Fusion 360: Two Weeks Coming Full Circle

The past two weeks our class has been working really hard to get a decent grasp of Autodesk Fusion 360. Because it is such an expansive and powerful tool- there is no possible way for us to master all of its features, but the goal is for us is to understand what can be done with the software, and develop a set of skills to make a basic 3D image from scratch.

After looking back on my classmate’s reflections, I was pleased to learn that I was not the only one who had difficulties starting out with the program. Noah voiced my thoughts exactly in his post, “As I continue to work with Fusion 360, I am learning how to control and shortcut my way through this CAD. This program has had a faster learning curve than other new software I have tried in any regard. While I may struggle now, I know that as I continue working with this software, it will begin working for me.” We’re all learning together exactly what can be achieved through the software – so now we’re just on the journey of figuring things out for ourselves.

Some people in the class have had prior experience with 3D design software, so it was interesting to learn their take on a unique program. Nora talked about how it differs from software she’s used in the past like Inventor. “Fusion is quite an interesting modeling program because it integrates the whole product development process-from design, to engineering, to fabrication-into one cloud-based tool. Because Fusion 360 allows users to create certain geometries that would be difficult, if not impossible to create in Inventor in a matter of minutes.”

For a little background on Fusion 360; it was first released two and half years ago – but has undergone dramatic changes in recent times. It is one of the first technologies for direct modeling to bring together organic yet complex form design.

It was good to know that Fusion 360 stacked up well to its competitors. We have each put in at least ten to fifteen hours (minimum) with the program, and it would be painful to hear there was a software out there that would suit our needs better. But because so many of us are beginners not only in 3D design, but to the whole 3D printing process in general, it really seems like Fusion 360 is the exact tool we need to learn to use.

The first week during our introduction to Fusion 360 we had the privilege to hear a presentation by two Autodesk representatives. They spent a solid three hours with us, helping us one on one, to design a lamp using the software. The amount of knowledge they possessed on 3D design was unfathomable to someone of my novice status, but listening to them talk about their careers in design was something I definitely appreciated. The skills and knowledge that we are gaining through this class are one-hundred percent applicable in today’s business world. Even beyond applicable- I would go as far to say they are actively sought after, and with the speed technology has been advancing at, I only expect that demand to sky rocket.

A week later after we had all completed our homework of designing a few more objects in Fusion 360, everyone seemed to have a much better grasp on program in general. I felt very similar to Gian in his post, “I feel MUCH more comfortable with the Fusion 360 software now, and I feel much more capable of creating an object from scratch. I’m still learning about the different nuances of the software, but I feel confident in my ability to create a relatively simple object and modify it to meet certain specifications. “

For me, personally, I was able to navigate between the menus and viewpoints much, much easier the second week- and I also finally picked up the ability to customize measurements to an exact inch or millimeter- which proved incredibly handy when building more complex objects for personal use.

My classmates were able to print and design some really awesome things the past two weeks, and I’m really excited to move forward from here and see what we are able to produce next!

 

Fusion Frustration

Two weeks ago, our class was introduced to Fusion 360, a modeling software free to download for students. A speaker came in to walk us through a tutorial of making a lamp. Glancing at the lamp on the projector, I did not think modeling it would be very difficult. I was very wrong. Not being very adept at technology, I experienced great difficulty going through the basic functions to make the lamp which I later attributed to my lack of knowledge about the basic commands of Fusion 360. Therefore, I would highly recommend that anyone looking to take advantage of this software watch a few tutorials on the basic functions of Fusion. All in all, I did not end up with a lamp…

Before last week’s class, we were assigned to model an object based on a youtube tutorial. This provided me with the opportunity to learn at a more slower pace how to actually work Fusion. Even though I kept stopping and restarting the tutorial, my headphones came out very…interesting.  Although they look normal, I could not figure out how to do a normal bridge between the two earbuds, so my headphones ended up with an awkward indentation. I’m working on it.

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At this point, I have come to terms with the face that I will not be an immediate pro at Fusion. If you have many issues with basic technology, then Fusion 360 is a long learning experience. For this reason, I was very grateful when we were given the opportunity to tinker around with Fusion during last week’s class. Our mission was to fully model and print something during the three hour time. However, being very picky, I think I spent the whole three hours figuring out what to model. Coming to terms with my lack of ability with Fusion, I settled on modeling a handle-less panda mug (the handle was too complicated.)

