Generative Design and the Form Tool in Autodesk Fusion 360 for Concept Design

JEFF SMITH: Hi, guys. Welcome to my Autodesk University class. My name is Jeff Smith, and our class today is "Generative Design and the Form Tool in Fusion 360 for Concept Design." And that is a mouthful. But let me break it down a little bit and get going, so we can get right into Fusion.

So Safe Harbor Statement-- I'm going to leave this up here for a moment. You guys can all read through it. And then knowing what we're showing, I'm pretty sure that everything that I'm showing today is all in production release, so shouldn't it be an issue. So these are my goals. I want to get you guys exposed to Fusion 360 as a tool for concept development, get you guys to think of it in a different way, and maybe give you a different point of view to generate ideas.

We're going to do a quick overview of me first just so you know where I'm coming from. And then we'll do a quick overview of some tools in Fusion, so you're comfortable with what it does, how it works. If you're coming from another piece of software, there will be pieces that you completely understand. There might be some that are a little different, but I want to make sure we have the same foundation. And then, we'll do some automated modeling to get some cool ideas how and why. Then we'll do a quick dive into volume fields. And you might say to yourself, oh, that's an interesting way to generate a concept.

We'll also use plastic tools, specifically the geometric pattern tool. And then lastly, and probably most importantly, we'll use a generative design and generative setup to produce some forms that you may not get to first. And as a designer, it's a really interesting way to think, so I want to share my experiences with you and hopefully, give you other tools.

So a little about me and a little bit about CAD. So as I said, my name's Jeff Smith. I am an industrial designer. I went to the Rochester Institute of Technology. I graduated in 1993, which makes me old school. It makes me trained on paper both for drawing and drafting, but that's a good thing because I learned all my digital tools as I went. I did about 20 years as a product designer, design for manufacturing at a small design company called Reflex Design.

I have been ID adjunct faculty at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, RIT, and I currently teach one class at Iowa State University. I've been with Autodesk for almost eight years. I've been on three teams-- education, customer success, and I currently am in sales, which is very unusual as a designer, but design thinking works. I'll show you my Instagram page as well just so you can see where I'm coming from as a concept person. SOLIDWORKS is my foundation for CAD program.

So that's where I come from. That's my background when I come into Fusion is how I think. OK, I have all kinds of stuff I'll show you in this regard. I picked three images really quick just so you can see something both for CAD, both for drawing. But we'll go more through that and how this system works. This down here is generative design, which is pretty cool and where we're going to touch on last today.

So, let's get over here and go to Fusion. But I'll quickly jump out of here. We'll come back there in a moment. But if you're interested, I mentioned it earlier, this is my Instagram page. This shows you where I'm coming from a concept design standpoint. I'm a little bit old school. I'm a little bit focused on drawing and markers, but I also do digital. I also do CAD. I also build things in 3D, do things generatively and so on. But that's enough of that. Let's get over to Fusion.

OK, here is Fusion. Let's take 3 minutes and do a nickel tour to make sure we're all on the same page. Fusion is a very designerly way to do CAD because the upper left hand side here is your hierarchy, and it goes left to right, top to bottom. So if I work my way across from the left to right and from the top to bottom, you get to start to feel how it's laid out from a user interface. Big button, you can switch between tool sets. The default is design. We'll touch on generative today, maybe rendering for a second. But we're not going down to simulation, manufacture, or drawing, and so on.

Each tab has different substructures. So I'm in design. So it's got solid modeling. If you're coming from SOLIDWORKS, Inventor, or Pro/E, this makes sense. It's got surface modeling. If you're coming from SOLIDWORKS or another tool where you build surfaces, makes complete sense. It's also a really good mesh generator and editor. It's got sheet metal. It's got plastic tools. We'll touch on this as well, most specifically the geometric pattern. You've got utilities you can add in. You've got managed extensions and so on. Volume fields is over here on the right. We will touch on this today as well.

So I'm going to go back to solid. There are all kinds of things you can dive into with preferences. We're not talking about that now. You've got a view cube over here. If you're used to an Autodesk tool, this should make sense. If you're coming from something else, it might be a little unusual. If you click on it, you can move to a certain view. If you're using your mouse to tumble and rotate, you have the ability to use different combinations of Zoom pan and [INAUDIBLE] button. All kinds of things about that on videos out there.

