Autodesk Fusion For Beginners - 3D Model a pattern on a curved surface

1. Autodesk Fusion Class Introduction: Welcome to this parametric lampshade project. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Martin, a landscape engineer, a professional in the AEC industries, a university CAD teacher, and a maker. I use Autodesk Fusion a lot in my side business. I create physical items for my ETSY business, classes on this platform, and I also post tutorials on YouTube. My first experience with CAD software was a landscape engineering project about ten years ago. We probably made a two dimensional bench or something like that. I work with different CAD software on a regular basis, and Autodesk Fusion, the CAD software you learn more about in this project is the CAD software I'm most passionate about. The opportunity to cover the entire process from design to manufacturing within one program is amazing. In this project, we mix some fundamental Autodesk Fusion techniques into a smooth and easy workflow and create a parmetric lampshade. Working with parameters has many advantages as you will see throughout the project. Everyone is on a personal track on their 3D modeling learning journey. The lessons are divided into short segments, so it will be easy for you to find, watch and rewatch relevant parts on your computer or why not on your phone. I hope to see you in the next lesson where we talk more about your project assignment. Thank you. 2. Project Assignment: Your project assignment is to upload a photo of your parametric lampshade to the project gallery. You can either upload a real picture of your 3D printed design or why not a digital photo of your Autodesk Fusion rendering. Your lampshade should have a pattern and an angle between the top and the bottom. Be sure to keep a safety marginal between your lampshade and your lamp, so you don't cause an accident. I'll do my best to leave feedback on your work and look forward to seeing your creative ideas posted online. See you in the next lesson, where we will follow the first rule of Autodesk Fusion. Thank you. 3. Save your project and create a component: Give yourself a good start and save your project. After that, open design shortcuts with keyboard shortcut S and search for new component. The first rule of Autodesk Fusion is to work with components. This best practice has many benefits. Some examples are the ability to collect actions that belong to the same component in the same timeline and the ability to assemble components into a finished product. Give you component a logical name and make sure to activate it. We have started the project in a great way. See you in the next lesson where we set up some user parameters. Thank you. 4. Set up Parameters in Autodesk Fusion: If I could go back in time and change one thing on my Autodesk Fusion journey, then I'd start working with parameters earlier. If you're new to parameters, just trust me that this will make sense as you proceed with your project. I want to set up a design, and I want to be able to change the size of the entire design with just a few actions while I keep the ratios of different product dimensions. The dimensions I use for my project are from a good looking lamp shade I have in my home. You can use other dimensions for your project. Press plus and start with your first parameter. I will name this Fusion parameter bottom and give it a dimension 100 millimeters. I'll name the second parameter Top. The expression will be bottom times 0.7. I'll name my third Parameter height. The value will be bottom times 1.2. My fourth parameter will be called basefoot. This one is fixed at 37 millimeters since the lamp shade must fit the lamp. You'll see what I mean when we proceed with the project in the coming lessons. The fifth perimeter is called thickness, and I set this to 2 millimeters. Just like the fourth parameter, this parameter has no relation to the first three parameters. The sixth parameter is called emboss. I'll set this as thickness times 0.7, and I'm just exploring here. I could have set this thickness two times 0.8 or 0.6 or 0.5 as well. Those are our parameters, and it's okay if you're confused. You'll see why we did this soon. But first, see you in the next lesson where we set up a new construction plane. Thank you. 5. Create a construction plane in Autodesk Fusion: You're taking a class on a 3D printed lampshade and we have not even started on the lampshade sketch. Instead, we create components, set up parameters, and now a construction plane. You might wonder why. The reason is because we want to be able to create, edit, and make variations of the lampshade with very few actions. So, onto the construction plane, we'll make an offset plane and we'll set the height to our user parameter height. You now have two different construction planes at a distance equal to the user parameter height. Let's make some sketches in the next lesson. Thank you. 6. Sketch with user Parameters in Autodesk Fusion: It's tempting to press the sketch button in the top left corner, but the Pro Tip is to activate design shortcuts with keyboard shortcut S. Search for sketch and select the construction plane for your sketch. Press keyboard shortcut C to activate the circle commando. The blue infill indicates that circle is activated. Start your circle in the center of the canvas and set the dimension to basefoot. Create a second circle and set the dimension to bottom, or whatever you call your custom user parameter. Activate sketch shortcuts with keyboard shortcut S and finish your sketch. Create a new sketch, but select the upper construction plane this time. You see here why it was so convenient to sketch in the center of the origo. You can place this circle on top of the other circles. I'll use the user parameter top for this circle and then exit a sketch environment via the sketch shortcuts. We have about 80% of our lampshade now, and we can't even see it. See you in the next lesson where we connect your circles. Thank you. 7. Loft in Autodesk Fusion: It's time to put the pieces together. And this is obviously not the only way to create this shape, but I recommend this workflow because it's fast, precise, and as we will see later, easy to edit. Loft