10 things that make Fusion 360 awesome

ALEX LOBOS: I'm Alex Lobos, I'm the director of school of design at Rochester Institute of Technology. And today, I will share with you 10 things that make Fusion 360 awesome.

As you might know, Fusion 360 is turning 10, and throughout that time, my students and I have been very fortunate to work with the Fusion team, and with the education team at Autodesk at very different levels. And it has really transformed the way that we use CAD and how we integrate technology into our designs and workflow.

So out of those experiences, I'm going to share with you 10 things that we've learned that we feel that make Fusion awesome. And also, that have improved the work that we create.

So the learning objectives for this class-- first is to discover how Fusion 360 enhances innovation, mechanical development, and collaboration. Also, learning new tools that help to drive design intent, and these tools could be solid modeling, freeform modeling, surface modeling, and many more.

We also discover a few tools-- extra tools that Fusion 360 has-- that are very powerful, such as generative design and the rendering environment. And lastly, we will explore the benefits of using both CAD and CAM as part of a creative concept development.

So let's get going. What makes Fusion 360 awesome? The first thing that I feel that makes Fusion 360 awesome is the ability to model in real time-- direct modeling. And this mostly happens in the freeform T-splines environment.

So we started working with Fusion 360 about two years before it was released to the market. We were very fortunate to start working with the Fusion team as they were finishing up the development of the product. And that was a great experience, being able to understand how everything came together, to provide feedback to the Fusion team, and also to have a lot of interesting stories out by the time that the product was released.

What you're seeing here-- it's a Coca-Cola bottle-- is one of the first designs that I published, that I felt highlighted some of the benefits of Fusion. So I want to show you and walk you through the workflow for creating this bottle.

So everything starts with bringing an image of the Coca-Cola bottle to have as a reference. And I put it in as a canvas. And once I have that, I go and create a sketch. And then from there, I draw a spline. And what that allows me to do is to follow the contour of the bottle, and really tweak some details so that I can be as accurate as I can.

Once that spline is completed, I used revolve to turn it into a three-dimensional shape. And the cool thing with this is that depending on the number of faces that I choose, that gives me a level of resolution and more accuracy for creating the bottle.

At that point, I start adding some geometry, which is a very powerful tool of the freeform environment, where I can just add faces without much complexity. So you're seeing there that I'm adding some faces to the center of the bottle, so that I can add some details and some bumps in the surface of the label.

I set up this design as a four-way symmetry. What that means is that right now, as you see that I'm creating the ridges, as I move sections in one quadrant of the design, the other three quadrants are adjusted automatically. So you see, it's a fairly basic, straightforward workflow, that gives you very good results quite quickly.

So based on that, I also want to show some student work that was created back then. These are some helmet designs that I feel really reflect the ability of creating complex shapes in a very fluid way, in a very quick way. And also, Professor Stan Rickel, one of my colleagues, he developed some workflows and exercises where students would create shapes both in Fusion and with clay and plaster in real life. And then, it was very interesting to compare how the different workflows and abilities of both tools connected.

Next, you know, I've always said that a new design doesn't have to begin with a sketch. So traditionally with CAD, you know the story-- you have a plane, you draw a sketch, and then you project that sketch into a three-dimensional shape. So I showed you in t-splines how easy it is to create shapes and to model them without using a lot of sketches.

A lot of people feel that that is not really possible in parametric mode, in the model environment. The stand mixer that you see here was modeled without a single sketch. And I feel that that's one powerful way of modeling that can go both from the t-splines environment into parametric environment.

So let me show you how that works. So in this case, I'm in the model environment, and I start with a single box. You know, I define dimensions and then just pull the arrow to create some general dimensions. And then from there, I create a series of boxes that I will use to cut holes into the main object.

As you can see, I'm doing this fairly quickly. I'm not super worried about proportions at this point. I just want to create some basic geometry.

Once I have that basic shape, I use fillet to start rounding off corners and start giving it a little bit more definition, so that I can have a better sense of how the stand mixer is going to look like. Again, I'm not looking for proportions, I'm just looking for general curvature and details of the shape.

Once I have that, one very powerful tool in Fusion is move. So most times, you use move to move bodies. But you can also use it to move faces.