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During my own free time, I have taken on the challenge of modeling a snitch from Harry Potter. It has proved to be very time consuming, and I only have the sphere and part of one wing complete. I have not yet finished adding pegs and cutting into them to make the wing more wing-shaped, but here is an update of where I am at.

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Although my skills at Fusion are not yet sufficient enough to make anything worthwhile, learning Fusion has made me realize the full potential of 3D printing. It is completely limitless and as time goes on and as we become more acquainted with modeling softwares, we will start to see more and more incredible things being created.

 

Week 5 & 6: Fusion

Fusion is a really cool software to use for designers (especially industrial designs) to make their design come true in a 3D dimension.

In the class, I am really happy that we students get to use it for free, because this just provides us students an easier access to learn a awesome software.

We learnt to make a lamp in first fusion workshop under instructions of the guest speakers, and after the class we tried to build our own work on fusion. I feel like the greatest function for fusion is that it allows you to make a very complex geometry quickly, and you can change the form of the object easily as well. Also, you will be able to change the dimensions accurately, by setting a specific height, width and length in it. The most important thing for beginners is to get ourselves used to the different tools in Fusion (In class, we learnt a lot about using “Sketch”). But for upper level users, the most important thing would be to have a great idea, and Fusion will be a tool to make that idea come true.

Currently I am watching tutorial videos online about the usage of different tools in Fusion, to get myself more familiar of how to use it. The problem of Fusion, though, is that it might be too big for lap-top, therefore, it is not always working on my lap-top. Other than that, it is an awesome tool for designs!

 

Weeks 5 & 6: Fun with Fusion

For the past two weeks we have focused on working with a program called Fusion 360 to model objects that we can then 3D print.

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Working on the base of a lamp in Week 5’s Fusion 360 class

During our Week 5 session, we were lucky enough to have two gentlemen from Autodesk come in and help us learn how to use the software. After spending a bit of time discussing what it is like to work as a industrial designer in industry, we started working Fusion 360 lamp modeling tutorial. Fusion is quite an interesting modeling program because it integrates the whole product development process-from design, to engineering, to fabrication-into one cloud-based tool. It’s a pretty new product (first launched ~2 years ago when I was a course aide with the GE 101 class) and is a really good software to use for creating non-linear geometries and to working on modeling projects with teams. Even though it was developed by the same people, it’s quite a bit different than Inventor and involves what is called “direct modeling”-pushing and pulling on the model to create details and form shapes- instead of the traditional parametric feature based modeling approach. This workflow took a bit of getting used to, since I was pretty comfortable with the Inventor way of doing things, but was definitely helpful to learn more about, because Fusion 360 allows users to create certain geometries that would be difficult, if not impossible to create in Inventor in a matter of minutes.

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Fusion 360 Headphone Earpiece

A great case in point is the set of headphones I worked on modeling over the course of the week after our introduction to Fusion 360 with the Autodesk guys. The ear pieces in particular, which involved a lot of more rounded geometries took me only about 15 minutes to create in 360 (and this was me using Fusion for pretty much the first time, it probably would have taken a whole lot less time if I had been more familiar with the program,) where in Inventor getting something that complex could easily have taken a few hours or more.

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My finished Fusion 360 headphones

During class the 6th week, we worked on finishing up the tutorials we had done over the course of the week and had a chance to get a free print of something we had worked on. I completed my headphones, but decided to instead print out this open-sourced shelled torus lamp by Massachusetts-based Design Studio Nervous System. I also came back later in the week and printed a few more things, including a 3D bracelet from the Nervous System bracelet generator, another version of my head with a larger keyring hole on top (it worked a lot better the second time around!), a iPhone speaker amplifier (I forgot to use, so this didn’t turn out perfect, but it still functional), and an iPhone case from the MakerBot generator (sadly it turned out a tiny bit too small so I’m going to have to try that one again). The last couple weeks have left me feeling a lot more comfortable using the MakerBots in the BIF lab and I’m looking forward to expanding my capabilities with our upcoming classes at the Beckman scanning facilitates and at the Fab Lab in Urbana.