is easy to use. Select your first and your second profile to connect them. We'll keep it simple in this tutorial and stick to this new body operation. This body is created within our active component, and that's perfectly fine. We've got a solid body which is based on connected geometries. Let's take a closer look in the next lesson and perform a section analysis on our 3D model. Thank you. 8. Section Analysis in Autodesk Fusion: You can activate section analysis. Via the inspect drop down menu, but let's stick to our fast workflows and activate design shortcuts with keyboard shortcut S. You can perform your section analysis flat or with an angle. You can immediately see that your lampshade needs to lose some material from its inside. This is because we made the shape with the loft command. If we, for example, used another workflow with focus on the revolt commando to create or lamp shade, then we would not have this situation. It's not really a problem, though. Let's fix it with the shell commando in the next lesson. Thank you. 9. Use the Shell Command in Autodesk Fusion: Let's get rid of the inside of our lampshade. You find the shell commando in the modify section of the tool bar, but I will activate design shortcuts with keyboard shortcut S and take it from there. Use the blue option, which is for solid modeling, Give your body an inside thickness and press OK. We're not completely done yet. We clearly see that you won't be able to assemble this lamp shade since there's no hole for the lamp. Do you remember the circles we made in a previous lesson? Activate Extrude with keyboard shortcut E and find this circle. You'll have to turn your sketch visibility on if you can't find it. Once you press Extrude, you might be tempted to add a distance. However, we would like the extrude cut to follow along if we make a change to the thickness of the design. Therefore, you should change the extent type to all, so your extrude cut operation will cut through the design when you change the thickness. And that's it. See you in the next lesson where we add another construction plane. Thank you. 10. Add a Construction Plane at an angle: One of the design goals is to add a pattern on the lampshade, and we will add a construction plane as a step in that process. Normally, I'd use design shortcuts, but I want to show you where to find the tangent plane. Once you select your face, the reference plane becomes visible. We will leave it with a default setting since it already has the right angle. We will use this construction plane for our upcoming pattern. But first, let's pretend that we want to change the size of our design, but keep all ratios intact. Let's look at parameters again. Thank you. 11. Change user parameters in Autodesk Fusion: We set up parameters in the beginning of the project. This will allow us to change the size of our object and keep the relations and ratios, such as the angle of our design intact. Activate design shortcuts with keyboard shortcut S and search for change parameters. We see that our top and our height are related to our bottom. Our basefoot, which is the hole needed to assemble the lampshade is fixed at 37 millimeters. Our thickness is fixed at 2 millimeters and we haven't used the emboss parameter yet. When we change the bottom, our lamp adjusts. You can right click in the canvas and easily find your latest commando and more. That's how easy it is to work with parameters, and the opportunity to create relations and equations is useful when you iterate and edit your design. 12. Insert DFX File in Autodesk Fusion: You can either sketch directly on your angular construction plane or insert a DFX file with a sketch. The purpose is to create a sketch with the same angle as our lampshade. You'll find the DfX file I used for this project in the project resources. Use it if you'd like to. Locate your DFX file on your computer and select your construction plane. This pattern is too large and we need to move it. We'll do this in two steps. See you the next lesson, where we move the DfX file. Thank you. 13. Move your DFX File in Autodesk Fusion: You need to select your move object, which is sketch objects in this case, before you make your selection. When you drag from the right to the left like this, everything you touch is selected. Be careful here so you don't make mistakes. You can see your selection in the project browser. I just want to move the snowflake pattern, but sketch one, which isn't named, so we can't be sure what it is, is also selected. A quick fix is to turn the sketch visibility off and redo the selection. Going from the left to the right is different than going from the right to the left. When you go from left to right, everything you completely cover is selected. You can work with different move types, such as free move or point to point. Free move is pretty good in this scenario. There is no right or wrong place for your snowflake. We'll leave it here for now and see you in the next lesson where you scale your DFX file. Thank you. 14. Scale your DFX File in Autodesk Fusion: There is no exact size for our snowflake sketch. Therefore, I prefer to scale, and not calibrate in this scenario. You find scale in the modify drop down menu or via the shortcut paths we've discussed earlier. I've seen people make a common mistake here. When they try to select their DFX file, they fail to select it. This is because our DFX file is a sketch, and we change it in the contextual sketch environment. Right click your sketch and select sketch scale. Select your entities, your center point for the scale operation, and then either drag or type a scale factor. I'll type 0.25, which means that I scale the sketch to a size which is 25% of the original size. Activate Autodesk Fusion Sketch shortcuts with keyboard shortcut S and finish your sketch. Coming up, we'll create a circular pattern. 15. Create a circular pattern in Autodesk Fusion: We are creating a circular pattern with the sketch. Therefore, we enter sketch mode before we make the pattern. I'll make a construction line just to have some kind of reference for the circular pattern. A construction line is not part of your design, and you activate construction lines with keyboard shortcut X or via the sketch palette. Select your sketch objects, your center points and add a quantity. We look at workflows for editing this choice later as you iterate your design. Next up, we will look at the differences between emboss and the deboss, and then we'll apply a design feature to our lampshade. 