Hey everyone, Aaron here from Gough Custom! Today I want to give you a quick intro into a software
tool that I use every day, and that I love, called Fusion 360. So what the hell is Fusion? Fusion is
a CAD package, a "computer-aided design" package, primarily geared towards industrial design.
So building cars, machinery, or in my case, knives! Fusion is a 'parametric' CAD package,
which means that if you were to draw a box in Fusion, each side of the box would have a
dimension associated with it, a parameter, and if you go back and change those dimensions and then
your entire drawing will update. This is a paradigm that works really well for maintaining
complex drawings over longer periods of time, I've used a lot of different CAD packages and I've
really liked fusion 360, it's the one that I've ended up sticking with.
In today's tutorial we're gonna go and design a lego brick, fairly simple object but it's
gonna cover a lot of the stuff that you need to start feeling comfortable with Fusion!
Before we get started a quick note on computer hardware... Like all CAD packages
Fusion requires some grunt in your computer, it doesn't require the latest and greatest,
but if you're trying to run it on a 12 year old thin and light laptop you're probably going to
have a bad time. In this video I'm going to be using a 2015 macbook pro with 16 gig of RAM,
anything similar spec or better and you'll be totally fine.
If you are on a laptop don't bother trying to use the trackpad, it does work but it's really
painful, make sure you get yourself a little bluetooth mouse or a corded mouse, something
with a middle button and a scroll wheel and you'll have a much better time! Okay let's get stuck in!
Okay so here we have Fusion 360 open, and we have a blank design. This is exactly what
you'll see when you open Fusion for the first time. Up at the top here we have our toolbar,
and then on the left hand side here we have the object tree,
which shows all of the objects in your drawing, and then down at the bottom here we have what's
called the history bar, so this will let you step back and forth through the process
of creating your model. Let's start with something very simple, we're just going to
draw a box. This will allow us to demonstrate a bunch of the core features of Fusion 360.
So step number one we want to create a 'sketch', we want to create a 2D drawing that's going
to become the basis of our 3D object. So up here you're going to go to the create menu,
then you're going to click 'create sketch', then it shows you the surfaces on which you
can create a sketch. These are called 'planes', they're basically like imaginary flat surfaces,
and our default drawing starts with three planes already in it, and these are our origin planes.
So we want to choose this one which is the 'XY origin plane', and this is the one that kind of
lies horizontally like a piece of paper on a desk. So we're just going to click on this bottom one.
So now we get a different workspace this is called the 'sketch workspace'.
Up here at the top you can see that we have a new set of tools and if we click create,
now we can create lines, rectangles, circles, etc...
So the first thing we're going to do is create a rectangle. So I'm just going to choose the 'two
point rectangle' tool, and I'm going to click and drag and create a rectangle. Now this rectangle
doesn't have any dimensions, we don't know how big it is, so now we're going to go create,
sketch dimension, and we're going to choose the top line and then drag up and so right now it says
it's 4.9 inches, so we'll change that to 5 inches. And then we're going to choose the left hand side,
we're going to drag off to the side, and it says 2.9 inches. I'm going to change that to 3 inches.
Okay so with our very basic box drawing, our rectangular drawing, completed we're just going
to go over here and click 'finish sketch', this will take us out of sketch mode and back into the
primary workspace. And then by clicking down the middle button on your mouse and dragging
around you'll be able to 'pan' the camera so we can look at different parts of our drawing,
and then holding down shift and clicking down the middle mouse
you can 'orbit' the camera so we can look at the objects from different views.
To create a 3D object out of this 2D sketch what we need to do is go create, extrude, and this will
allow us to extrude our drawing into the 3D world. So here you can see we've already got the blue
inside of the rectangle highlighted, we're just going to grab this arrow and drag it up, and now
you can see that we've got a 3D box. So we want this to be two inches tall, so we're just going to
in this box we're just going to type two inches and hit enter and now we've got a 3D object!
So one of the really cool things, the coolest thing I think, about Fusion 360 is that as I
said it's 'parametric', what that means is that we can actually go back and change things and then
our final drawing, so this box that we're seeing, will change. So down here we can see our original
sketch, and we can also find our sketch here in the object tree, so here we can see 'sketch 1'
and if we right click on either of these we can see we have a whole bunch of
options and one of them is 'edit sketch'. So if we go to one of these and we click 'edit
sketch' we get back to our two dimensional sketch view, and then if we change this to be two inches
and we hit enter, now we see our 2D drawing has changed. And then when we click 'finish sketch',
we now have a changed and updated 3D object as well!
Okay so to demonstrate some further core features of Fusion 360, let's go through and change this
simple box until it looks like a lego brick! Now it might seem crazy to, you know we're aiming to
make a knife, but now I'm talking about boxes and lego bricks but just bear with me. If you are not
familiar with Fusion 360 it's very easy to get overwhelmed with all the steps involved in making
a knife, or making a more complicated object, so we're just going to walk through it nice
and slowly so you're able to get a grasp on every stage. So let's go down here and edit our sketch
and we're going to turn this back to three inches deep, so we have a nice rectangle.
