Create Metal Wall Art with Autodesk Fusion 360

1. Autodesk Fusion 360 Project Introduction: In this project, we make metal wall art just like you see in the images in the introduction. We set up digital files that can be sent to manufacturers. We'll set up a drawing and we will export a rendered image with a transparent background that can be placed on top of an image of your choice. I'm Martin. I'm a self taught product designer professional in the AEC Industries and university CAD teacher. In this project, I walk you through a simple and easy workflow where I create Metal Wall Art from a licensed stock photo. You can use your own photos, your licensed images, or why not, your own handmade sketch, when you follow along. At the end of the project, you will have files ready to be sent for manufacturing and you will have a transparent rendering that can be used when you continue to work with your marketing. We've already started the project. Let's continue in the next lesson where you learn about your class assignment. Thank you. 2. Autodesk Fusion 360 Project Assignment: Your project assignment is to upload an image of your product to the project gallery. You can either upload a rendering, a photo montage, or why not a photo of your real product if you choose to manufacture it. Uploading projects is a great way to get feedback on your work and an opportunity to inspire other students. I'm looking forward to seeing your project, but I'm also looking forward to the next lesson. Let's look over some basic Autodesk Fusion settings. Thank you. 3. Autodesk Fusion 360 Sheet Metal Project Settings: I just saved my project. And now I want to take the opportunity to show you my unit settings. I'll work with millimeters. I recommend small units and it's perfectly fine if you change units here. A best practice I want to show you is how to create your component. We'll demonstrate some of the reasons through out the class. We'll work with sheet metal, so create a sheet metal component. And, I'll be honest with you, you can complete this project without utilizing sheet metal capabilities within Fusion 360. One of the learning objectives is to introduce you to basic sheet metal settings, and we can check that box now. Name your sheet metal component, leave the box activate checked and select sheet metal rule. And if you don't know yet, don't worry. I just want you to think about your options and show you the sheet metal list at this stage, which in my case is a mix between my own sheet metal rules and Fusion 360 sheet metal rules. We'll talk more about sheet metal and laser cutting later, but your settings here won't affect the files you export at the end of this flat sheet metal project. And that's it. See you in the next lesson where we insert a picture. Thank you. 4. Insert a picture in Autodesk Fusion 360: I'll base my design on a licensed stock photo. But if you have the time and talent, why not take a photo of your own sketch and insert it? Select Canvas in your Insert drop down menu and locate your image. I recommend that you create a structure for your files so you find them easily over time. Your next step is to select one of your construction planes. Select a flat view as seen from the top orientation, so your future file export comes out flat. And in the same orientation your laser cutter will work. Your image is centralized on your canvas. You can rotate it, scale it, flip it. And you can either use the buttons in the middle or the data input boxes in the menu. It's easier to trace an image when you see your lines. Change opacity if you need to, you must change the image size. Sometimes it's better to scale your image, sometimes it's better to calibrate your image. Let's start with image calibration in the next lesson. Thank you. 5. Calibrate a picture in Autodesk Fusion 360: You find your imported image in canvases in the project browser. Imagine if you wanted to make a custom made metal wall art object for a specific place with a specific dimension. Calibration is a great tool. You pick two points and decide the distance between them. Fast, easy, correct, but is it the one and only approach if you want to make a standardized product with the intention of shipping it to customers on a regular basis? Let's see if we can make a case for the scale option in the next lesson. Thank you. 6. Scale your picture in Autodesk Fusion 360: In this video, I will demonstrate one reason why scale is an interesting option for you, when you make your products. And it goes beyond the actual product size. Think of shipping dimensions. Turn on your construction lines. Those are helpful reference geometry that doesn't become part of your design. I'll go with the center rectangle option and start from the center of my design. Let's say that you research shipping options with suitable packages for delivering flat metal wall art. One standard box is 400 times 300 millimeters, One standard box is 650 times 550 millimeters. And both those off the shell options are much cheaper than making your custom sized box. Let's base our product size on Shipping Alternatives. Right click on the image, select Edit, and start scaling your image. Let's stop here. If you made an item this size, you'd pay for the larger box, but not really have the benefits and added value of a larger design. Same case here, if you go just outside the standard package format you found, shipping might be more costly than the added value from a