16. Emboss and Deboss in Autodesk Fusion: We are using the emboss feature when we make a pattern on our lampshade. It's important that you use the correct desired effect on your selected face for your selected sketch profile. The emboss effect will raise the pattern from the selected phase while the deboss effect will cut the pattern to your selected depth. You can use the parameter you set up in the beginning of the project. I called this parameter emboss since I had the emboss pattern on my mind, but deboss would have been a better name given that we used this feature inside the emboss commando. As often, there's a bunch of settings that you can explore. But we will leave the alignment options as they are since we accomplish our design goals with our sketch and with our construction plane. Once you zoom in, you see that your pattern looks great. The idea is to make a thin 3D print for the pattern. This will give your lampshade a cool colored light. 17. Circular Feature Pattern in Autodesk Fusion: It's important that you select feature as object type when you select your the debossed pattern. And a pro tip before you edit or play around with complex patterns. Save your project before you start advanced calculations. The need to do this obviously depends on your project, your pattern complexity, and your computer power. But this habit doesn't really have a downside, so why not use the insurance. It can be a little tricky to find the pattern. It's often a good idea to zoom in and look for that bright selection. Your selection turns blue once you select it, and all the snowflakes turn blue since they are part of the same circular sketch pattern. Once you select your axis, you're ready to set your quantities and distribution. A full distribution means that your pattern fills 360 degrees around your axis. And that's it. We have a circular debossed pattern. Great job. Let's look at some timeline editing workflows in the next lesson. Thank you. 18. Edit Circular Pattern via the Timeline in Autodesk Fusion: Your actions are recorded in the timeline, and you find editing options when you right click on the selected action. The circular pattern is easily accessible in the center of the pattern. Your deboss feature, which is recorded later in the timeline, will update when you update your sketch pattern on your sketch positioning. You can see how Autodesk Fusion is recalculating emboss as soon as you click finish skills. 19. Add an appearance in Autodesk Fusion: Activate appearance with keyboard shortcut A. You probably must make your menu larger if nothing appears to happen. Search for your appearance and just drag and drop it onto your design. Did you know that you can right click and edit the color, roughness, reflectance, as well as accessing advanced settings. I encourage you to play around with different settings and then I'll see you in the render environment as soon as you're ready to render your lampshade. 20. Cloud renderer in Autodesk Fusion: We'll make a fast and simple rendering in this lesson. Switch to the render workspace in the top left menu and right click somewhere in the canvas and select scene settings. You can drag an environment from the environment library onto your canvas, but remember to change the background setting to environment. You can easily set an image size. Pro tip here. If you're rendering with the intention of putting your image on a website, look up image size recommendations from that website. You'll see the estimated rendering queue time if you make a cloud renderer. Your project appears in the rendering gallery, and once you're ready, you can choose to download it with different settings and with or without a transparent background. If you intend to place your image on top of a photo, then it's obviously convenient to download with a transparent background, so you don't have to remove the background in your photo editing software. And that's it for this fast and simple rendering. See you the next lesson when we export our STL file. 21. Export STL File from Autodesk Fusion: I just saved my project, so my latest information is included in the STL file export. Remember to turn your visibility off for any objects you have that you don't want to export. Exporting STL files requires a cloud transition and hence Internet connection. Your export can take a couple of minutes but can also go faster. You're ready to take your STL file into your slicer once your export is ready. 22. Set up your 3D Print and Export G Code: I used the Prusa slicer for this video, but the principles apply to any 3D printing project. Importing my STL file with imperial units, the second option, is not relevant since I work with millimeters for my 3D printing project. Your object appears on the slicer in the same direction you 3D modeled it. Pro tip here; keep your folders organized so you find your STL files without any distractions or frustrations. We get data for our 3D printing settings once we click slice now. This print will take 4 hours and 37 minutes, and we have data for the different parts of the project in our top left corner. You can make a bunch of advanced setups and utilize some basic system presets. If we change to a layer height of 0.2 millimeters, the quality preset, we see that our 3D printing time becomes around 3 hours longer. It's up to you to find the right balance between time, cost, risk, and quality. Import your G code into your 3d printer and enjoy your work. We only have the conclusion left. See you in the next lesson where we summarize the project. Thank you. 23. Project Conclusion: Great job! You have made a parametric lampshade with a debossed circular pattern. If you learned something new, please leave a review, follow my profile, or why not share the class with your network? I hope we get to see your work uploaded in the project resources. Thank you for taking this class and see you soon on another project. Thank you!