Fusion 360 Form Tool and Surface Modeling

JEFF SMITH: Hello, and welcome to my class on Fusion 360, kind of focusing on the form tool and how that relates to us as service modelers. My name is Jeff Smith. If you don't know me, I am an industrial designer working at Autodesk.

I've spent some time in different positions at Autodesk from the education team helping colleges and universities to adopt Fusion 360 to a customer success team helping customers adopting Fusion 360. And most recently I am on the automotive technical team helping our customers use a broad range of products.

My background as I said is industrial design. I worked for about 20 some years in that field building products across the world and across markets. My background is solid work. So I taught solid works as adjunct faculty as well. And I started with 97 plus. So surface modeling in a parametric sense is my core background.

And maybe like me, you've come to Fusion and you found the form tool. And you're a little bit puzzled by it. Hopefully I can unlock some workflows for you now. Quickly, I'd like to give you a little bit of information about me. And to do that, let me switch screens really quick.

OK, first, if you'd like to learn a little bit more about me, this is my Instagram page. It's blaster701. I post a lot of work that I do as an industrial designer. Mostly I do drawing and sketching. I'm old school. I'm old enough that everything I learned was analog. And all my digital work was on the job.

So I do a lot of canson rendering and marker rendering. You can see there's CAD in here as well and some Fusion 360. But I'll scroll down a little bit more here. And you'll see a little bit more Fusion 360 and some complex modeling, some generative design and some more modeling of cars and surface modeling that we're kind of talking about today, and then some generative as well. So if you'd like to learn more about me, this is a good place to go and see it. So with that in mind, let's switch over to Fusion and start talking about where we're going to go today, OK.

So I'm going to quickly do a baseline. I mentioned the form tool. And I mentioned surface modeling. If you come from the world that I came from where you're very accustomed to doing sketch-based parametric modeling, and I'll just do a quick spline here, OK? Terrific, and I'll make a tangent over here.

This should make complete sense to you. And because of my background, I'm going to go ahead and say, also make that a construction line. And I've got tangency on that. I'm not going to add any dimensions here. But you could add them as needed. But I want to do just a simple, quick surface loft where it's controlled by sketches.

And the steps for parametric are involved as well. And it's just to make sure that we're all on the same page. And I think I drew that on the wrong plane. So let's edit that really quick.

We'll redefine my sketch plane. And we'll put it over here. That's where she wants to be. And let's right click and go back into that sketch. And we'll go ahead and make that as well.

And we'll do another spline over here. And we'll do just a two-point spline for now. And I'll say, make those tangent, great. And maybe I'll pull this one over a little bit. And I'll pull the handle a little bit, terrific.

And I'll add a construction plane further down here. I'll say, plane along path. I'll drive it all the way down to that side. And I'll do a new sketch over there. You might notice I have a look at automatic turned off for my Fusion.

It's just kind of the way I like to work. But that's relative. And again, I'm making construction lines here. But it's not ultimately needed. So I'll do a fit point spline as well. That's great.

And I'll just say that those two are tangent for now. And I might look at it just so I can get a proportion of what's going on, OK? I'll pull this one down here. And I might depending on what's going on, I might make a reference back to the prior sketch so I know those are lined up, depending on what I'm doing, all right? It's all kind of relative based on your parameters.

But I'm going through these steps just to show you the baseline, OK? So I've got a simple wireframe here where I'm going to loft from profile to profile and control one side of it. Could I control more? Yes. But in the interest of time, we're just going to be basic.

Now, when you switch over to surface, your loft tool is here. And I could easily say select that sketch, select this sketch, and select my rail as this sketch over here. I can dive in deeper, and I can control direction or connected for those sketches. And my rail doesn't really give me anything, OK?

Perfectly valid will work. But my legacy and my history tells me to use surfaces for that. So I'll extrude that. I'll extrude this one. And I'll extrude this one. So now I have surfaces to make tangency relationships to. My sketches are still on. So if I do a loft, and I grab here, it's going to default to the sketch first.