So in this case, you see that I'm using that to really get a sense of the proportions and where I want different components of the stand mixer to be. So this is, again, modeling in real time. One of the cool things that move has is that you can also angle faces, so this brings a whole new dimension to how you can create model sculpt shapes in Fusion.

So you see that by now, I have a general shape of the stand mixer. I was modeling only one half, so I can mirror that half so that I have both left and right sides of the stand mixer. And then, if I use the combine tool, then I can connect these into a single shape.

By the way, if you are interested in any of the examples that you see today in the class, and want to see them in all of their detail, all of these come from previous classes that I've done at AU. So you are able to find them on AU online.

So next, I want to talk about advanced modeling-- going beyond fluffy clouds. There's this perception that the work that you do in these clients works very well for super-organic shapes that are not necessarily too precise, and that if you want something that has more dimensions and details to it, then it can only be done in parametric mode.

So this is an example of a design that I created where I wanted to highlight how organic shapes created in these plans can actually have a lot of definition and follow design intent. So what you see here is a concept backpack that has a semi-rigid exoskeleton, and then you have a mesh bag liner inside where you will put things. And it has two green lids made out of silicone.

So the idea is that if you stretch them, then that's how you close the backpack. And then if you release them, they compress and open up the pockets for the backpack. So as you can see, there's a lot of organic shapes in here. Imagine how long it will take to model something like this with a traditional sketch projection workflow.

And let me show you how some of this was created. Again, I brought in an image to have some reference of the proportions of a backpack. And from there, using a quad bowl, I was able to create a soft box, let's say, where I was able to control how many subdivisions I wanted. And then, just adjusting some proportions to get the shape right.

Once I had that done, what I was interested in doing was to remove some faces. And that is done just by selecting them and clicking on the Delete key. And that opened up some space in the shape. And from there, I could use a tool called bridge to connect to edges. And that's how you see that these side-angled sections were created.

Once I had a general shape, I used thicken to give it some thickness, and turn that from a surface into a solid. And what you see that's happening now is me using the pipe tool, where I can draw a simple line or curve, and then turn that into a tube. And then, I can edit and adjust some of the shapes to change the form a little bit.

And now, I'm using bridge again to connect some of the faces of the straps into the main body. And using bridge, again, to select some outer and inner faces that, in this case, will connect to actually remove geometry from the backpack. So you see that this is a very fluid workflow that actually works very efficiently.

This is an example of a student work that I feel reflects this idea of creating very organic, complex shapes. But bringing them into a more precise type of workflow that involves some assembly and different parts.

So this is a military boot that one of our students designed. His goal with this was when you are wearing military boots in snowy situations, you need those boots to be waterproof. And that really limits, if not blocks, the ventilation that your feet have. And that can create a lot of issues with overheating, over-sweating, et cetera.

So the solution in this case was to create some ventilation. There's a pump system in the inside of the shoe, so that any time that you take a step and your heel touches the ground, you pump that system that pulls some air from the outside into the inside of the shoe. And this actually worked-- it reduced temperature, and it improved ventilation in the mock-ups that the student created.

What I want to highlight in here is the high level of detail of creating a very organic, very fluid shape, and then being able to combine different layers, you know, like the outer sole, the midsole, the upper part of the shoe, et cetera, et cetera, in a very effective way.

Next, I feel that the CAM unit manufacturing part of Fusion can be an essential part of the creative process, and you can combine that with the more traditional approach for a tool like Fusion, and really create very interesting results. What you're seeing here is a table lamp that I designed with a student of mine, David Villarreal.

Our goal was to create a very elegant, very lightweight, very minimal lamp, something that almost felt like it was handcrafted. But at the same time, it would have been very hard to do with only manual tools. And at least in our case, I don't think that David or I would have been able to make this by hand out of wood.

So the lamp is about 12, 15 inches tall, you know, about 40, 45 millimeters. It's very lightweight-- than 2 pounds. And it has this LED ring in the middle that projects light up and down.

So the way that this lamp was modeled was a very simple workflow. We have three rings, and then we selected a few faces from the middle to the bottom, and then from the middle to the top. And that was all it took to create the side sections that you see. We had a three-way symmetry, so that we only had to perform that process once, and then the other two sections will be created automatically.

