assembly in our browser and let's go and open this separate and then we'll go and take a look if we have any other files and you clean we're going to not use that recovery file does that want to just create it during this live stream that's fine this orange pup file here which happens to be our clutch cover also has an issue let's go and activate that component and also isolate it here I have my clutch cover and just like before what we're gonna do is we're going to try to find our problem using the stitch so I hit stitch select my object oh and I do like to show the bodies folder to see if I have lots of surfaces but it looks like I only have one and if I look at this and let my preview update it's showing me this red region right here let's go and zoom in a little bit and what's showing us is that we have two free edges or like we have a hole in our model now I could use the patch command like I did before but now I'm going to show you a reason you might want to use the unstitch tool right because check this out if I did the patch tool this is what's gonna end up I'm gonna say patch this hole say okay stitch this all together and yes I'm gonna end up with a solid but you're going to still see a remnant of the original issue now our direct editing infusion is actually fantastic so the truth of the matter is that if you switch to the solid modeling tab select this and hit the lead chances are it's going to clean it up we just did which is awesome so awesome but I'm going to show you a different way to do that because you're not always so lucky that you can actually just select the issue and hit delete it just fixes it so let's show you a different way to approach the same problem let's go back in time a little bit well dad there we're gonna go back and say let's unstitch this in two separate bodies and then I could start extending and trimming and stuff so we're gonna go back to surface and I'm gonna say modify unstitch I like to deselect the chain selection because if you select this you're going to end up with like 350 surface bodies at this point you can see that number here that's how many faces there are and they're gonna be a lot of surface bodies it's too many so we're gonna say uncheck the chain selection and I'm gonna unstitch just this surface here the one that I'm going to mess with and I'm gonna say okay and what it did was it on the stitch though it unattached those surfaces from each other and now I have two separate surfaces I have the entire part - that face and then that face or that surface body if we hide the rest of it what I could see here is that problematic area what I could do is I can extend the problematic area well past the issue itself and okay then I could go and show the rest of it now I have this like overlap and overlaps are bad you cannot stitch a model with overlaps or if you can it's going to end up with a really bad model you're not going to want to do that so what you're gonna want to do is you're gonna want to trim that particular face and then stitch together and luckily we've already used our trim tool so I'm going to say trim using the rest of the model as our trim tool and then for what we're going to trim we're gonna want to select this area which is hard to see and therefore hard to select I can potentially select and hold and be able to select this from behind even though I don't see it and that would actually work but I'm going to show you how to do that another way instead we're gonna just go I'll believe that let's try it again we're gonna say trim select this tool hide the tool itself because I don't need it anymore and then I can select the area I want to remove and say okay that area was just trim so now this is nice and clean I have the rest of the surface still there now I could go and try and stitch this all together and it's gonna tell me if it's going to work and it okay and lo and behold now I have a body without that imperfection like face problem there so that's what the unstitched command does and if you wanted to unstitch the entire model you could do that too so I would just go and say modify on stitch select multiple of these things that I want or hit change selection and hit the entire thing you'll end up with a lot of bodies in this case like three hundred and fifty so that's what unstitched up there is another command in here that we haven't talked about yet and that's reverse normal reverse normal is going to flip your surface inside out but not visually it's kind of more about the math behind the surface so a surface is defined on like the in the math behind fusion there's like a side a and there's a side B and the when you try to stitch things together it might try to like line up all the side s and the side B's and it might have some trouble stitching something together so another trick that you can try is reversing the normal on a problematic surface and then try stitching together as well I don't happen to have an example for you to show you today on that but reversed normal can also come in handy the truth is I pretty much never have a chance to use that because fusion does a really good job of bringing in models from other software but just know that that exists as well all the rest of the tools that I see here split face split body move copy align to lead all that magical stuff all of that is exactly the same as solid line so if we summarize for a second the tools that are unique to surfacing are gonna be trim and extend right they make perfect sense stitch and unstitch they make perfect sense now too I hope reversed normal which just flips the math inside out and then lastly on the create side hatch an offset all the other tools are extremely similar if not identical to what you have in the solid modeling it's just a different approach to the same so what I want you to leave today with is a little bit more comfort in the idea that surface modeling can be helpful to you because the reality is that surface modeling is awesome you can make some pretty great things with surface modeling some of those things are really difficult if not impossible to make using solid model but a lot of the other things you could make either way is just a choice you get to choose on which technique you want to use and in some cases I'll use solid modeling and in other cases I'll use surface modeling and in yet other cases I'll use a hybrid modeling approach where I use some solid techniques and some surface techniques to be able to achieve my final result the key though is is that you have so many different ways to do the same thing using 360 is a fusion of different modeling techniques I've only covered today solid modeling and surface modeling there are yet many others as well but between those two you should be able to make incredible things I hope you learned quite a bit today and I hope you learned enough that you want to share this video with other people don't forget to give us a like don't forget to subscribe to our channel we now have a hundred and forty-four thousand subscribers and climbing and if you don't already own fusion 360 please feel free to reach out we're happy to help you with that I hope you have a great day and don't forget with fusion 360 you can make anything thank you so much you

Channel: Autodesk Fusion 360

Views: 58,181

Keywords: fusion 360, autodesk, design, engineering, mechanical design, mechanical engineering, industrial design, product design, software, CAD, CAD software, Computer Aided Design, Modeling, 3D software, Autodesk fusion 360, cloud based CAD, CAD in the cloud, cloud, Free CAD, Free CAD Software, Autodesk CAD, cloud manufacturing, free CAD program, 3D CAD solution, computer aided design, free software, 3d modeling tutorial, Surface Modeling, Surfacing, 3D Surfacing, Jason Lichtman

Id: HmgwKewMcw8

Length: 84min 47sec (5087 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 09 2020