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

The Edit Form tool

The Edit Form tool is one of the main tools that you will be using within the FORM environment since it can do a variety of things, such as scale, move, and rotate, all within the same tool. Here is a list that displays the different tools we will use:

  1. Edit Form tool location
  2. Edit Form tool window
  3. Set Pivot
  4. Scale in all directions
  5. Scale along axis
  6. Move along axis
  7. Move along plane
  8. Rotate handles
Figure 11.24 – The Edit Form tool information

Figure 11.24 – The Edit Form tool information

One of the most important things when using the Edit Form tool is to be aware that you should not create self-intersecting geometry. This means do not overlap faces, points, or edges. If this happens, then Fusion 360 will display a warning that you need to find and fix these errors or it will not create a solid 3D model. We will go over this next.

Fixing a broken mesh body

There are times when the mesh body may look correct in the Create Form environment...