marginally larger design. Both scale and calibration are great options, but keep shipping and delivering options on your market in mind when you create your product. It's time to start with your sketch. See you in the next lesson, where we look at different options for image tracing. Thank you. 7. Trace your Image in Autodesk Fusion 360: In this lesson, you trace the image with one of the spline options. We will fast forward between interesting points, so don't worry, you won't have to sit through the entire tracing process. Create a sketch on top of your image. You can use different sketch tools when you trace images. And two popular choices for complex patterns like this are the spline tools. In my experience, control point blinds are better when you demand mathematical correctness for your curves and the fit points spline, which I demonstrate in this class, is better when you trace images like this one. Like so many things. It's also a question about personal preferences. Why not try both and see what you prefer? Select a starting point. We're not trying to snap to exact points in the grid here. Turn the snap to grid functionality off. Try to use as few control points as possible. This takes some practice, but it keeps the overall complexity of your model down. You can use fewer control points than I do in this tutorial, and you don't have to trace the entire image in one move. You can take breaks if that's easier for you. Hit Escape To exit the Spline commando and use the handlebars to edit your spline. Right click the canvas and select Repeat Fit Points spline to continue. The hand you see is the pan commando. Press and hold your mouse wheel to use pan. This makes it easy to move around when you trace your image. Don't worry if your image tracing doesn't become perfect. In your first setting, we'll demonstrate some editing methods along the way. You can move around your spline points. When you work with the design, right click on the canvas and select Insert Spline Fit Point if you need to add more control over your spline. Another way to activate splines and other commandos for that matter is to activate Sketch Shortcuts with keyboard shortcut S. type your search word and select a tool. Let's fast forward and see what kind of situations we run into. This is an example where it is tempting to use extra points, but one point is enough. This is an example where I try with one point first and then add a complementary second point. You've got the idea now. I'll save you some time and jump forward. This is a design tip and not a Fusion 360 tooltip. Think about the people that will hold your object in their head. You can edit away sharp edges and sharp points. The error message tells us to look for constraints, those are rules. And since you can't break the rule, we must remove it , easy right? Select, and delete the unwanted constraint. The white area within our object indicates that all or lines are not closed. Sometimes a little editing is enough to make the point black. Here I get stuck though. A workaround in a situation like this is to add another sketch line and trim away parts you don't need. Our sketch is closed and it looks like we can move on. However, the outside seems to be closed, but not the inner spline sketch. There is one remaining white dot to fix. When we fix it, we can select the inside. I'll fix this in a second by removing the complex spline line, meeting with the temporary sketches. And then I'll just make a new fit point spline. You can spend hours working on your design and the overall quality. But for the purpose of this class, it's time to move on, finish your sketch, and see you in the next lesson where we create a three dimensional body. Thank you. 8. Create a 3 dimensional body in Autodesk Fusion 360: In this lesson, you turn your sketch into a three dimensional body with the extrude tool. At the end of the course, you will export your two dimensional sketch, So why bother creating it in 3D? You will learn more about some of the reasons throughout the rest of the course. You find the extrude tool in the tool bar, in the Create drop down menu or via the keyboard shortcut A. Blue lines turn black when you hover over closed profiles, we create a flat design in this video so just ignore the taper angle option, which would give your flat design an angle. You can use the arrow and drag a distance, but that doesn't make sense given our project, a standard sheet metal dimension will be 1 millimeter, 2 millimeters, and so forth. So, enter your exact distance. You can leave the operation as a new body operation. This body will be created within the active component. You can inspect the distance at any time and measure the distance between the top and the bottom if you are unsure. Our three dimensional sign looks good so far and we find our body within our component. The timeline is a great and important element in Autodesk Fusion 360. Let's take a closer look in the next lesson. Thank you. 9. Autodesk Fusion 360 Timeline: Your recorded actions are grouped in a timeline, and each component has its own timeline. You see the blue color code in the timeline for the sheet metal component and the yellow color code for the main component. Let's go back in time and edit your sketch. I'll use the circular commando to create two holes. We need to hang our metal wall art on the wall, and I'll use a standoff screw, also called a spacer, to create a distance between the metal