If you press and hold, it's going to give you the option to choose the edges. Call me a little bit old school, I just turn my sketches off. That way it's faster to say edge to edge with my guide rail, OK?

Now, notice the default for all three edges is connected G0. I'm just going to use G1 for now and say tangent. As soon as I do that, I've got control over my edges. And I can say align to edges or align to surface as well. I'll say align to surface, align to surface. And then my rail also has G1 for its curvature, and I'll say OK.

Now by doing that, I've ensured my continuity across all three surfaces. I don't need those surfaces anymore. I just hide them. And I could proceed, you know, and go forward as needed and say that I want to create a mirror of this. And now I don't want faces, I want body. I want this body, my mirror plane here.

Drive it across here, go ahead and join them. And now I know I have continuity across that edge. Perfectly fine, makes sense, everyone's on the same page here, great.

If for instance, I go to my top plane here and I say construction offset this plane drag it down. Let's make sure it's somewhat down, great, terrific, we'll just say, make it a little longer terrific. And I'll say, add a new sketch there on this one. I'll go ahead and look at that. And for our purposes here, I'm just going to draw a circle, kind of snap it here to the midline, maybe a little bigger than we need it, terrific, OK.

And in the interest of time, I'm just going to say go ahead and extrude that as a surface. And I'll send it up. And I will maybe bow it out or in a little bit just because we want to draft it. And terrific. So I've got this form across here.

And traditional service modeling would say trim, trim tool. Get rid of this? Yes. Right click repeat trim, trim tool, get rid of this, great. I've made that edge. I'll go ahead and stitch those together. So now those butt-jointed edges are one singular body.

I'll make sure my sketches are off down there. I'll go ahead and say, patch, patch that bottom edge. We'll switch it to tangent G1 so it's got a little bow on the bottom. I can pull the weighting as needed. I'll say, OK. And then I will go ahead and stitch those together.

As soon as I make an airtight volume in a singular stitched body, Fusion will automatically make that a solid. So now I have a solid body there based on my Surface Construction. Completely valid, makes sense. That's how we would baseline and do that work.

Great system, you can do that in Fusion. But I want to open the door that most of you can see, but you're not quite sure how to leverage it. If you're a good surface modeler, you know that there's a time and a place to use solids. There's a time and a place to use surfaces. And as soon as you juggle those two, that's when you get the most out of the software.

I want to say that Fusion has a third rail which is also the Create Form environment. And when you do that, you now have a third option to build from. And let me just start a new file so we can talk about that. And we'll go forward from here and open that third modeling process, OK.

So there's a baseline that I think you need to know before we talk about how to apply your surface modeling strategy to the form tool. When you open the form tool, it creates a session. It's marked in the timeline as this action. And in the upper right, it says, finish form, which is very similar to stop sketch.

And if you have that mentality, you'll realize that this session is what you're doing. Everything that's here is a leader of solid and surface production. For example, if I do a box, and I put this box here, and I'm not going to do anything as far as adding subdivisions at this moment in time. I'm just going to modify it and potentially pull this edge out and pull this face up. Notice it's giving me a dimension so I can move it specifically, OK?

At this moment, that is an airtight surface. If I grab the whole thing and say, right click or Control C copy, right click or Control the paste, I create a second version of it. I'm just going to pick these four faces here and say, right click and say, delete or hit Delete on the keyboard, and it removes that grouping.

And what happens is it opens that inside. The edge continues continuity just as if the surface was here side-to-side. You can see the difference with the two. It's showing me I have two form bodies, or T-spline bodies at this moment. Their subdivision only split up. And that's how you use them.

The key to this world is that when I say finish form, each one of these T-spline bodies generates a potential solid or surface. Airtight, this will create a solid. Non-airtight, this will create a surface. So I say finish form.

