You MUST KNOW THIS as a Fusion 360 User!! - Day 4

hey guys and welcome to day number four in this video i will talk about some basics that are absolutely crucial to understand if you are a fusion 360 user i will talk about the difference between polygon meshes and solids i will show you how to create solids how to turn them into surfaces and how to turn these surfaces back into solids again i will talk about t-splines and i will show you how fusion handles meshes let's get started before we continue i have prepared this chart to give you a quick overview about the different types of 3d models and geometric modeling on the left we can find fusion 360. among other ced applications they all work with b-reps b-reps is short for boundary representations which basically describes the technology behind building solids and surfaces and solids and surfaces are also the material we are working with here some of the technology is the nurbs curves and nerve surfaces and sometimes also t-splines and the procedure here is parametric modeling which means that you are building 3d models using parameters procedural modeling this is the complex type of modeling where you enter mathematical values and then generate these very complex 3d models automatically and then also for instance direct modeling or direct editing where you deactivate the design history and manipulate and modify the solids and surfaces on the fly some examples for ced applications here are of course fusion 360. invento fusion 360 was previously a part of inventor then solidworks cadilla siemens nx rhino 3d and muy3d when you look at the right side of this chart we have polygonal modeling that deals with triangle meshes and polygon meshes they sometimes start with point clouds that you receive from 3d scanning we have vertices here that are connected with edges and then turned into faces and these faces are then turned into surfaces and complex models and some procedures or approaches here are subdivision surface modeling digital sculpting or the traditional classic box modeling popular software packages are 3ds max maya blender cbrush cinema 4d modo and lightwave generally speaking everything on the left gets created with the purpose of later production and by production i really mean to turn the drawings and designs into physical goods and technology and many models on the right side stay in a digital environment like games or visual effects for instance but also keep in mind that both areas overlap each other so you would have to turn a model that you've created in fusion 360 into a polygonal or triangle mesh to make it 3d printable now keep this rough overview in mind when i show you what different types of models fusion 360 is able to handle in the next few minutes let's start with solids first i'm in the design environment here the solid tab is open and there are several different ways to create solids so again like i've mentioned before do not focus too much on the single steps it's totally okay if you are not able to follow them it's more about the general concept in this video so i start with a sketch i pick the top plane i hit the s key to open up the sketch shortcuts i pick the rectangle and draw a rectangle on the top plane now i exit or finish the sketch add some volume to our two-dimensional line drawing so that i can turn it into a box like so i hit ok and now i select the top plane of the box go to create and this time instead of starting with a circle i pick a cylinder solid and draw this cylinder right on top of our box add some height make sure that the operation is set to join and then i click on ok now when i move over to the browser and open up this bodies folder i have one solid body inside and i can prove that this one is a solid by going to the inspect drop down menu pick section analysis choose a plane move this plane over like so and whenever you see this cross hatching it indicates that we are dealing with a solid body so let me quickly get rid of the section analysis and when i right click on the body and go to the properties i can also prove that this is a solid because we have a surface area here and we have a volume and of course a volume only appears when we are dealing with solid objects now let's make this a little bit more interesting and turn the solid into a surface model and for this reason i switch over to the surface tab i select one of the planes of the box and hit the delete key on the keyboard and now we have turned the solid into an open surface model so this means we can look inside the object and the planes that previously comprise the solid volume are now paper thin we have an outside and an inside the inside gets illustrated in a yellow color and the outside is whatever your material is and at the same time also the icon over here in our browser has changed from the white solid box into this orange open surface i can again prove that we are no longer dealing with a solid model by right clicking on the body over here go to properties and as you can see the volume is zero and this means uh it's not a solid object anymore and the same goes for the inspect tool the section analysis if i pick the plane and move the plane over no cross hatching appears and this means we are dealing with a surface model now a surface model is not a bad thing by any means you have a lot of tools available to adjust the surface model and you can eventually turn it into a solid later on so let me try a few things here i'm gonna select all of the faces then i go to create offset and offset them by