and the wall. This stand of screw needs a hole with a diameter of 8 millimeters. We will look more at it in the next lesson. Once you have added circles to your sketch, those circles appear in later stages in your timeline. Since we only have two steps at this point, it's the next step. Edit your extrude feature and tap the circles to create two holes. We'll get more reasons to revisit the timeline later, but first see you in the next lesson, where you create and assemble your stand off screw component. Thank you. 10. Create Components in Autodesk Fusion 360: It's time to create components again. This time we'll create stand off screws or spacers. We said earlier that some benefits of components are structure and organization. Two other benefits with components are the ability to assemble them and the ability to insert them into other designs, both as linked objects and as individual objects. As a bonus, this lesson will also present an opportunity to demonstrate useful opportunities with the extrude tool. Activate your top level component, so your new component is created on the same hierarchical level as your sheet metal component. A standard internal component is fine. We use this component for the purpose of testing our design in the digital world, but we won't produce this part. If we don't like the wall art design with digital spacers, we can iterate the wall art before we send the files to manufacturers. Leave the box activate checked so you can dive right into your spacer component, create a new sketch on top of your metal wall art component. We want to create a circle but it's tough to find the exact middle of the hole in our metal wall art component. Use project in situations like this, which you find in the create drop down menu, this makes it easy to find your circle and you'll find this sketch in your component. This hole has a diameter of eight (mm) and my spacer has a diameter of 12 millimeters. I use the offset tool to offset my hole 2 millimeters on each side, which adds up to a total of four. And it's okay if you feel unsure, just use the measure tool to verify your diameter. This is a quick tip which will save you time over time. Press keyboard, shortcut E, and jump directly from the sketch environment to the extrude command. Select both circles and add your height. My spacers are 4 millimeters high and have a nice soft edge, create this good looking edge With the fillet tool. My spacer goes through the hole and continues to the other side. Let's solve this with extrude. Quick tip here. You can press and hold your left mouse button on a face. When you want to select a face behind a face, you don't want to extrude through your metal wall art. Therefore, we would like to start our extrude at the other side of our metal wall art component. And remember our metal wall art is 2 millimeters thick. Set this as your offset start point. Set the extrude distance and set this as a new body operation. And we'll combine our parts into one component later. Let's hide the metal wall art component and take a look. Let's connect our two bodies with a third extrude. You can use project again and follow up with a to new body extrude operation. Now we have three separate bodies that combined is a digital replica of the spacer. Select all of them and combine them into one body. It can be tempting to create a copy of the body within the same component, but instead we copy the component. This way. If we change the original, the copy is updated, activate your top level component and copy paste your spacer component. This is easy to do with keyboard shortcuts, control + c and control + v , if you work on a PC, you recognize many standardized shortcuts from other programs. Instead of using the move tool, I recommend that you assemble your component. Assemble is how you build and structure different parts of your design and define relationships between different components. And this can be done in a variety of ways. Find the joint on your space component and find the joint on your metal wall art component. Your component snaps to the right place as indicated by the joint figure above your component. Let's demonstrate what I said earlier about some benefits with components. Edit a sketch on your original component and watch how your copied component updates. We won't go this big though. You can use keyboard shortcut, control + Z on your PC. If you work on a PC that is, to undo your action, that's it. You have created two components and made a simple assembly. Well done. We discovered that our metal wall art is too thin around the spacers. See you in the next lesson where you edit your splines. 