Book Image

Improving CAD Designs with Autodesk Fusion 360

By : Kevin Michael Land
Book Image

Improving CAD Designs with Autodesk Fusion 360

By: Kevin Michael Land

Overview of this book

Autodesk Fusion 360 has become an indispensable tool for designers, tinkerers, and engineers worldwide thanks to its versatility that allows for large-scale assemblies and smaller, quick 3D prints. If you’ve faced challenges with learning Fusion 360, this book will help you overcome them and build the confidence to design your own projects, explaining step-by-step instructions and the purpose of each tool. In this book, you’ll dive into the design workspace and learn sketching fundamentals such as setting up a component, recognizing when a sketch is fully constrained, and parametrically flexing models. Through trial and error, you’ll work on multiple easy-to-build projects to create simple, useful items that can be quickly 3D printed for use around the house and then advance to much bigger projects that require joint connectivity and large assemblies. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to sketch fully parametric designs, translate them into 3D models, and create your own unique designs.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: Simple, Fun Projects for Around the Home
7
Part 2: Bicycle Water Bottle Holder Project
13
Part 3: FORM Modeling Techniques
17
Part 4: Working with 2D and 3D Scanned Images

Creating the Bottle Reference Model

In this chapter, we will use the calipers from Chapter 6 and take the dimensions of a water bottle to create a reference model for our water bottle holder, which we will create in the next chapter. The water bottle that we create will be used to manipulate the size of the bottle holder so that if a change is needed, we can adjust the size of the bottle to adjust the size of the holder. This chapter is mainly about creating a 3D model, which does not contain all the fully detailed features such as bottle-cap threads or a hollow bottle. We will learn more about creating parametrics and using those parametrics to manipulate the shape of the bottle body.

We will learn how to model a bottle from the dimensions measured with our calipers and then put those dimensions into Fusion 360. We will then use the Change Parameters tool to adjust those dimensions to create the other bottle sizes.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main...