On the left here is your browser. This is where you organize your information. Anything with a triangle can be opened and closed. Anything with an eyeball can be turned on or off both at the folder level and at the item level. You've got name views, document settings, and so on in here. All of that is fine and dandy.

As a solid modeler, you can draw 2D sketches, and then you can do things with them. Everything can be dimensioned, everything can be edited. I'm just going to do a real quick extrude here. So we see it. We send that up. Notice, I have a Bodies folder and a Sketches folder. Everything is tied together. We have our history across the bottom. Fusion is both a history-based modeler and a non-history modeler. You can do it both ways. Direct editing is a very powerful tool, but we're going to go with history for right now.

OK, I've done a quick extrude. Notice that I have a body here. And this is wrapping up my quick tour because you have to understand the nomenclature if you're coming from somewhere else. Bodies make sense. The icon here next to my name of this file is a singular item. That means that this is a part right now with a single body. If, for example, I do move, copy, and I take this, and I say, create a copy, and I slide this over, I now have a multi-body part.

If I do a new extrude and drag this up-- let's not do that, let's do this-- and let's go from here. And instead of saying to join, I say new component, I now have a multi-component assembly. So Fusion files are both singular parts and assemblies. You can create your assembly from scratch. You can also go into the data panel here and add information in and create assemblies by bringing files in. All of that is legal. Everything is fine. You just have to understand the nomenclature difference between a component and a body because I will talk about those things as we go forward.

Now there's one trick that I will show you guys, which is under Inspect. Down here where it says "Display Component Colors," I use this all the time. It's Shift-N. And what it does is it matches your on-screen images for different bodies. These two bodies are in the bodies folder of the main world. This component is this yellowish color, and it's body is in here. So the colors match. Also, across your timeline the actions highlight those colors. So if I just hit Shift-N, it goes back to whatever color I have assigned to this thing, whatever material I have assigned to it.

So that's my basic nickel tour as fast as I can do it. I'm going to just start a new file here because I want to start fresh. And I want to show you guys our first tool set. And my idea here for this class is to really give you new ways to generate concepts and new thought processes to generate concepts. It's not always about the end result. It's saying, ooh, look at that idea. What if I did this? What if I did that? What if I took this from here?

So the idea here is to help you generate new forms and new ideas and also gain geometry. The more geometry you have, the more pieces you can put back together, the more things you can pull from the old-school style of kit bashing and pushing things together. But if you can generate unique things quickly, you start to figure out new ways to work. And that's my goal for this class.

So, we'll start simple. And we're going to use the automate tool here. Now, I'm kind of going in reverse slightly because generative design is the real foundation. And we'll touch on that last. But automated modeling is very, very, very basic generative design, and it's super fast and easy to use. So let's start there.

So if I'm going to go onto the automate tab, there's only one tool. It's automated model. You can see the little preview there, and it shows that you have some red pieces, some gray pieces, and some blue pieces. It's very basic modeling, and let's just start with it. Let's go for it. So I'll turn on my origin. And I'll say, you know what, I'm going to draw a quick little cylinder here. It's 20 millimeters. I could dimension if I wanted to. I'm going to go a solid extrude. I'll send it over here, and I'll say make it 50 millimeter. Great.

Fusion is super flexible on movement. So I'm going to say move, copy. I'll grab that body. I'll slide it up over here, and maybe I'll even rotate it. Could I have drawn it in this position? Yes, no problem. Could I made it parametric? Sure. But I'm about speed right now. I want that over there. So let's get through another one. We'll say extrude. I'll take this one, and we'll say 15 millimeters. Great. And then I'll go to my top view. We'll do move, copy again. I'll take this. I'll slide her over. And then let's push it down and over here a little bit so it's kind of pushed off in that direction. Great.

And again, in the interest of time, because I want to generate concepts, I want forms. So let's use move, copy again. Let's open my Bodies folder, take that one. And I'll say, create a copy. I'm going to push it over here. I'm going to move it up like this a little bit. And it's at the same height. So let's push it at a different height. We'll do move, copy again. I'll grab that body. Let's push it up over here, and maybe I'll rotate it down a little bit. Great.

So my intent here is to create a complex form and join these pieces together. They're starting geometry. They're simple baselines to get the ball moving. But, I want to give it some sort of obstacle to deal with. So I'm going to do a quick primitive sphere here. And we'll just build this sphere, make that a little bigger, great, terrific. I'll say OK. I'll go to my top view, and we'll just do a quick linear pattern for now of this body along this axis. And we'll push this over here, great. And maybe we'll do four of those, and we'll push it a little bit wider on that. Terrific, we'll say, OK.