Now I have a solid and a surface that no matter what I do to these, it's led by this session. For example, I'll go to surface, and I'll say extend an edge. And I'll say grab this edge, and I'll extend it just a little bit, right? And it's going to distort and drive based on its edge.

I'll say, OK? I'll go back into that form session, which occurred ahead of that timeline. I'll grab that entire edge and just for our purposes here, I'll maybe extend it a little bit and pull it over a little.

I'll say, OK. I'll finish my form. It regenerates the solid and surface and updates parametrically the extent, OK? That's the baseline.

Now, let's open the door to our surface modeling strategy and how that can aid us using the form tool. So I'll start a new file, OK. With that in mind, let's kind of take the context back to our first demo that I did as a surface. But let's use the form tool as a surface generator.

So I'll start a session. I'll quickly put a plane on the top face here. And all this does is create a planar element. It is not an air tight. It's just a planar element. And you can see that it gives you four surfaces to start with.

If I grab these arrows here, they subdivide and add more quickly within the tool generation. You can turn on symmetry as well. And you can mirror length and width. So now it's quadrant-based. For what we need, it's not important now. But you can. I can make it bigger, smaller, I can punch in numbers.

These sliders and these poles are only available when you create the plane. There are numerous ways later to stretch it, grow it, add it, subdivide more. But the handles are only available when you're creating something. So I'll say, OK. And now you have two tool sets.

Under Create, you're adding items. Under Modify, you're changing them. This is hierarchical. And the one you probably will use the most is edit form, OK? It's right here. It's also right click on your marking menu at 2 o'clock.

So I'm going to double click on this entire edge, say, right click edit form. And now as I move that up, it's pulling and distorting its neighbor as well. Just for our purposes, I'm going to rotate it. And then I'll also grab this one, and I'll pull that one up. And I'll rotate it as well.

And you can see that I'm getting a live effect of what my quote, "surface loft" would have generated. And I'm seeing the cause and effect live based on my movement and my manipulation of what the surfaces are doing. And for our purposes now, this is great. It gets the job done.

I'll say OK. And I'm going to move it off my top surface a little. So I'll double click on everything and move it away from my plane just so I can use the plane as a starting point, great.

So in this form session that's identified in the timeline, I only have one body. And it is not airtight. So when I say, finish form, it generates a surface body, terrific. If I come to do a sketch on the bottom, and I'll look at that. And very similar to our last demo, I'm just going to do a circle, terrific. And then I'll say surface, extrude that one up as a surface. And I'll go ahead and draft it out a little bit making sure we're overbuilt like a good overbuilding modeler. And I'll say, OK.

Now, at this moment in time, the bottom isn't closed with a patch. The top is open and violating this other one. I could follow a normal procedure and say trim. And say my trim tool is this and cut this, great. And I can go through the same process, repeat trim, trim, trim, terrific.

And then I could say, patch. And I could patch this, great, and then stitch them together and net a solid, perfectly valid. And what I've done is I've used this form tool to create a compound, complex surface body in a faster, slightly more intuitive way. And again, I'm not saying replace surface modeling. I'm saying, now, instead of just solids and surfaces, you also have sub-divisional modeling to yield surfaces, OK?

So with this in mind, I'm going to leave the bottom open. And I'm going to use a tool inside of Fusion called boundary fill. And it is a way to get to solids faster and not need to destroy or trim or make copies of surface bodies.

So I want to make a solid here. And so I'm going to say, create boundary fill. And my tool rules are surface body, surface body. And for this demo, I'm also going to use the top plane. And as soon as I do that, it identifies a potential airtight intersection of all three tools.

And it wants me to say, hey, pick the cells. So if I say check the cell, I only have one. You could have multiples. I'm going to say this one, new body. And I'll say, OK.

So what it does is it retains both surface bodies and generates the solid that I can then go ahead and fillet it, cut it, shell it, whatever I want to do. And now I have a really fast way to get to this compound nature.