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tumblr_nkg0caoNZv1tt4io8o1_540 Nervous System Cellular Lamp and Kinetics Bracelet

 

Week 5 & 6 – Fusion 360

This week the class was assigned to begin a personal project with the skills and knowledge learned from last week’s lecture on Fusion 360 program.  I decided to work on creating a screw.  It is a simple but practical project in the tutorial video. Besides, I saw one of my classmates coming out a perfect example of it. The progress wasn’t easy on me. I’m still working on it. Hope to print it out by this week. Below is a screen shot of the tutorial video from YouTube.

Screw

Fusion 360 does not as beginner-friendly as TinkerCad. However, it is designed to create technical items that may be massively produced in industries, whereas TinkerCad is more likely for personal interests in 3D printing. I’m looking forward to having my model printed out and sharing more thoughts and ideas with the class.

Week 6!

So evidently I’m not very good at remembering to write reflections (setting a weekly iPhone reminder now), but class is going great and I feel like I am finally getting the hang of 3D design software. Two weeks ago when we had the in class Fusion 360 tutorial I kind of felt like repeatedly banging my head against the wall. The presenters were great! But I don’t know if I was just having a really “off” day or what, but I could not master a single one of the steps they were trying to teach us. My lamp was never going to be a lamp- so I eventually gave up and settled for messing around in Sculpt mode making pretty blobs.

But low and behold, after much fiddling and tinkering- I made something! From scratch! By myself!

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It’s a hat! haha I just vaguely followed a Youtube tutorial and sculpted some cylinders, but I think I’m starting to grasp how this whole “design process” actually works. I wasn’t too fond of Fusion originally- but the sense of accomplishment I had after finally printing something that was my own, was pretty awesome.

Here’s another thingy I made the past two weeks that I forgot to write about.

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It’s me! Turned sideways- I’ll figure out how to rotate images in my next post.

I’m really excited to design more things and just explore the world of 3D printing more. I find myself wandering onto Tinkercad when I have a spare moment in class or to procrastinate on hw. Can’t wait to play around with scanners in next week’s class as well.

Reflection week 5 & 6

Learning Fusion 360 was a challenge and a half.

My class sat through a lesson last week where an Autodesk representative helped us with putting together a lamp, and while I did learn quite a lot at this, I got lost and ended up feeling a little discouraged. I went back through the lamp module online and cleared up what was confusing me at home that night, and from then on,  I feel great about Fusion.

I’ve learned to love the ‘edit form’ function, bending shapes in all sorts of different directions until some combination looks good. I’ve used this as I’ve started my semester long project: to make a fleet of spaceships, and a folder of spaceship parts (engines, canons, bridges, etc.). My goal is to create an interactive component for a science fiction series I’m working on through 3D printing.

hmThis ship isn’t quite done yet. The arms extending from either side could use some sort of structure on them. Additionally, I need to include a ‘spinning structure’ between the two main engines in the back. The saucers also need some details,

It’s important to me that my designs, and the tone behind my whole book for that matter, needs to be realistic. The spinning circle I intend to put back there will create a gravitational field for the area within it. It will allow people to walk with Earth-like conditions on the inner walls (a little disorienting to imagine, but check out the image below. It’s an artist rendering of a similar concept inside used on the show Babylon 5).

garden-nightIf I was a real engineer, I could design some gadgetry that would automatically turn the object, but for now I’ll settle for an axis of rotation I can build-in with the hole feature on tinkercad. From here on, I’m going to keep on designing ships that keep some of the same design features, and aggregating those consistent features into shapes that can be imported into tinkercad.

Week 5 & 6: Fusion 360

I’ve learned so much in the past two weeks. Week 5 was an introduction to Fusion 360, a super cool software that can be quite complex even with step-by-step instructions.

The workshop I participated in to learn Fusion 360 was great. Our main task was to create a model of a lamp.

Here’s a progression of that process:

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My lamp turned out pretty well in the end. It took some time for me to figure out a lot of the steps, but after a lot of trial and error I managed to get to the final product. I definitely struggled through it and got frustrated a few times, but I never gave up.

