Next-Generation Work Holding with Automated Modeling in Autodesk Fusion 360

KEVIN LEE: Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining our Autodesk University 2023 class that is focused on next generation work holding with using Automated Modeling in Fusion 360. My name is Kevin Lee, and I'm joined here with my colleague, Meagan Mason, where we both plan to share with you a demonstration of how Automated Modeling works and a few Automated Modeling workflows that may help simplify some of your work holding needs for CNC machining purposes.

With our presentation, you can expect to take away these noted learning objectives. Now, in case you didn't know, Automated Modeling is a fairly new tool in design workspace that automates the process of exploring and creating new design concepts based on simple definitions of what to connect and what to avoid. So imagine simplifying your work holding methods with defining multiple faces to connect and specific bodies to avoid. And within minutes, you are presented with several design alternatives of various shape, style, and complexity as solutions to move forward with.

At first glance, the basic concepts of Automated Modeling probably sound very similar to some other modeling tools in Fusion that you may already be used to. However, as we look closer, you'll see that Automated Modeling is quite different and incredibly powerful. Automated Modeling in Fusion 360 is going to change the way you approach and explore new ideas for clever work holding complex parts for your CNC machining purposes.

Now, our presentation will review some of the traditional work holding methods, and where you can find these useful resources inside of Fusion. And you will learn how Automated Modeling techniques in Fusion can also reduce work holding time on the most complex parts. And we'll discover best practices as well to help you generate good quality design alternatives using Automated Modeling tool. We also want to share several great examples for using Automated Modeling for your next generation work holding challenges.

Now, before we get started, please let me introduce myself. My name is Kevin Lee, and I'm the managing director of our business Leeverage Integration based here in southwestern Ontario, Canada. And our business is primarily focused on providing Fusion 360 software tools to our customers as an Autodesk reseller. And with having over 20 years of CAD/CAM and machining experience working as a tool maker and focused on CNC programming research prototype instruments, we ensure our Fusion customers success with various training and support as we are partnered with Autodesk as an authorized training center.

And throughout my career, I also had the opportunity to teach part-time as a college professor, helping my students learn CNC manufacturing from manual G-code programming to CNC machine tool setup and operation. And these teaching experiences have enabled us to be very active in the education working with many faculty as an Autodesk learning partner. I'm also proud to share my Autodesk Gold Certified instructor status, as I really enjoy working with our commercial and educational customers on a daily basis.

Now, enough about me, as I'm also very excited to introduce my colleague, who also is one of our recognized certified instructors. And her name is Meagan Mason.

MEAGAN MASON: All right. Thanks, Kevin Hi, everyone. My name is Meagan Mason. And for the past 15 years, I've been working as a mechanical designer in various manufacturing industries but mainly in the heavy equipment and aerospace sector.

While working as a designer, I also had the opportunity to instruct various Autodesk programs at a technical college in Winnipeg, Manitoba. And as Kevin said, most recently this past year, I have joined the team at Leeverage Integration as an Autodesk certified instructor for the Fusion 360 platform.

KEVIN LEE: Awesome. Thanks so much, Meagan. OK, so first thing to cover here is the Autodesk safe harbor statement. And being that our presentation is recorded for Autodesk University purposes, it's important to note that our presentation may contain information, opinions, and data supplied by other third parties perhaps. And Autodesk assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of such information in our presentation.

Now, to get things started, let's review some more traditional work holding methods and where you can find these Fusion 360 resources to support you. Now, I'm going to shift over into Fusion. And we're going to start off first looking at what everybody sees as standard clamp set.

And I'll shift right back into my PowerPoint here. I missed this one slide. I wanted to introduce these three categories of traditional work holding methods that we would like to review with some examples. And when we break it down, and we start looking at different clamping styles as a traditional work holding method, and how that can compare to using traditional vises or multi-axis work holding methods. And of course, looking in a little deeper into jigs and fixtures, where often these types of methods require additional design and engineering efforts.

So looking at some clamping methods that might be recognizable by many, we can start to see that we have standard clamp sets. In most machine shops you'll see these where they provide lots of adjustment for various clamping needs. Another common work holding method is using T-slots, or what they call Mitee-Bite toe clamps, right? And other work holding methods that I've used in the past include gluing and lamination. And even some projects I've even used two-sided carpet tape, believe it or not, to stick down plastic parts for machining.

And sometimes with the taping method or even gluing method, removing the machine parts from the glue or tape can often be a challenge. So I'd like to go back into Fusion here and just kind of show you that these clamp sets, these are assets that are available in the Samples file within Fusion. And you can literally open these files and drag these clamps out and start to place them around specific fixture plates that you're trying to set up on a manufacturing assembly.

And when we go through and look at some of these other resources, such as the T-slot Mitee-Bite clamp, you can see that these are designed to slide into the T-slot of your milling table. We can anchor them tight to the bottom of a T-slot with the screw head over here. And with these eccentric screws giving them a clockwise rotation, they actually force this yellow nut, this face to clamp and apply pressure to the surface of your part.