Then on top of that we want to create another sketch to create the little circular nubs that
are part of a lego brick, so what we're going to do is go up here to create, click 'create sketch',
and then choose the top surface of our box. So one of the really nice things about making
sketches is you can create them on any flat surface, it doesn't have to just be
the origin planes like we originally used, so we're going to click the top of the box
and then we're going into a two-dimensional view facing looking downward onto the top of that box.
So the first thing we want to do is to create a circle, so we're going to go to create,
we're going to go down to circle, and we're going to choose 'center diameter circle'.
So we'll click that and then click somewhere on the top of our box and we want that to be
a 1 inch diameter circle so we're just going to type one inch and hit enter, and now you can see
one of the cool things because we typed in the dimension while creating this object it actually
comes with a dimension for us, so here it's saying one inch diameter which is perfect.
But it's not positioned nicely relative to the top of this box, so we're going to go to create,
'sketch dimension', and we're going to choose the center point of the circle
and then the top of this box and that's going to allow us to change the dimension between the
center of the circle and the top of that that square. So let's change this to be
0.75 inches so that's going to move our circle just a little bit there, and then we're going to
create another dimension, create, 'sketch dimension', and we're going to do it from
the right hand side, so we click the center of the circle, and the right hand side of the box,
drag it up and let's change this to be also 0.75 inches.
So now we have a circle that's perfectly positioned on the top of our block, and we're
going to click 'finish sketch'. Now obviously this doesn't make it look like a lego brick,
so we have to do a couple little more things, the first thing we're going to do is create another
extrusion, so we're going to go up here to create, extrude, and then click the inside of this circle
and then we're going to drag it up, and so let's drag it up a quarter of an inch and we'll click ok
and now we've got one nub sticking up out at the top of our box.
Now on the top of our little lego brick we actually need six nubs sticking up,
the naive way to do this, the very straightforward way to do this, would be to draw six circles
in our sketch and then to extrude all of those circles. But part of the power of Fusion 360 is
that there are lots and lots of tools to minimize that kind of labor, that kind of repetitive work,
so in order to create six of these we're actually going to create what's called a 'pattern' which
takes an existing feature and then multiplies it in a pattern. So if we go up here to create, and
we go down here to 'pattern', and then we choose 'rectangular pattern' we can now create a pattern
of this nub. And to do that we're going to change the type from 'faces' to 'feature',
and what that does is it allows us to choose the type of thing that we want to create a
pattern from, and then we're going to go down here into our history bar and we're going to
choose this extrusion which is the last thing that we did, that's how we extruded that nub,
and you can see when I hover over this the little nub highlights. So I'm going to click that and
then we can choose the directions in which we want to recreate this pattern. We're going to
click on the direction button and then we're going to click on the edge to say we want the pattern to
be aligned with this edge, then we're going to drag the arrow to multiply the feature in that
direction. Then we can go back and use the other arrow here, near the original nub, to drag the
pattern in its second direction. Now obviously we have too many of these nubs here, we have nine,
we only want six so what we're going to do is go over here to the rectangular pattern toolbar
and change the second quantity from 3 to 2, and that'll give us our six nubs. Now it looks pretty
good, it might not be perfect but it's close enough for our purposes! So I'm just gonna hit ok,
and now you can see we have something that's starting to look like a lego brick!
Now the underside of a lego brick is always hollow so they can snap together,
but in this case ours is still solid so we need to go through and hollow this out.
To do that I'm going to go to create, I'm going to create another sketch,
and I'm going to create that sketch on the bottom surface. Now one thing that's interesting when you
create a sketch is that it includes the geometry of whichever plane you've placed it on, so you can
see I've already got these four sides. That makes our life really easy in this case because all we
want to do is make a rectangle that's a little bit smaller than the bottom, so to do that we're
going to go up here to the modify toolbar and then we're going to choose 'offset' and we can
hover over the outside edge of this rectangle. We see it highlights blue,
if we click on that we can then drag it to any size that we want to create an offset sketch.
So let's offset this by minus 0.25 inches, like so, and then we'll just hit 'ok'. So now we've
got another line here that represents the area that we want to remove, so we'll click 'finish
sketch' and then to remove the material from the inside of here we're going to use extrude again,
because extrude isn't just for adding material, you can also use it to take away material. So
we're going to go create, extrude, we're going to choose this middle section, so we'll click on it,
and then you can grab the arrow and drag it down. Now one thing is if we go too far,
or if you were to change the height of the the brick in the future,
then this extrude might cut all the way through the brick like it is now which isn't very useful.