So I've got some information on there. Maybe I'll just move this one down a little bit, make it work a little harder. So let's move this one down here so it kind of has to go through those, figure out what it's got to do. OK, simple, easy, I built a couple of pieces here, very basic shapes. So I'm going to say automate-- automated modeling. What am I going to connect? Faces to connect-- I want to connect this face, this face, this face. Bodies to avoid-- I want to avoid this body, this body, this body, this body. Generate shapes.

So what it's going to do is it's going to go through this process, and it's already started. It's building shapes to run through this and to bring those pieces together. And I think it's doing-- let's see, it's got one, two, three, four, five, six. And what it's going to do, it's going to link them together and avoid the red areas. It will generate, based on the one I pick, a solid body of that. And it will also generate a form tool.

And what's important about that is that the form tool is editable. I can change it. I can adjust it, and I can make it what I need to be. And that's the very, very interesting part about this. Because the form tool is super powerful in what I can do with it. Now keep in mind, I've been very direct with this right now. I've said, this face, this face, this face, connect the dots. And you can see it's going right through there. It's not thinking about structure. It's not thinking about material. It's not thinking about it. It's just going to build what I want.

If I click on each one of these, it's going to preview for me, and it's going to give me some interesting shapes. OK, so this one went around it, down it, and below it, super interesting. I like that one. This one also went down and around it, but it's thicker. So let's take that one there. It's almost 80%. It's almost there. So maybe we'll grab one in the interest of time. Well, it's almost done. Let's just look at these here for now. These are done.

OK, 80%. We'll just grab this one for now. That's good. So we'll take that one. It's going to generate it out. And now, what's very interesting is I didn't model that. I quickly put this together. And if you look at my timeline, it has a form session, a boundary fill, and a combine. If I come in and I edit my form tool, I'm in the form environment at that time period. I can then say, you know what, I want this here, and I am going to edit that. And I'll pull that center section up.

It remembers what it did, and it's editable based on where I started. So that's super interesting to get that starting point, and it captures all that history. But let's go one step further. I don't care about that right now. Great, I did that one. But I've got these here. Let's make this work a little bit harder. And let's say, rectangular pattern, bodies to pattern, this, this, this, this. And let's say direction, let's go this way. So now, I've got three going up. Great, terrific. We'll say we got that. And let's make our modeling a little different.

So let's say fill it, and let's put a fill it on all these edges. And we'll say, let's see what 5 millimeters looks like. All right, sounds good to me, 5 millimeters. Now I've changed the geometry. I haven't added that much to it. But let's do another automate. Faces to connect-- just to make things different, that fill it changes the point where it touches. So I will grab the outer shell this time of all three of these.

And I'll say bodies to avoid, and I'm going to do a quick box select just so you guys can see that it can be done as well. I'll grab all of those, and I'll say generate shapes. So now, I've changed the parameters of what Fusion is thinking about. Notice that all of my prior work is captured in the history. That original result body is still there. I can go back and use it. I can do what I want with that. All of it is perfectly referenceable and editable based on what I've done. That's the upside of parametric modeling. There is a real strong point there on what it can do and how it builds things.

So there we go. Now, it's thinking about different ways to connect those. Look how the artificial intelligence of how this is building is now grabbing it differently. Think about what you can do there. That's very powerful. Again, it's got some similarities.

Ooh, I like this one. That's interesting how it pushes through there. Triangle on this one as well. That one's very similar, but it grabs it in a very different manner based on what we did.

I'm going to just go with one of these for now because it's here, and it generates it out. So we'll say OK, and let it generate that one out. There are many different ways to create these elements and what you can do with them. So let's just quickly do something with this. So let's grab all of these here, and we'll turn those off. Visibility, we will say Show High, there we go. Voila. So now I have this piece here, which I find very interesting.

And if I quickly do something with this-- let's just move this really quick. And let's say, let's take this piece, let's right click it, and we'll say create component from body. Now that is a component. It's a singular body in this, and I can use it as a structure. That's still my other body over there. I don't need that. And let's do a quick setup here, and we'll say joint, and we'll grab a joint to this, the origin, terrific. Now that's in position.