11. Edit Splines in Autodesk Fusion 360: I don't like that our spacers are bigger than our metal wall art. Our metal wall art is the star of the show, not to the wall hanger. We will look at two different workflows for editing this spline. Let's activate our component and edit the underlying sketch, vie the timeline. We don't see the spacer sketch here. This is because we went back to a time before it existed. Keep it simple and offset the sketch for the hole and work from there. This circle is just for reference. Turn it into a construction line so it won't affect your metal wall art design. Activate sketch shortcuts with keyboard shortcut S and repeat the Offset action for the second hole, press keyboard shortcuts X If you want to turn your line into a construction line without pressing the line type button, you can use your control points and handlebar to adjust your spline, just like you did when you created it. Another method is to create a new spline and trim away the old parts. Iterate with your control point handle bars until you find a smooth transition. Our sketch edits affected the extrude feature which appears after the sketch in the timeline. This is easy to fix, jump into the extrude feature and update it. Our sketch looks better now, even though the edges are still a little sharp. I corrected this before I sent this to manufacturing, but you have got the point. So I'll move on with the course and not bore you with that editing. See you in the next lesson where you add appearances to your components. Thank you. 12. Add appearances in Autodesk Fusion 360: We will add appearances both to the metal wall art component and to the spacer components. You find appearances in the modified drop down menu or via the keyboard shortcut A. Appearances are grouped into folders and there is also a search bar. As an example, a search for powder coat gives us 16 matches in the Autodesk Fusion 360 appearance library. Click the arrow to download appearances and drag and drop your choice onto your component. I'm happy with the appearance of the metal wall art component, so I'll activate the space component. Keyboard shortcut A takes us right into the appearance menu. It's easy to reuse appearances. Our powder coat is found in the, "in this design" window. You can also choose if you want to add your appearance to the complete body or component, or just the face of a body or component. Appearances are applied to the selected occurrence. We will have to repeat this for both components. That's how easy it is to add appearances. An appearance is a visual representation of your design, but it doesn't contain engineering properties like materials. We need to communicate some information that we will send with our file. Let's create a drawing in the next lesson. 13. Create a drawing in Autodesk Fusion 360: You change from the design to the drawing workspace In the top left corner, we will create a drawing from design In this tutorial. Several options appear. We will go with the suggested settings for this tutorial and create a drawing from scratch. I recommend that you create some templates. If you intend to create standardized drawings on a regular basis, it will save time and give your delivery a professional touch. Your drawing is created in a separate file. Make sure to save it so you don't lose important work. Placing a base view with this scale and orientation doesn't make much sense for this design. You can change the settings in drawing view. I'll change to top orientation and adjust the scale one to five. Double click on your view if you want to edit it. For example, a shaded style will clearly communicate our design intention. It's a good idea to add dimensions. Double click your dimensions if you want to edit them. There is a bunch of settings here such as tolerances and linear precision, but we'll keep it basic in this tutorial, not going in depth with those options. I want to place a dimension on the holes. Our spacers are visible since we selected full assembly when we made the switch from the design workspace to the drawing workspace, turn off the visibility and place a diameter dimension. It's a good idea to place dimensions in the same horizontal or vertical direction since it helps the reader, your drawing is a communication material. A detail 00:02:09.280 --> 00:02:11.260 View is a great option if you want to highlight an area of your design, select parent view, position, specify size of boundary, and place your detail. You can change scale, name and a bunch of other settings. The name and the scale, in this case A and 1:1 is clearly visible around the detail and around the parent view. It's easy to move around objects like those When you organize your drawing. It's a good idea to write information on your drawing. Let's create text. This is just an example of relevant information and what you write here obviously depends on your project. I want to say something about tolerance. If a laser cutter works faster, the work will generally be cheaper and quality lower. If a laser cutter works slower, work will generally be more expensive, but precision and quality higher. There are standardized ways to communicate about tolerances, but if you are unsure, just have a dialogue with your manufacturer and ask them for recommendations about speed and quality for your project. I'm also going to add that all measurements are in millimeters. Since that is the case for my design, it's nice to find a nice balance on your drawing. And you might have to iterate your design a few times. Double click properties to edit them. You don't need to be fancy here if you're a private maker, but you'll probably have guidelines if you work for a company or a client. Keep it simple and relevant. Let's add another view to illustrate the distance from the wall. Our detail view is automatically named B, and it's useful to clearly see the scale now when we have two detail views, the purpose of this view is to illustrate the distance to the wall, which is easy to do with dimensions. Personally, I think it's quite fun to add dimensions, but don't add too much information to your drawing. You can insert images in your drawing and it's quite easy to scale, move, and position the image. The balance on this drawing