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:

Screen Shot 2015-02-17 at 3.45.48 PM Screen Shot 2015-02-17 at 4.24.11 PM Screen Shot 2015-02-17 at 4.44.22 PM Screen Shot 2015-02-17 at 4.52.55 PM

 

 

 

 

 

 

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:

Screen Shot 2015-02-21 at 6.28.54 PM

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:

Screen Shot 2015-02-21 at 6.26.39 PM

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:

Screen Shot 2015-02-24 at 4.11.28 PM

 

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:

Screen Shot 2015-02-24 at 4.09.49 PM

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:

Screen Shot 2015-02-24 at 4.10.13 PM

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:

2015-02-24 18.58.19

 

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.