I'm going to slide it over a little bit. We'll say minus 25 millimeters. There we go. And now, I'm going to say go ahead and mirror. And I'm going to mirror this component along the mirror plane. And now, I've started to create an interesting different structure. Could I be building a new spaceship structure, a new landing gear, a new mounting structure? I really haven't built that much, and it's already starting to push things together.

Now, let's just say I take both of these, and I say components. But component and component-- let me just select them so I get together, there we go. I'm going to say create a copy. And now I'm going to move those up. And I'm going to rotate those. There, I didn't want to rotate it around that one. So I'll go back one. There we go. Let's go to the left. There we go. Terrific. And I will say set pivot point on the origin. Go, we'll say all right. And now we'll slide it up. I'll rotate it so it lines up. And now, I'll place it over here.

And so in not a lot of time, I've created a semblance or a structure of a system. And there are many ways to deal with this and all kinds of patterning that I could do on top of this. I hope this opens you towards what could be done to get models done quickly. Now, this form here is the build. And if I come in here and edit that-- I don't want to delete it, I want to edit it. Let's hit the right button. There we go. That's my original I'm going to zoom in here, and I'm going to say, give me this to this just for right now. I'm going to take that form, and I'm going to push that up, and I'm going to push that back.

So in a quick instance, now all of the items add that detail. And that's very minimal time to get things to happen and to push through. So I find that very powerful, and it's a great way to get new ideas. Problem, but could I also be building for drawing? Because you've got to remember that CAD and drawing are siblings. They work together. Sometimes, you draw first. Sometimes, you build CAD first. Sometimes, you can use a CAD file to create an underlay to sketch over. So perfectly valid, no matter which way you're working. There's not always a right way and a wrong way. So keep that in mind.

So let's go forward, and let's start to talk about some volume fields. And I'll use one of these as my demo rather than to build a new piece of geometry. So if I switch over here, and I come to Volume Fields, you'll notice that there's not many tools here. The first one is volumetric field geometry. That is really deep. And if I go in there-- and I'll let the tool open-- there is a lot in here. I have not mastered this yet. But if you've done this before with graphs and cells and rasterization and rendering and meshing and resources, great. But let's go simple first.

Let's cancel that. Let's go out of here. And let's just go with a general volumetric lattice. Which its intent is for 3D printing, but why can't it be used for concept? So I'm going to say, Volumetric Lattice. And you'll see here that it brings up the volumetric lattice tool. I am going to grab this part here. And you'll notice, it's going to think for a second. But it gives it a full gyroid lattice structure in there, which can give you a very different look for renderings, for materials, for items because it's going through it.

You'll notice that I've got it for size. I can switch it to these basic setup ones where it switches it. I can adjust the scale. This one happens to be uniform right now. I can rotate and adjust. Let's do move, rotate. Let me just zoom out so I can see my quick handles. There they are. So if I rotate it, it orients the position of how it intersects the body, which is completely fascinating.

I can switch it between uniform and non-uniform to get the size on there. Let's leave it at uniform, great. And I'll just the size here. We'll make it 5, and just see what happens. So it's much smaller. Let's put it at 25. Now, it's much bigger. So you get some very interesting elements out of this and what you can do with it.

So I'm going to say, OK. And now, you can see through it. Just for a quick example, if I come over to Render, look at the difference, right? So it's really-- let's just do a quick in Canvas. It's not there. Because it's just a mathematical impression at the moment. It's not real. So you have to make it real.

So let's go back to Design, and let's go over to Volume Fields. And let's say, Create Mesh. So I'm going to create a mesh. Let me make sure I got the right body selected. We want to do this body here. You can adjust the refined ability between high, medium, low and custom. I'm just going to leave it at medium now. I'm going to say, OK.

So what it's going to do is calculate through and create the mesh. So it will be actual 3D then based on that. That way it can be rendered, it can be 3D printed, and so on. So whatever you need to do with it, you have the ability to push it through. So now it is an actual mesh. I switch over here to Render just so you can see it. It's a very dark material right now. But in Canvas Render, it is an actual solid now, and you can use it to render as needed, build as needed, and so on. So let's stop that, go back to Design.

So, let's go a step further here, and let's have a little bit of fun with what we can do here. So I'm going to go ahead and draw a sketch on this plane here. I'm going to look at that, come on, look at it. There we go. And I'm going to draw just a quick spline off the origin. And just send it over here. That's great, lovely, good enough for our demo right now. Clearly, you can do anything more you want with that.

