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 a 2D parametric reference model

Let’s take the middle-sized water bottle and use that for our reference. Remember, since Fusion 360 is a parametric model, we can easily create the other models just by changing the dimensions. This time, we will use the parametric manager and use labels such as length, width, and height to change the size of the bottle.

Starting a new project

Open Fusion 360, hit the Save button, and create a folder within your PACKT Publishing project, naming it Ch08 Bottle Reference. Now name the Fusion 360 file Bottle. Change the Units to Millimeter since we took all dimensions in millimeters (refer to Chapter 7 in order to see how to change the units if required).

We can either start the sketches, add the dimensions, and then use the Change Parameters manager to add the parametric label names, or we start off by adding the the Length, Width, and Height parametric names first since we know what names we want to use. Either way, you can always...