Again, the form session that's back here in the timeline is editable and adjustable. So if I go in here and I say, edit this. I've gone back in time, and you can see the ghost of Christmas future here where you have the solid.

And I'm going to go ahead and modify this surface by, I want to move that point. And I'm going to pull that point down and create a more dramatic depression. And I'll take these two points here, and I'll slide those points up to create sort of a little winged area there.

Again, the principle is the same I say finish form, it generates the surface body here and then it goes through the steps of doing the extrude, the boundary fill, and then the fillet. And I can interactively play between the three tool sets, solid surface and the form tool, OK.

So let me add a new file here. All right, so let's take what we learned and build on that a little bit. I'm going to start a new form session. And I want to talk about and expand on speed and how I can play with form.

So I'm going to start with a plane again. And I'll draw it on the front face here. And I've got it set with this right plane kind of being my general spine of this item. I'm going to turn on symmetry. And I'm going to turn on length symmetry. And I'll say, OK.

I only have four surfaces here, great. So if I say edit form, and I grab this edge. And I drag this edge up and down, you can see how it's pulling my center line as well. And if I manipulate it and pull it out, it stretches and helps the one next to it, great, terrific, OK?

I don't want to do that so I'll undo it. If I use edit form, and I grab this and this, and on my PC, if I say Alt-- I believe it's Command on Mac-- and I press and hold Alt and then drag that same arrow, you can see that it added a face just so you can visualize it. Now I'm pulling down without pressing Alt. And now I'll press and hold Alt and you can see it add that face.

And as I'm doing that, I'm actually growing and sculpting my contour as needed. Now, what's even more interesting is if you press and hold Alt and control, it will crease for you.

So now I've built the crease in. I'll press and hold Alt again. And I'll move it in. I'll release both of those. I'll pull that down. I'll zoom in just a little bit. And I'll say, press and hold Alt. And I'll drag it off of there. And I'll bring it down.

So at this moment in time, I've created an interesting cross section without sketching. And I've been able to visualize and manipulate it as I'm doing it. So we're going to go ahead and say, well vertices, which is the longer way to do it. But I want to show you that I can pull these together. And now that's got one item sitting there.

If I double click on this whole center line, and I say edit form, and I use the middle, now I've universally scaled my inside and I bowed those outside faces, OK? With this in mind, I'm going to leave my edit form tool up. I'm just going to mention it. I'm not going to go into detail about it now.

But notice that down here, it says selection filter. And the default is all. But if I switch to faces, it's only allowing me to pick faces. If I switch it to edges, it only allows me to pick edges. And if I go to points, it only allows me to pick points.

But look what it does when I have an open face. It's got handles to control the termination. So if I box select all those handles, and I universally scale them, I'm controlling the termination of that face very quickly and very elegantly on how that face ends.

I'll say, OK. And I'm going to quickly repeat that process. Whoop, I don't want a cylinder. I want a plane again. I'll draw on here. I'm going to look at that. And I'll quickly build a piece here, terrific.

I will take this entire thing. It's got symmetry as well. I'll say give me this whole thing, right click, Edit form. I'll switch it back to all, right. I want this whole thing. One second, let's say, all. There we go. I'll slide it forward. I'll rotate it a little bit.

There we go. I'll grab that edge, and I'll pull that edge forward and maybe down a little bit. And you can see how I've quickly built a compound face to this. I'll pull it back a little just so I've overbuilt the surface, terrific.

I'll say, OK, finish that form. And now I have two surface bodies. And I'll take this one here. I'll right click. And I'll say, whoops. I don't want it. Let's move copies, fine. I don't want a face. Give me one second.

I'll say right click, and I'll say move copy. And I'll say this body. And I'll say Create a Copy. And I am going to just re-select that one. So it's selecting easier for me. Create a copy. I'll pull it over here. And just for our purposes, I'll angle it down a little bit, great.