I'll use create, and then I'll use the pattern tool, Pattern Along Path. And I'll say, let's do bodies, and let's grab one of those bodies there. I may have to pick it inside the component. There we go. Let's do that component here.

OK, and let's do our path along here. And then we'll drag it out along the path. I'm going to do it identical. Let's do path direction so it rotates, and let's do more based on that path. So I say, OK. And now, I've taken that intent, and I've created a structure along it that can be used for rendering, modeling, and so on, drawing, whatever. That's not a lot of effort to get to that level of complexity of form that is also editable. Because if I move that profile, everything updates, and my structure changes.

So there are very interesting things that you can do meshing this world of parametric and using tools to pull concepts in. OK, so we'll go one more thing here with the volumetric lattice. And what I'm going to do is I'll do a quick sketch down here at the bottom, and we'll look at that. Touch the button, Jeff, there we go. OK, so I'm going to draw a line. And I'm going to go in this direction. Good enough for me. I'll say, all right. I'll finish my sketch.

I find this a really important part of Volumetric Lattice, or sorry, Volumetric Field. So I'll say volumetric lattice. I'm going to do this body here. Gyroid's fine with me now, but I'm going to start to play with the other tabs. So I'm going to say, solidity. And distribution, I'm going to say gradient along path. And I'll pick that path. What that's going to allow me to do is either fade or increase or have that lattice get weaker or stronger along that path.

And you can see as I pull that through, my solidity and where it meshes. I have even more power to generate that. Let's just go a little bit more in that direction. There we go. And you can see clearly that it's super thick on this side, and it fades as it goes through. So again, you get another aspect of how you could use this tool. I'm not going to convert those to a mesh, but the principle would be the same. You'd say convert to mesh, draw those out, and then those are a solid as well, which gives you yet another level to work with.

There is one more detail in there that's also interesting that I'll highlight quickly. I'm going to try. There we go. Sometimes recording Zoom at the same time is not always the kindest to the computer. So you can also do custom. And custom allows you to take a sketch and create your own lattice structure. So play with that as well-- super interesting that you can do that. So let's cancel that. All right.

So let's move forward one step. I'm going to open another file so it's clean and easier for you guys to see. And let's talk about plastic tools. So if I switch over here to Plastic Tools, these are tools that make a lot of sense to me as an industrial designer who's done a lot of design for manufacturing. But I'm going to leverage it as a concept designer now to set up where I'm going to go for Generative and also to show you different ways to build things.

So what's very interesting is under the Create Tool, you have tools like the Boss Tool here, which you may be using to build concepts because you want to look realistic, and you want to have a screw in there and a bolt and a structure and bosses that lock together. Super valid, you might want to use that. Snap Fit Tool, allows you to create snap fits. A Rest Feature is how it intersects and things come together. You can add threads and so on, all kinds of very interesting things. But I'll leave you guys to explore those and things like webs and ribs as well.

But I want to talk about the geometric pattern. And what this allows you to do is it puts a light version of visual scripting directly inside of Fusion. So you can create patterns that distribute and change weight very easily inside a parametric modeler. If you've play with Dynamo or tools like Grasshopper, those are heavy visual scripting tools. This is a very quick, efficient way to get distributed patterns and weighted patterns into a solid model. And so that's why I think as a concept designer or someone looking to create new concepts, this might be a very interesting tool to get familiar with.

So I'm going to turn the tool on, and you'll see the first thing that it tells you is we need something to work with, Jeff. What are you going to build here? I need a face. I have nothing right now. So let's keep it very basic. I'll turn on my origin. I'll do a sketch on the top, and I will do a rectangle, center point rectangle from the center. I'll drag it out, and let's-- for the heck of it, let's make it 150 by 150. Hit the right button. And now it's 150 millimeters by 150 millimeters. Ultimately, scale is dependent on what you need. It's up to you.

So I'm going to say, extrude that, and we'll say make it 15 millimeters, great. I will go back to plastic, and I will say Geometric Pattern. So again, now, I can tell it what face I want to use. I want to use this top face, great, awesome. And it has a face, and it wants to know what you want to build. Do you want to use spheres, cylinders, boxes? Or do you have a custom shape that you have already pre-built that body you want to use? So again, great alternatives. We're going to keep it simple. And we're just going to go with the sphere.