And what I want to highlight in here is, again, how simple the process is. And something that Fusion does in a very straightforward way, almost like finding the laziest way to connect geometry, when you look at the result, it actually translates into something very elegant, very organic, very fluid. And I feel that that's a very good way of combining these tools that you have at your disposal.

So once we have the final design created, the physical lamp with a CNC router, so you see there are some sections David milled this out with a shop bot, just carving out the sections and then connecting everything together. The cool thing about this lamp is that, once we have the prototype and Autodesk became interested in it, and asked us if they could make a few versions of the lamp out of their shop in San Francisco, Pier 9.

So that was a very cool experience, you can imagine. I mean, and you can see here how the quality of the design, the level of detail, went way, way up once Autodesk was able to play with different materials, and inserts, and different woods. So this was a very fun project.

Next, another thing that makes Fusion 360 awesome is collaboration. And how when you are working in teams, you need collaborative tools, and Fusion can be that.

So what you're seeing here is the entire industrial design department at Rochester Institute of Technology. And we run a project with the Fusion team. They came in this last spring.

So at the beginning of the semester, we gave the students a brief. And we organized the students in groups of four or five so that there was freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, and grad students in each of the teams.

The brief was this-- at Autodesk University, and some other conferences and shows that Autodesk has, they set up what they call the factory experience. So this is a space in the expo where you have different machines from different vendors creating parts using different processes. So as you are walking through the exhibit, you collect these pieces, and then you can take them and put them together and end up with a product that you get to keep.

So you can imagine things like a Bluetooth speaker, or maybe an air purifier. And the charge that we gave these teams at RIT was, what other types of products could be created through that process?

So students spend four days-- it was a very short week-- coming up with concepts, working with the Autodesk teams, and also working with them creating CAD models, sketches, mockups, et cetera. And just to complete the design.

So these projects involve a lot of collaboration and teamwork. And that's where we saw the benefits of, for example, Fusion teams, and some other capabilities that the program has for allowing collaborative work.

Autodesk chose three designs, and those are being refined right now. And the goal is that starting next year at Autodesk University, you will get to see some student work from RIT in the factory experience.

This is one of the designs that was selected-- this is a multi-tool that has a measuring section , and then also a laser measuring tool. And it also has digital color readers, so you can put anything that you have in front of this lens and then you will get a readout with the RGB value.

One thing that was important for this design was to create a design that was simple to manufacture, and at the same time, that it highlighted different manufacturing processes. So that it aligned well with the factory experience.

This is a second design that was selected-- this is also a measuring tool, but this uses a wheel as the measuring method. And again, you know, I love seeing these designs and thinking of how quickly students have to create them. Again, only four days to come up with the concept, and refining it.

And this is the third new concept that was selected. It's an electric screwdriver with multiple bits that can be interchanged. And it also has a very, very cool appearance, I think.

So the next thing that makes Fusion awesome is render. And this, I have to say, is one of my favorite tools in Fusion 360. I feel that rendering is a very, very powerful tool for storytelling, for communicating your design details of your designs to different audiences and stakeholders.

The rendering environment in Fusion is very simple. It has basic tools, but when you use them correctly, you can get amazing results. And I've never felt the need of having to go to other programs, like Keyshot, or something similar-- I really feel that tweaking with the Fusion and rendering environment is enough to create new results.

So here, you can see some examples. This is a drum set that I designed. It was modeled in a parametric way, meaning that I only modeled one drum. And then, I was able to copy it and simply change the dimensions, the depth and diameter. And then, a new drum would be the result.

So I did that a few times-- same thing with the hardware that you see holding the cymbals.

In terms of storytelling, you can see that there's some diagonal axes that are created because of the angle of the camera. And also, the way that Fusion works with materials and with lights, and also depth of field, you know, where you have some areas that are in focus and some areas out of focus, when you combine these together, you really create a compelling image that highlights the detail of the design that you want to highlight.

This is another example, a bass guitar-- I love the detail of the wooden body, the grain, some of the texture, same thing with the strings and the other hardware, being able to identify a focal point.

This is another example-- a digital camera, where I feel that having some detail in how the lens was assembled, adding some fillets, some slight separation between the different parts-- once you start rendering that, it really highlights the different components. And it gives more realistic appearance to them, to the render.