After that workshop, we were assigned to try to create a new design on our own by following a tutorial on youtube. I chose to try out some headphones.

Here’s the headphones I ended up creating:

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I ran into some major problems with this design even though I was following a pretty straight forward tutorial. I messed up one little step without realizing it would cause problems later, and I didn’t know how to fix it without undoing all the progress I had made after that step.

Basically, the best way to explain the mistake was that there were two faces merging together and they were somewhat overlapped, which is not good. Here’s what it looked like after I “fixed” it:

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Yeah, there’s a lot of extra faces there. I had to mess around with that for a long time until they weren’t overlapping anymore. I did try to use some functions like smoothing and merging faces, but I couldn’t get it quite right so I mostly stuck with the simpler steps until it looked decent and wasn’t overlapping.

After going through that mess I was very frustrated with Fusion 360 and just wanted to move on. But then week 6 came and we were supposed to 3D print our design. I did not want to print my headphones, so I decided to try to make a custom design with no tutorial.

I chose to try to make a candle holder since I had recently purchased a couple candles. Well, Fusion 360 didn’t get any easier for me. This is how far I got after a long hour of attempts:

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I hated it. And I really wanted to print something, so I moved over to the simpler modeling option, tinkercad. I made this in about 30 minutes with no issues at all:

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But then I thought why not try to use a function in Fusion 360 where I import what I made in tinkercad and edit it more in Fusion 360.

This is what happened as soon as I uploaded it:

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Yeah…there was way too much going on and I just wanted a simple candle holder. So I took the original tinkercad version and printed the design just like in week 4 with the bust I made of myself.

Screen Shot 2015-02-24 at 4.09.30 PMAnd here’s the final product:

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My lesson over the past two weeks was a big one. I learned that I am not good at Fusion 360. I need a lot more practice! It is so fulfilling when something I designed is printed, so taking it to the next level by printing something designed in Fusion 360 would be incredible.

 

Fly Fusion360-bird!

As an IT nerd, I know how to use tons of different applications. But when using a new software I really have to motivate myself every time. So here we are again. I should use Fuison 360. I installed the software, opened it. And then. CMD+Q, which closes an application on a Mac. I need some help!

Industrial Designer Jeff Smith came to our class to help us with our first Fusion 360 experience. Jeff seems to know quite a lot about designing things. He has made lots of amazing products. So we started building a lamp. It took us almost 4 hours to build it including sculp mode, faces, sketches and lots of “modifys”. Now I have no doubt any more that you can build everything in Fusion 360!

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A few days later I started to build my own, wooden, headphones. I followed the Autodesk Fusion Tutorial. Now it took about half an hour to build. I start to enjoy designing in Fusion 360!

But I wanted to design and print something that is useful. I decided to design a bird, that you can nail on the wall to use it as a hook. Designing that bird was everything else than difficult. All i needed was the Sculpt mode, a Box, Symmetry and some modifications. Of course some small details need some time, but it never got boring, as I knew, afterwards I will send it to a Makerbot and start the 3d print! 🙂

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Week Five Autodesk open a hell gate:)

HI,

It’s me again.kappa

I tired to mod my headphone with fusion 360, like this

before4head

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afterkreygasm

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But look at that bad painting, plus I just can’t convert them into body because it constantly ask me to weld vertex!!!(Need help herebiblethump, since I can’t mod them into A body, Idk if fusion360 require it to be a closed body or sculptures mustn’t intersect)

I hope one day we can do modding just by hand, even fusion360(typically ez to start)’s way is quite unhuman. Fellowing is what I think about this.(They are all parallel, not serial)

1,

2787343-hololens7

See modkappa

2,

download

Hand moddansgame

3,

140106183211-makerbot-3d-mini-story-top

 

Print modswiftrage

4,

imagesmodel-from-scanned-designs-large-1152x

Object-oriented modkreygasm, it is stupid to design a headphone without headkappa(exactly just like what I did,lol)

(I wonder where the human head came from, another sculpture, I guess,lol)

 

end

See you guys tomorrow:)

PS:By seeing HTML by change it from “Visual” to “Text”, I salute to all you programers:D