minus four so my goal here is to give our box with a cylinder on top a little bit of thickness and as you can see i have now an outside shell and an inside shell and like i have mentioned before the faces are turning outwards when they have the material color and when you look at the rear side or the back side of the faces they have this yellow color so when we add some thickness to the object it makes sense that the inner body faces inwards and so i select it go to modify and reverse the normals like so so you probably already get an idea of what i'm trying to do here and then i simply close this opening here by using the loft tool so i go to create again pick loft then i add the first profile i select all of these edges i add a second profile select the inside edges like so then fusion already creates the cap for me i click on ok gets added as a separate or as a third body then i go to modify again reverse the normals and now i end up with an outside shell with an inside shell and with our cap if you observe the model in this stage it looks like a solid so you cannot tell any difference but when you use the section analysis again the model remains hollow inside or in the area between our faces here and this is because all of the components are not welded or knitted together so i go to the stitch tool select all of our faces here and the outside shell and now the green line indicates where the stitching is going to take place and when i now click ok the operation ends in a new solid body so when you look at the browser here the three surface component parts disappear and i end up with only one solid body i go to the section analysis and the cross hatching appears again so this means that we are dealing now with a solid body that also has volume as we can see right here now it's time to point out something that is absolutely fundamental to many many cat programs and this is the parametric design history or the parametric history and i'm talking about this little toolbar down here and as you have probably already noticed it gets longer and longer with each operation i perform on the model and it actually captures everything i do so it allows me to scroll back in time so to speak and to make changes on the very first sketch for instance or the offset that i have performed or the stitching or the loft that i have created so i can drag this little line back in time to the initial sketch so let me show the sketch as you can see the browser now only contains a sketch there is no body because at this stage of my creation no solid was created so if i move it over to the right you can see that now the body appears because i did an extrusion at the next step was the cylinder that i have placed on top followed by deleting the surface that we had an offset and i have reversed the normals i have closed the gap with a loft feature i have reversed these normals too and last but not least i have stitched everything together and here you can also see that i had three uh surfaces before the stitching and after the stitching i turned it into a solid body now you may ask what this is good for and the cool thing is i cannot only go back in time but i can also change all of the functions and features that i have applied to the model so for instance if i scroll back to the offset double click on the little icon and i can now change the a previously defined value of -4 to something like let's say -12 and hit okay and when i move the slider over to the right again everything updates accordingly so the loft gets updated and also the stitching and we turn the thing again into a solid body you have to be careful with these operations because it depends on how well you have constructed the model this starts with the initial sketch and also the features that you apply step by step so it requires some experience to build models where you can scroll back in time make large adjustments and have the model updated when you move the slider over to the right again i remember that when i became aware of this function and the workflow i was absolutely blown away by it having a background in 3ds max and zbrush it means that whenever a client wants me to change something i sometimes have to rebuild the entire model and with this feature or with this function i can simply go back in history make my adjustments and have an updated model in seconds it also comes with a slight downside though you have to plan and you have to prepare your model and all of the steps up to the final model in a way that allows you to go back and make these adjustments so let's see if i can demonstrate what i mean by this and when i go back to the initial sketch and right click on the sketch and click on edit and let's make it uh wider like so and then i finish the sketch and drag the timeline over to the right i get prompted with a bunch of warnings and arrow messages it looks kind of right we still have a solid but something went wrong with the surface offset here so i go back to the surface offset double click on the feature here it looks okay i got no arrow messages i click ok on the dialog box and it seems to be fixed and now i move the slider slowly to the right watch how the model gets rebuilded and this small adjustment already seems to fix the problem but i'm dealing here with a very very simple model it gets way more complex and complicated if you're building highly complex models that consist of several different parts or surfaces now before you ask do i have to start with a sketch do i have to turn the solid into a surface