is not perfect, but it contains good enough information for a potential manufacturer. They'll be able to look at the drawing and understand the project. Keep in mind that the file becomes larger when you add pictures like this. A color drawing with a photo like this will take longer time to print and cost more to print than a drawing with less color intense information. It's a good habit to explain your views with a text so the reader can understand your drawing without misunderstandings. Export your PDF from the top right corner of the drawing workspace, Tick open PDF. If you want to open your file automatically and save some time, we're going to leave the drawing here. I wanted to show some different options. But to be honest, this drawing contains more views and more information than we need to create for this metal wall art project. The picture is quite fun and can be used to illustrate or communicate matching colors. But not something I put on drawings on a regular basis. We will export DFX files in the next lesson. There are some mistakes you want to avoid. Let's look at options. Thank you. 14. Export DFX File in Autodesk Fusion 360: Your DFX File Export is like a laser cutting recipe. Let's look at different workflows for your file export. First let's look at the workflow where we export via the export menu. It's easy to find the DFX file. And once you click Export, a cloud transition starts. Let's open the DFX file and see what this workflow gave us. You probably notice a lot of unwanted things. First, everything visible in our design was exported. We don't want to laser cut our spacers and not our spline handlebars. This export also contains material in different levels on the Z axis which we don't want. If we send this file to manufacturers, they will probably ask us to clean it up. The laser cutting pattern from this file does not match our drawing and design intent. Let's try another workflow. Right, click your sketch and save it as a DFX file. So far, it's gone fast and the file was saved instantly. The DFX file looks much better than the first workflow. We can't delete the blue infill, but the drawing we send along with the DFX file clearly communicates our design intention. The construction lines we made on the sketch a few lessons ago were exported, so we must delete them. Otherwise, things look good. And we can send this file over to our manufacturer. The picture you've seen at the start of every lesson is a stock photo combined with a rendered image. See you in the next lesson where we render an image and export it with a transparent background. Thank you. 15. Render in Autodesk Fusion 360: You can change visibility in the render workspace. But since we passed the menu with the mouse, let's adjust the visibility of some design items before we enter the render workspace. In the top left corner, the spacers should be visible, but there is no need to show the joint in the rendered images. Change from the design to the render work space in the top left corner. I'll just be a good lad and change to the top view. Before I right click on the canvas and select Scene Settings. It's easy to change brightness, but nothing seems to happen when we adjust position, we're working with a solid background. Let's see what happens when we change to environments. You can drag and drop environments from the library. Something seems to happen with the shadows. When we move in the cool light environment, you see the lights when you look from below. What about this ground scale? Let's look at this plaza environment. This environment has cobblestones on the ground and you change size with the ground scale. Not what I'm looking for for this rendering, but good to know for another time. There's a bunch of other nice settings here and an opportunity to save settings as default, which could be nice if you want to return to the same default setting. This solid color background, top view, and brightness is good enough for my purpose though, There are multiple rendering options available, free or paid, in the cloud or on your local computer. You can set your custom image size and start your rendering in a matter of seconds. Your rendering appears in the rendering gallery in the bottom left corner. Render que time appears when I click on this unfinished cloud rendering, render que time can be different due to several factors. Open your finished rendering to download it. I want to place this image on top of a stock photo. Therefore, I'll download it with a transparent background so we don't have to remove the background later in the process. Autodesk Fusion 360 suggests a name with original data such as date and time included. That's how easy it is to render an image with a transparent background in Autodesk Fusion 360. Let's finish the course and wrap it up in the next and final lesson. Thank you. 16. Autodesk Fusion 360 Project Conclusion: Well done, you made it. You are now ready to produce your own metal wall art. I've got to tell you, it's an exciting feeling when your items arrive from the manufacturer. Hopefully you can find a good laser cutting and powder coating business partner that can turn your idea into a physical product. If you like this course, please review and follow my profile. It's only going to take you a minute. I'm looking forward to seeing your projects posted in the project gallery. Thank you so much for taking this class and see you soon on another project. Thank you.