Looking at another common Mitee-Bite clamp would be this toe clamp. Same idea. It kind of slides into the T-slot of your milling table. And it gives us a raised approach. If I look at the right side view of the clamp, you can see when we turn that eccentric screw, it's going to force that yellow clamp forward. And being that it's on an angle, it even has teeth on there, it helps bite into the surface wall of the part that we're trying to clamp.

Another quick example, seeing what these resources look like when you pull them into a manufacturing setup where you can see, we have this milling table. And bringing them clamps and toe clamps out of the clamp set, you can bring those in and position them around your part. And then use these resources as a fixture collision detection when you start creating your toolpaths inside of your CAM setups.

I'm going to shift back over to my PowerPoint here. I just wanted to highlight a few of these-- this other category with respect to vises. And so using standard or specialized vises with removable jaws can always be pretty common to see. And many vises can also be altered to allow for modular jaws to be used, such as Talon grip jaws, right?

And so when we look at leveraging multi-axis or tombstone machining methods, you can see a few of these images here on the right side of the screen, we can start leveraging some of the self-centering vises and fifth axis dovetail work holding fixtures that are available. And it starts allowing us to think about how could we start hanging on to really challenging parts and using some of these resources to help us put together what we call web machining principles. And leaning into some more multi-axis tool approach.

So as we start looking at some of these examples, I want everybody to start thinking about the machining process, and what happens. And if often if we don't have a part securely fastened, and it can lead to part vibration during the machining process. And so one of the things that's pretty paramount and important when it comes to work holding is you often want to have extreme part rigidity because this helps stabilize the part throughout the machining process.

So if we start thinking about how tool vibration can lead to problems, such as tool chatter marks, right? And sometimes a worst case scenarios it can leave us with tool gouge marks right in the finish machine surface of our part. So looking at some of these resources in Fusion, I'm going to go up to my list here. And I'll jump down into using a standard vise with parallels, right?

Again, another very common practice, where we can raise the stock of our material up on top of these ground parallels. And it raises our part above the vise so that we can present all the machining features to the machine tool. All right? So that is a very common work holding method, probably one of the most simplest work holding methods.

Now, if we look at another example, this is just showing some jaws. But even taking out the hardened jaws of the vise and bolting in aluminum billets, you can machine little steps on these aluminum or steel billets. And that also gives you kind of like a parallel effect in raising our part above the jaws so we can machine the features.

Looking at another example here with Talon grips, as I mentioned. I'll give us a side view of this example, where we can see these Talon grips, they're a little modular pieces that can bolt into different positions within the movable jaws on a self-centering vise. And these Talon grips are designed where we can hang on to a minimal amount of material on the bottom of the stock.

And the way when we apply clamping pressure, you can see the knife edge that begins to bite into the surface. And so that allows us to not have to hang on to very much material, as little as 50 or 75 thou in most cases. So again, another very common use of modular vise jaws for quick part holding.

Now, if we go into another example with dovetail fixturing, so dovetail fixtures, this is what one could look like on a raised platform. You'll see these often on multi-axis machining centers. And this is where you can see there's a groove, a dovetail groove in here and a pin, where you can pre-machine these features as the first thing that you do on your stock.

And then you would put your stock in that dovetail and would line up the hole on the pin. And as you tighten the screw, it actually bites down, or it pulls down that dovetail to where it fully secures it down on these faces up here. And it's a very secure method for holding parts with, again, minimal amount of material.

Now, looking at an example of using a dovetail, I have a fourth axis rotary attachment here, where you can see this round part. We've got some features on here that probably require some toolpath wrapping. Regardless of what's needed for toolpaths, when we look a little more closely here at the stock condition, and I'm going to roll this around a little bit more and zoom in, you can see that the pre-machined dovetail on the yellow stock would line up in the dovetail of the fixturing device. And that is what's going to anchor onto a very minimal amount of material on the right side of the part.

And so the idea behind this is that it's going to be fully secure. It's very stable. And we don't have any other clamps in the way. We can expose the entire part to the machining tool end.

Now, looking at another quick example, again, I have a fourth axis horizontal kind of showing a different way of fixturing and work holding parts. Again, you can see with these vise jaws in here using modular teeth, right? Very similar to the Mitee-Bite scenario. But these teeth, if I look around in the right side view, and you can see when I pick on that setup, and I zoom in a little bit more-- sorry for zooming in-- you can see those little teeth. They bite into the sidewall of the sock. So again, being able to position multiple components around a horizontal machining tombstone can really lean towards high production output on your machine tool.

Let's look for another quick example. Actually, it's going to take us into another category that I'd like to explain first. So I'm going to shift back over to my PowerPoint.

And the third category of what traditional work holding methods that we're familiar with is, of course, using jigs and fixtures and really having more of a customized work holding approach. This method takes quite a bit more pre-planning usually. And sometimes requires significant amount of design or engineering time where we want to also consider using these traditional jigs and fixture components. You can see a few of these images here, such as an ID clamp. I'll explain that here in just a moment.