And this is just another example where you can see how even the reflections, and some of the textures, and different elements of the design really come together to create a compelling image.

So next, talking about some of the additional tools that Fusion has is generative design. And the way that I see generative design, and many other tools based on AI, is how they become a collaborator. You give them some very basic parameters, and they come up with solutions, shapes, that you hadn't thought about, that would be impossible for you to conceive. And that becomes a very important, very unique part of your design process.

So in terms of generative design, the way that it works is that you define some points that you want to have connected. And then you provide certain parameters to how these points will be connected with a structure. In terms of material that could be used, weight that needs to be supported, forces that might come from different angles, and also areas where you want these structures to grow, to be created. And also areas that you want to avoid, so that there's no interference with other parts of your design.

So this table that you see-- for the legs, I use generative design. I simply define three points, in the top part of the leg, and then one point touching the floor. That's all the geometry that I have, basically four mini cylinders. And then, from there, generative design in Fusion created many different iterations and shapes of potential legs. So I was able to go in and choose one in this case-- this one that I felt really complemented my design well.

If you're curious, the top part of this object was done using a tool called barometer, which turns a solid shape into a Voronoi pattern mesh. This is outside of Fusion, so it's not part of the Autodesk products. But it was something that was very easy for me to model as a solid in Fusion, export as an STL, turn that solid into a Voronoi mesh, and then bring it back into Fusion and integrate it with the rest of the design.

This is a recent student work-- this is from Anthony Parrucci. And I feel that it has a very cool story as a design, itself. I feel that it also highlights the very cool ways of using generative design, and some of these other similar tools that you can have in Fusion.

So this project started with the idea of creating a hockey helmet for female hockey players. Most sports equipment is designed for men, and then it doesn't necessarily address needs that other users might have. So in this case, Anthony wanted to highlight that.

As the project grew, it ended up as a system that actually uses sensors-- some in a wrist band, and some in sensors that are inside the helmet. And those measure metrics such as your hydration level, your heart rate, your breathing, and some other biometrics that help you to understand what is your level of performance.

So this is information that will be very useful for any athlete. It might be very useful, too, for a coach, so that they, for example, understand what are some good levels or good moments for peak performance, and some moments where maybe something needs to be addressed.

In terms of the design, you see that this helmet has a lot of components. The mainframe was designed in a traditional way, with free-form, and creating some organic shapes and some mechanical details. The top section that you see that it's open, that was created with generative design.

So again, defining some points, and letting Fusion connect them in an interesting way. The sides were done using Voronoi mesh, in a similar fashion to what I described in the previous design. And then, for the inside padding, the orange sections of the helmet, those were done using lattice design, which allows you to create a simple shell and then to replicate that as a pattern, and remove geometry.

So that allowed Anthony to define the right density for having enough protection in the padding of the helmet, while also having a lot of ventilation.

So the next thing that makes Fusion awesome, I feel, is the way that you can combine t-spline modeling and parametric modeling, and how they become great partners. So what you see here is a concept that I created last year-- it's a smart speaker, similar to an Alexa or a Google Home, where you have a device that you give verbal orders to. And then, out of that, you will hear news, or music, or you will be reminded of different things.

What I wanted to make unique about this design was to add a cultural identity to it, meaning when you look at most smart products, they have a very neutral appearance. And I thought that adding a stronger cultural component would help with making the product more usable, more attractive in the home. And also, easier to use by a wide range of users, because they felt more connected and identified with the product.

So in this case, this smart speaker is based on Latino culture, specifically Guatemalan culture. So you see that it uses wood as the main frame. It also uses traditional fabric for the screen where the sound will come out.

In terms of the process, something that I felt was very useful was being able to model this in freeform, you know, in the t-splines environment, to create a highly sculptural shape. And then move that to the parametric mode where I will do cut-outs to make sure that there was enough clearance for components, for speakers, some of the internals. And also, getting a right shape for the opening in the front.

This is a process that you can do, and go back and forth, which is great, you know. I had a general shape, once I realized that maybe it needed to be tweaked to add some mechanical components, I was able to go back, tweak it, bring it back to the parametric environment, make more adjustments, and so on.

