Using Autodesk 360: A powerful CAD tool

Another day, another tool that you can use to create and make innovative products. This week in lecture we were not in our usual maker space but in the Armory to hear from Jeff Smith, an expert in AutoDesk Fusion 360 and an industrial designer for Autodesk. He gave us an overview of the Autodesk work environment, including their innovative makerspace called Pier9 which is for making digital into real. He also showed us how powerful and unique this software is and different ways of designing:

  • Parametric designing which entails specific constraints and dimensions, and
  • Free-form designing or sculpting using the Tee-Spline Body

The way Fusion 360 is setup is in order of the different design phases: model, patch, render, animation, simulate, etc. They use a top-down componentry/modeling system system unlike other CAD software such as Creo Parametric or SolidWorks which use bottom-down modelling. You could even type code and create a model instead of clicking around the tools. He also introduced the new and powerful concept of having the computer learn and design your product for a more efficient design. Learning from about Fusion 360 was a great experience the way he likened designing with time-travelling. I really felt inspired more to be a maker and get more into modeling. Using the skills that we learnt from him and the Fusion 360 tutorial, i was able to replicate the model of the wire conduit below,

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and go further to design a model of a product I use on a daily basis – A Chapstick:

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If you would like to dive into this powerful tool, Autodesk offers Fusion 360 free for students at their website.

After Jeff Smith, we had a representative from the CU Biolab, Dot Silverman, tell us about the various creative endeavors they do in combining Biology and making into what she called “BioHacking”. There are so many endeavors involving biohacking going on around the country such as the MIT Silk pavillion and so many others included in the picture below.

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