So what you can do is you can actually just click on the top surface and that'll extrude exactly
to the top surface, but if we want it to be offset from that top surface then over here we
can choose 'to object' instead of 'distance' for the 'extent', we can choose the top, and then we
can choose an offset, so we can say minus 0.25, and what that will do is it will extrude it to
a quarter inch 0.25 inches away from that top surface. So that means that in the future no
matter how we adjust the height of this lego brick it will still be hollowed out correctly! So
with that done we can click 'ok', and now we've got a hollow lego brick which is awesome!
Now when you're designing something like this you might not know whether or not the walls
are the correct thickness, you might not know whether it's all as you would
like for it to be in the cross section, so an easy way to check that is to go up here to 'inspect',
and then go down to 'section analysis' and what this does is it's going to allow us to create a
'section view' that cuts our object in half so we can see what the cross section looks like,
and we're going to just choose one of your origin planes, you can choose whichever one
you want but I'm going to choose this one and you can see now it gives us a view of the lego brick
cut in half which is awesome! And that actually doesn't alter the model at all,
we can turn it on and off by going over here to the object tree going to 'analysis' and then
turning on and off the section view. So if you need to see how thick or thin something is, you
know part way through an object, then you can use a section analysis like this in order to do that.
So this looks like a lego brick now, but you know if you've ever stood on a lego brick
you know they're pretty pointy, but they're actually not perfectly sharp on the corners,
they are just rounded over a little bit. So to do that, to add those 'fillets' what we're
going to do is come up here to 'modify' then choose 'fillet', and then you can choose all
of these edges that we want to round over. So we want to round over all of these outside edges,
so we're just going to go around and click each of these until they're highlighted blue,
and we're going to go around in here and we're going to choose the inside surfaces,
inside edges I should say!
Last one, and then we can set a dimension for how much we would like to radius all of these
filleted edges. So there I've just changed it to 50 thousandaths, let's make it a little bigger 100
thousandths and hit enter. So 0.1 inches. And now we've got a lego brick with nice rounded corners,
nubs on top, it's hollowed out on the bottom and everything about this is parametric! So if we
wanted to change the size of these nubs we could go down here and change the original drawing,
so we could change this to be 0.5 inches and then do finish sketch we have tiny little nubs.
If we wanted there to be more nubs we could go down here to the pattern, right click on it,
say 'edit feature' and then change the quantity. So we could change it to four that way,
and three the other way, we could have a whole bunch of nubs on the top if that's what we want!
And then we could also change the height of it, so we could go here to the first extrude, right
click on it, say 'edit feature' and then rather than two inches let's say that it's 1.5 inches.
And because we used an offset to change the height, the the depth,
of this cut for the hollowing out of the inside, the whole lego brick still works correctly!
So here you can see the power of
the parametric modeling. We can make changes, even pretty drastic ones, very easily and
still maintain all of the relationships within this design that we care about.
Okay so before I end this first tutorial let's have a really quick look at a couple of other
super useful tools within Fusion. The first one is this 'measure' tool. So if you click inspect
and then this one that looks like a measuring tape, 'measure', this lets you measure the
distance from any object to any other object. So if we choose this flat surface on the side,
and then we rotate around and we choose the opposite flat surface,
it'll show us with this little measuring stick here that that's three inches. If we go over here
we can change which units we're using, so we can change it to millimeters as the secondary unit,
and we can also restart the selection. So we could say okay show us the distance
from the middle of this thing to the side of the lego brick, it'll show us.
This is really, really, useful in a whole lot of different scenarios. I use it a lot so I just
wanted to point this out. One of the other things that you should really think about when making a
drawing in Fusion 360, especially if it's going to be a drawing that you potentially keep for a long
time, is organization. So over here in our object tree we can see that we have three sketches,
but just looking at them we don't really know which is which. We'd have to go and turn them on
and off to see which ones are which, but if you select one of these and then click on the name
again you can actually change the name of the sketches. So this one would be brick outline,
the second one is the nub on the top, 'top nub', and then this third one is the brick inside.
Naming things like this makes it so much easier to navigate a complicated drawing,
so it's very worth keeping in mind naming things as you go through the process of creating them.
So as you can imagine what I've shown you in this video barely scratches the surface of what Fusion
360 is capable of. I use Fusion every day and it's such a deep program that I'm still not familiar
with all the ins and outs of what it's capable of, but that's fine, what I've shown you in this video
will take you a long way if you're just working on simple projects. In the next video we're going to
build on top of this knowledge to design a knife from start to finish in Fusion! So if you'd like
to see that please make sure to subscribe, and to hit the notification bell so you get
notified when I upload that video. Hope you guys enjoyed this video, and I'll see you again soon!
If you learned something from this video, and would like to help me make more like it,
please consider supporting my work on patreon! The link to my patreon page
is just in the description underneath the video.