model make my adjustments and convert it back into a solid model again the answer to this question is no it really doesn't matter where you start and how you start usually only the result is what matters of course it depends a little bit on how many changes you expect to make once the model is created but all in all it doesn't really matter what kind of tools you use or what kind of workflow you use to come up with the finished model i can for instance try to rebuild the same thing with a different method so create a new document and instead of starting with a sketch i start with a box primitive or box solid right away i define the top plane as my starting plane give it some height click ok then i do the same for the cylinder i select top plane again and create a solid cylinder on top you could of course also draw a circle and extrude the circle now i give the whole thing some thickness and i do this by enabling the section analysis first so that we can see what's going on in the inside and then i click on the shell command select the entire body and write something like four millimeters boom there you have it let me hide the section view again and all that's amazing now is the opening at the front here so i simply select this plane create a new sketch select the plane one more time reject the edges like so and then i select the edges and offset them by -4 and last but not least i push this box to the inside click okay and we have created the same or at least a similar object like i have created before when i was turning the solid into a surface model and back into a solid again when you now look at the bottom of the screen you can see that the parametric history looks a little bit different than like what we had before but of course the same principles are still true when i go back to the initial object the box i can double click on it change its dimensions so let's lower the height a little bit click ok then the cylinder should follow because i have placed it on the top plane of the box the shell command is still valid and the same also goes for the cutouts of the front plane and when i now continue to add additional features like fillets for instance you can see that the timeline continues to extend to the right now i have shown you a lot of the basics in the last 10 minutes but what i'm gonna show you now is really amazing and it blew my mind when i first became aware of and it's one of the reasons why i'm so interested in fusion 360. and it's a function that is called direct modeling or direct editing and this means you can adjust the model without relying on the parametric history and this means you can delete or deactivate the design history and this can be done when you click at the top component part and go down to do not capture design history this option is also available in the right bottom corner right here do not capture design history and when i click this i get prompted with a warning that the timeline and all design histories will be removed so i'm okay with this and by doing so the timeline disappears i can now continue to adjust the model by simply selecting the faces let's say i would like to get rid of this wall here then i simply select the inside face activate the move command make sure that it is set to free move and then i offset the face and move it to the outside and this looks like i'm going to mess up the entire area here but as soon as i click ok fusion takes care of this section it removes the wall and it cleans up the area so this is absolutely fantastic i can do the same thing with the entire inner section here by selecting the bottom plane and offset this plane or this phase by moving it to the top so it intersects with the geometry that we have here at the top and when i click ok fusion closes the entire area i can further adjust the dimensions or the size of certain parts so i switch to the select phase mode and select the topmost part and then i simply move it up a little bit and click on ok and fusion updates the model on the fly i can also get rid of them entirely by selecting them and simply hit delete and when i'm in the direct editing or direct modeling mode i can still use any of the functions that i can find here so let's apply a shell again i select the entire body type in four millimeters click okay then i select the outer face offset it a little bit to the inside and when i click okay to this command i have removed the front face so that we can see the inside of the box again when you do not have any previous experience in other cad applications then you might think that this behavior is standard but i can guarantee that it's not it makes the entire modeling process a lot more straightforward a lot more intuitive and it's also a huge relief when you have to deal with surface models and solids that you import from another application in this case the parametric history is missing and you had a hard time making adjustments on the model so sometimes you had to reverse engineer the entire part to make it work but in fusion 360 you simply grab the faces move them around delete them add additional parts and you can do all of this on the fly now this is all you need to know about solids and surface models for the moment i will also talk a lot more about direct modeling and direct editing in the upcoming videos but for now i would like to show you two additional 3d models fusion is able to handle and the first one is the freeform or the t-spline object and the second one is the mesh and when i was deleting the parametric history