It automatically populates across that entire piece that full pattern. You can use the arrows here to drag and move this and adjust them. But I'm going to work my way down the tool flyout. So you can see it in a little more pragmatic way. So Size Limit, we're going to start there. Let's make it 1 to 10 millimeters. So you can see that automatically the preview is-- I got 1 millimeter at the center. I got 10 on the outside. So let's invert that. Let's say it's 10 to 1. And now, it's fading in rate from a 10 millimeter diameter to a 1 millimeter diameter.

Your spread control keeps it at 0 first. But if you move it in either direction, you can weight how quickly and how much it goes either side. So let's move it over to the other side here. It's taking a second to get over there. OK, so 0.3 here, I get a much, much more rapid transfer.

Let's go to Distribution. So right now, it's rectangular. Let's switch it to triangular. Let's switch it to hexagonal. Let's switch it to circular. And let's switch it to radial. So you can see how it changes the distribution of the geometry. I'm just going to leave it-- let's see what triangular-- I like triangular. I use that one a lot. I think that one's fun. But rectangular is also nice.

My distance is 15 millimeters. I can adjust that. I can say weight at left side. Weight at left side. Let's go back to rectangular. And you can see how it adjusts that. I'm going to keep it centered for now. I want to do a clear perimeter because I want the edge to not show it. And let's do a perimeter-- well, I don't need a perimeter offset here, but let's just do it so you can see it. Let's do 10 millimeters. It won't see it that much because it's probably less than 10 millimeters. So you have options like any other tool. am I going to create a new body, am I going to cut this, am I going to intersect it, and so on.

So let's just say go ahead and join that for now. So what it's done is it's created a parametric reference, and now it's one body with this distributed pattern, which is super cool and super interesting that you can quickly build this. Now let's just say I go back in and I edit my first sketch. And I say, well, no that's not 150 millimeter. That's 250 millimeters. Because this is parametric, it updates down the stream. So now it's letterboxed it, and it's pushed those out instead of it being a rectangle. So super fast integration, and different texture, different element, and so on.

So you get all kinds of cool things with that. So let's turn that body off, and let's go forward from there. Again, I want you guys to see different potential pathways. So let's quickly extrude this, and we'll send that up. And we'll say 100 millimeters, terrific. Let's just put a fill it on this side here, and we'll make it a fairly large fill it just so we can do something here. Let's make it 200 and see what that looks like. That's way too big but good enough.

So we've got this fill it on the side. This is a radius. It's a curved surface. But let's just do it so we can do it. We'll do geometric pattern on here. If I could pick it, it would help. And Fusion crashed on me. So, if it ever happens to you, send the report. It's really important. That's how they fix things. It's how you make the product better. If it crashes, send the report please.

What's fascinating is I've actually had people witness a crash. I've sent the report, and then the team reaches out to you and says, hey, do you have that file. I'd like to-- I'd like to check that file so I can debug it and find out what went wrong. To me, that's always learning. Got my report, good enough. We got to restart Fusion. All right, if you send your report in, good job. Now, I'm back up and running.

I am going to do a geometric pattern on this edge here. And on that face, we're going to just keep it simple with a sphere again. Let's do a rate again of 10 to 1. There we go. We're going to do a little more spread, and then I'll also do a clear perimeter on there. And maybe we don't want as many in this distance, so let's reduce those a little bit. There we go.

And we're going to say-- this time, we're going to say cut, just so we can see something different. So now, my pattern slice that side, which is super interesting and super fun. So last point here before we go to Generative because I think it's really important. So let me turn this body off. Let me turn the sketch off. And I'm going to start a form. So I'll do a quick form tool, and I'm going to do a quick plane. We'll draw it on here.

Similar process, but I'll just nudge this a little bit, and I'll give this a little bit of a compound surface here. And then I'll take these here, and I will modify that and extend it just a little bit. If I can hit ALT, it would help. There we go, terrific. And I will push those down just so we have a little more of a compound surface. And maybe we'll take this center point here. I'm just going to push it down, great.

It's going to generate that form. Now, it's a surface-- lovely, terrific. But just to show you it can be done, we'll do a geometric pattern. We'll do it on this compound surface. It's already calculated it. And you can see that it's following that compound surface. Again, 10 to 1, we'll put a little more spread. We can make it bigger. Let's try at maybe 15 here to 1, and it's going to be a larger transfer. Great, terrific, we'll say new body, beautiful. Create that.