So I have that surface going the other way. Could I have done that surface in the form tool? Yes, of course, I could have. And then we'll say, create, boundary fill, selection tools, all three of these surfaces. There is my cell. I'll say OK. And now I have a solid based on that construction.

If I want to change it, I go back into my leader which is the form tool here. I'll take that entire front edge. I'll pull it up like this. I'll say OK, drive it out, all my updates follow suit. So this is a really powerful way to iterate and create new surfaces and intent.

Let me start a new file and talk about my last demo for this section. So hopefully you've seen where my intent is going here. And I really want to strive to combine these three modeling techniques with surface modeling being the foundation.

So let's do a quick form, all right? And I'm going to draw a plane on this front face here. And for our purposes, I'm just going to quickly draw something like this. I don't want symmetry now because I'm going to build from it, OK?

And I'll say, OK. And then I'll edit form. And I'll take these two here. And I'll pull them out. And let's pull this one out as well. We'll slide those out like that. Let me just go to a side view here, OK. And let me take this point and this point back to this view.

Slide them out a little. And I'll take this point and this point. And I'll slide and bow that surface in the other direction. So I have this nice compound surface, lovely.

One of the things that gets challenging with this side of the coin is building cylinders and true circles, OK? Because even though that's a circle and I could adjust it and flare it and do whatever I wanted to with it, interaction and intersection on how these things come together gets to be slightly odd because of our previous mindset.

So if I want to have this surface here, which I should say, T-spline body intersect with this one and line up those flared edges or any of that to be a circle, that's a challenging piece of geometry and math to go through, OK?

But this is where you have to leverage what you already know. So you use the form tool as a overbuilding, large scale surface complexity construction. And then you let it generate surfaces. And you tap into your surface modeling knowledge.

For example, if I draw a sketch on here, and I look at that and I draw a circle on there, great, and I draw a smaller circle on there, terrific, and I finish that sketch, now you can leverage yourself as a surface modeler. And say, trim, my trim tool is this. I'm getting rid of that, OK.

Now, I'll say extrude this. And I'll push it forward a little bit, great. And then I'll say loft from this to that. Retain G1 tangency to that lower surface. And now you can leverage exactly what you want from a true circle standpoint.

I'll stitch those together. This one, and that one, and that one, say OK. Then I'll add a fillet, break edge across there. I don't want to drag it too far like I did there. Let's make it 15 and see what that looks like, great.

And so now I have actual geometry in the right place that's all based on this initial surface. So if I just take-- let's take these over here, right? And we will slide those out. And you can see that it pulled those away.

Let's pull the center one as well. So it drives it out. You can see the change that it had on the future. We say OK, update, and your surface modeling falls into place.

I hope that opens the door slightly so you can see where you can go with this. And one quick example I'll open-- let's go to my recent data. I'm pretty sure I opened my Camaro test a little bit ago. There it is.

So this is a file I built. And I think I previewed it ever so slightly in my Instagram page. And I was doing a setup for a solve there. That's interesting. Let's get out of Simulation and go back to Design, right? And let's look at this for one second, OK?

If you're a surface modeler, you understand how this works. But if you go into my timeline here, you'll notice that I've got a couple of quick sketches, a couple planes, guiding what this does. And there's a form session.

If I go into the form session at the very beginning, you quickly realize that I have a main body for the greenhouse, a main body for the car itself. It's not super complicated. It's slightly overbuilt.

But what you see is that I have not worried about the foglight. I have not worried about the grille. That's in the future. Because later on the road, the demo I just showed you for this foglight makes complete sense if you're a surface modeler.

With that in mind, I hope you saw something here. And let me switch back to my presentation. And there we have back to my presentation.

I hope you enjoyed today. I hope you saw something new. And I hope that like me, you saw that there is this other world inside of Fusion that feels very strange at first, but when you start to tap into your surface modeling history, you can really leverage it. So follow me on social media, enjoy, thank you for coming today.