before i got access to two additional tabs at the top so the first one is the form tab and the second one is the mesh tab and now let me get rid of this body here and i go to the form tab and choose let's say i start with a simple box again i select the top plane where it is here it is and then i simply draw one of these free form boxes like so give it some hide and then i click on ok this little guy looks like a solid but it's actually not you can tell this by the different icon in the browser and when i click on it and select the properties you can see that i do not have any surface area or any volume the same goes for the section analysis it is empty inside so there is no cross hatching and this means it's also not a solid at least not yet i can turn it into a solid but before this i would like to take advantage of some of the functions and features that are only available on form objects or t-spline objects i do not want to go into great detail here the most important thing is that you are aware that freeform objects exist and as you have already seen here there is a lot to cover so let me quickly activate modify and simply extrude some of these faces and one of the characteristics of these t-spline objects is that they always remain smooth so there is always a smooth connection between the single faces and let me try to extrude these faces here too like so and i hit ok and then let's maybe try to bridge two faces together so go to the drop down menu of the modify tab search for bridge here it is then i select this face and this one over here let's see if this works yes it works perfectly so you can create very complex organic models using free forms and t-splines last but not least you can also convert them into solids again by using the utilities here convert and now i select t spline to b rep so b rep stands for boundary representation which is another term for solids i leave it at b reps i select the entire model i want to create a new body and then i click on ok it takes a second and here i have a new solid that is appended to the list and when i go to the inspect section analysis again we can see that it is a solid and i can then perform any operations that are available for solids before i end this video let's take a quick look on how fusion handles meshes and as you now already know the mesh tab becomes available if you delete the parametric history it also becomes available when you go to file and open a mesh from here now let me continue with the solid that i have here and turn it into a mesh so i click on b wrap to mesh this requires me to select a solid fusion provides me with a preview and then i simply click ok when you now take a close look at your resulting mesh you will see that it only consists of triangles and this is because fusion is only able to apply the functions on the modified to triangular meshes so this means that when i perform a playing card for instance i simply select the mesh and then i can move the cutting plane around and let me show you what happens uh in case the mesh consists of four-sided polygons and for this reason i create a new document and as long as the canvas is empty or as long as our browser history here is empty i do not have access to the mesh tab and let me close this window again and open a mesh that i have prepared and this one consists of quads so this means that when i now go to mesh and try to perform a plane cut i am not able to select the object anymore and this is because it consists of four-sided polygons but you can do something else with these type of meshes and this function is available in the form tab under utilities convert and here i cannot only convert a t-spline into a b-rep or a b-rep into a t-spline but also a quad mesh into t-splines so i select this option select the mesh click okay and then fusion turns my mesh into a free-form t-spline object again so let me quickly try to bridge a few faces here i'm gonna select these four and four faces on the other side click ok and then i activate modify selective faces in the middle move them up a little bit probably try to scale them down like so now again this is only possible with meshes that consists or that are made out of four sided polygons now all in all it looks like that we do not have that many functions available when it comes to adjust meshes in fusion but this is also totally understandable because it doesn't have to be one of the main strengths of this software all right then that's it for this video thanks for watching the whole thing i hope i was able to clear a few things up when it comes to different object types and how fusion handles them i think it's a good idea to talk about these basic concepts early on because we have to deal with this fundamentals throughout the entire series now thumbs up if you like the content subscribe and leave a comment in case you have any further questions see you in the next one

Channel: 3D Gladiator

Views: 2,744

Keywords: 3d gladiator, fusion 360, cad, cad design, inventor, solidworks, 3d modeling, blender, autodesk, industrial designer, industrial design, cg artist, 3d printing, cnc milling, cnc, 3d design, 3d artist, freelancer, designer, manufacturing, Design for manufacturability, 3d printer, cam, shapeways, 3dconnexion, wacom, 3d scanning, 3d scanner, diy, autodesk fusion 360, how to, fusion 360 tutorial, learn fusion 360 in 30 days, learn fusion 360 or die trying, Fusion 360 tutorial kevin kennedy

Id: ifL2v_3pkCg

Length: 26min 45sec (1605 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020