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

Rendering the ghost

The RENDER workspace is a great tool to showcase your models and show what they can look like in the real world with textures. We will use the same ghost model within the same workspace, so if you closed the ghost model file, open it back up. Click on the DESIGN workspace button at the top left and then select RENDER.

Figure 12.32 – The RENDER workspace location

Figure 12.32 – The RENDER workspace location

Note that this environment has far fewer buttons than any other one we’ve worked on before. There is only the SETUP panel, the IN-CANVAS RENDER panel, the RENDER panel, and, within those drop-down arrows, not many other options.

Figure 12.33 – The RENDER environment overview

Figure 12.33 – The RENDER environment overview

Our ghost seems to have a dark, shiny material applied to it. This is because all default materials in Fusion 360 start off as metal materials. There are two ways to change the material in Fusion 360, and we will look at these in the next section.

Changing...