And now, I have a set of patterned spheres that are generated from that form. If I come back in and edit my form tool, and I say, well, I really wanted this wave to be higher over here, and I wanted this edge on this side to be lower over here-- you can clearly see the Ghost of Christmas Past there showing where the generation of my geometric pattern was. But when I finished my edit form and it calculates where it is now, it adjusts the pattern, which is next in line.

So again, another way to create very interesting tool sets within a solid modeler where it has history. If I was with you, I'd say any questions right now, but we're going to hold that to the end. So let me start a new file really quickly. And let's move towards Generative. So Generative Design, again, like I mentioned, is the parent of automated modeling. But Generative is going to ask you for more information, and you have to understand what it's asking you for.

So I'm going to do a quick setup here and go through the system. And then I'll show you some presolved equations based on that. So you can see both sides of the coin. So let's start really simple. And it's going to look a little bit familiar, but let's just do-- let me turn my origin on-- and let's do this quick piece here. And I'll say solid, extrude, drag that out, and we'll say 50 millimeters, great. I'm going to go to the top. And again, for interest of time, I'm going to do quick moves instead of precise placement.

So we'll place this over here, great. I'll say move, copy. And we'll grab that body again. We'll create a copy of this one. We'll move it down over here. Maybe we'll rotate it a little bit this way. And then, we'll rotate it a little bit down as well. And then on the other side, I am just going to mirror this. Well, no, we'll do a copy again.

So we'll copy this one, create a copy. I'll place it over here, and I'll move it across this side. So I have three bodies for right now. We might even say let's do one more. So let's say repeat move. We're going to move this body, create a copy, slide this over here. So let's just say for this example that these are my starting-- or these are my preserve regions. These are what I want to start with. I want to connect the dots. Whether it's from this face, whether it's from this face, all the faces, you name it, whatever you like-- all of those are valid.

But let's say that I also want to tell Fusion-- I drew on the wrong sketch plane. So let's click edit that sketch plane to here. We go-- wrong one. Let's say new sketch here. I'm going to look at that, and I'm going to do a quick piece in here. I'm going to say solid extrude, take this, and I'm going to go symmetric, push it in both directions. So this is now an obstacle for Fusion to avoid with Generative.

And let's just draw a quick sketch on the top of this and give it a little more information. So let's put a circle off the origin. And let's put a circle in this corner here. And we'll say, OK. And then I'm going to give it a quick extrude, extrude, extrude. Join those together, push that up there. And let's do-- because I'm just quickly mocking something up for you guys here-- go. We'll say extrude this one, push it down, and we'll draft that one as well when we build it.

So I have several bodies here. And it's a quick way to work. So let's add one more body with a simple loft. And I'll say loft, and I'm going to loft from this to this. And I'm going to say, G1 tangent and G1 tangent for how each one of those start. And I want to make sure that I didn't say join. No, I did. So let's say new body. And I say, OK. So all the bodies are individual.

So what Fusion is going to ask me in Generative is very similar to Automate. But it's going to ask me more. So if I say design, and I switch to Generative, Generative Design comes up. And it's saying to me, Jeff, what are you going to do? Are you doing a structural component, or are you doing a fluid path? Fluid path is very interesting, but we want to do a structural component. So I'll say Create Study.

If you've ever done simulation or FEA analysis, it will be helpful here. But if you haven't, that's OK. You can get it done because I'm going to give you the quick tool sets for how it works. First, I haven't saved this, so let's save it. There we go. We're just going to say AU, test, record. There you go. So now I have the file saved.

Remember earlier when I talked about user interface, and I said left to right? That's very important when you're doing Generative Design, when you're doing CAM, when you're doing simulation as well. If you just start from the left side and work your way towards Generate, you should hit everything. So my first dropdown is Guide. I can toggle on the learning panel, which is very nice. It'll bring over the learning panel, and it'll show you step by step, great way to work.

Next dropdown is Study. I don't need a new study right now. I'm in study one. I'm good to go. When it opened it, it forced me to start one. What this means is you can have more than one study in a file. But right now, one is good. Edit Model-- do I need to change things or get rid of things in the context of this study? No, I've got everything I need.

The next one is really important. And this is telling Fusion what types of bodies you have. The first one is preserve. These are things you need to keep. So I'm going to use this one first. They are green. I want to have this body, this body, this body, this body as my preserves. It tells me I have four. I say, OK. They turn green. Because it's a good user interface, it lets me know that those are my preserved geometry. I could turn them on and turn them off.