So once the design was ready, I was able to mill this out. Some students at RIT helped me to do that. And then, assemble everything together for the final design.

So the next thing that makes Fusion awesome is going between physical and digital. And I believe that that's something that you've seen in the rest of my presentation, as a constant, but something that I really value and love the idea of being able to go between the digital tools, and also the more traditional analog tools.

What you're seeing here is part of a research project that I did with Autodesk, looking at how photogrammetry could be used in industrial design. So for this example, I was very interested in creating some champagne glasses that had a very interesting pattern. So I started thinking of pine cones-- you know, they have a very cool pattern.

And I thought that instead of trying to replicate that with some modeling, manual modeling, you know, I could bring the actual geometry of the pine cone into my design. So the way that photogrammetry works is that you have your object, and then you set it up in a photo booth and a turntable, so that you can start taking pictures of the model as you rotate it.

So you go all around from a number of different angles. So in this case, I ended up with 100, 120 images. It sounds like a lot, but it doesn't take a lot of time. It's like a three to five-minute process, taking the pictures and rotating the model.

So I brought these to ReCap Pro, and the software starts overlapping the images. And out of those overlaps and information, it creates a digital file-- a digital model of your design. So that's what you're seeing here.

At this point, I was able to simplify the geometry to reduce the number of faces, and also turn the faces from tri-base to quad-based. Once I had quad-based faces in the design, I was able to bring everything back to Fusion, and then to model the final details of the glass-- the base, the stem, and also, the top.

So that's the final result-- this combination of this photogrammetry method with traditional modeling. This is something that you could do with 3D scanning, as well, you know, depending on the technologies that you have available.

So with this process in mind, we set up a collaboration between MakerBot, Autodesk, and RIT, where we had students design products and edit them between analog and digital workflows in an iterative way.

So we asked students to come up with wearable products that could be worn, or used around the wrist. And then, the idea was that they will create many versions, many iterations, of the design.

The workflow was something like creating a mockup, and once you had that mockup, you used mesh capture photogrammetry, or 3D scanning, to turn it into a CAD model. So then in Fusion, you could refine it, add more details, or change some things. You will 3D print it, so that now it was back in the real world.

And then, you could make more adjustments, scan it again, and so on. So we asked students to do a minimum of three iterations of this process. The results were great. This is a dog leash that, instead of relying on you holding the leash just with your palm, it actually distributes, you know, the forces throughout your entire hand and wrist. So this makes the leash a lot more comfortable to use, and also a lot safer, so that you don't let go of the leash by accident.

This is another example-- this was a bracelet that you use with a screw, so then the idea is that if you're holding and screwing something, and now you need to change a bit, and you don't have a third hand that can help you, then the bracelet would allow you to exchange these drill bits.

And then, this other concept I loved-- it was a very whimsical concept. The idea here is that this is a shopping list. So you see these charms that represent different foods, and items that use and consume in the home. So let's say that you are running out of eggs or milk, then you will take those charms and put them in a bowl. Once you were ready to go shopping, you will put on a bracelet that held magnets, so then you will grab those charms and attach them to the bracelet. So that became your shopping list.

You could go to the grocery store. And as you were gathering the items, then you could put the charms back in their place. And eventually, bring them back to the tray, so that you could repeat the process next time that you wanted to go shopping.

So the last thing that I want to comment about how we feel that Fusion 360 is awesome is that for us, Fusion is more than a product. You know, it's really a community. We've been very fortunate to work with Fusion on many different new ways throughout the years-- everything from being able to present at conferences, both faculty and students, to visit Autodesk offices. Also participate in design labs, which are a lot of fun.

And students have won, by the way. Also having the Autos come to campus very often. And I was also very fortunate to be a visiting research fellow at Autodesk as part of my sabbatical.

So my point with this is that all of these experiences, I feel, have enhanced the way that we use CAD, and have really helped us to create different ways of using them. And what I've noticed is that we are not the only ones-- the Fusion team, the education team, are always looking for collaborators and have very similar relationships with other schools and other organizations.

So I hope that helps you to think of new ways of using Fusion in working with your students. Again, if you are interested in more details of any of the designs and workflows that you saw in this class, I encourage you to look them up in AU online, because all of these come from classes that I've taught before.

So thanks again for your time, and have a good one.