And so in Fusion 360, we can easily import many of these, what I should say, off the shelf clamping methods for your fixture design. And conveniently, we can directly insert McMaster-Carr components as well directly into our fixture design. So I'm going to show you that workflow here in a moment.

And also with that, I'd like to show a combination of-- or an example showing a customized fixture design, where you can see the use of Mitee-Bite clamps to secure a part for CNC machining. So I'm going to shift back over to Fusion here. And I'll open up my next example.

And so this is just showing a quick component of a toggle clamp. But to explain how I got this here, I just wanted to create a new design really quickly. And show that up here in the toolbar, if we go into the Insert menu, we can go right into McMaster-Carr component directory. And it opens up their link into their website, where we can actually do a search on toggle clamps, right? And we can start to choose many of the different options that may be available here.

So if we look at some low-profile hold-down toggle clamps, right, we can find our way down into the various options in the list. And if I go ahead and pick on the McMaster-Carr part number, it gives me the option for downloading a 3D step file, right? And there's also various methods of file translation we can download. So I'm going to go ahead and hit Download on that.

And once that comes in, this is the beautiful thing. You don't have to go dig it out of your Downloads folder. It brings it right inside of your Fusion 360 document, right? So you can see it brings that toggle clamp in. Where from that point we could insert this Fusion document into our manufacturing assembly.

So really quickly, I wanted to show sometimes before you do that, you might also want to-- just looking for my other example here, toggle clamp with joints, right? You may want to take a few moments and create some assembly joints on your toggle clamp, such that you can actually see the motion of how these components will work, and how the bodies within the component will actually move with each other, right? So that can be sometimes another step that might be useful for you if you decide to bring in this toggle clamp into a manufacturing system.

Now, if we go into my next example here, an expansion clamp. I mentioned these clamps. This would be a great example of where you could create a three-hole bolt pattern in a fixture plate, where you'd securely the anchor down this ID clamp to the base or the floor of your fixture. And then from there, if you had specific bores or ID holes on your part, you would have these lined up to position these, where you would drop your part onto this a sleeve, and then tighten up this bolt. And that would actually apply pressure inward to the ID surface of the holes in your part. So again, another common method that we can see out there in many shops.

Now, when I go back into-- I do have an example here where it's a custom fixture using Mitee-Bite clamps. So I'm going to show this in here. Again, pretty simple fixture design. Really, when you look at how this is holding the part, you can see the relief on the back corner here, allowing us to basically push this part towards the back of the fixture. And that's what these little Mitee-Bite clamps are doing, right?

Being able to insert them into your manufacturing assembly. Turn that eccentric nut and apply pressure force or clamping force towards that blue face. And you can see, in this case, we have this pocket that was machined in the fixture base itself was machined a little bit larger, giving us room to insert these clamps.

Now, I do want to take a moment here and thank my good friend, Angelo Juras. He actually was the person that was so kind to share his sample file. And he works with DSI, so a quick shout-out to my friends over there DSI with this example.

OK, so I'm going to swing back over to my PowerPoint here to keep us on track. And I guess next up we would like to-- actually before, I just noticed I stepped ahead a little too quick. I wanted to show where we can find these clamping resources inside of Fusion.

So if I go over to the data panel, and you stretch out to the home view, we can scroll right down all the way to the very bottom. And in CAM Samples Directory is where you want to go. And in there, you can see there's some other folders. If you make your way into the Work holding folder, this is where you'll see some resources.

For instance, if we go into the Fifth Axis Work holding folder, you can see this is where you could pull in these pre-designed Fusion documents that have the dovetail fixtures or the self-centering vises. For instance, if I open up the vise, you can see this is an asset that you can quickly pull into your design and adjust your jaws accordingly to grip onto your workpiece. So this saves many hours from you having to design something up that looks like a vise. This resource is readily available for you to use.

A couple other quick examples. When I go down in here to the Mitee-Bite folder, you can see it's, again, lots of different examples in here. You scroll down. There's ones that we've used in the past called pit bull clamps. Quick shout outs Mitee-Bite. And this is just another example of a resource that you can use inside of Fusion.

So again, these examples are readily available for you to use. And even going back one folder into the Work holding, if you're just looking for a simple vise, right, and there's that clamp set that I mentioned earlier. Or if you're actually looking for like a three-jaw chuck, and you want to bolt it down to the table of your machine tool and adjust your jaws, you can use that as well. So some great resources for you to use. And using some more of the traditional style work holding methods in Fusion.

Now, that being said, I am going to shift over finally and into my second slide. And this is where we want to first look at how we're going to use Automated Modeling features in Fusion 360 with a simple example. And we'll look at how to specify inputs that are needed.

We're also going to generate some new geometry and explore what those design alternatives look like. And with that said, we're going to shift over to my colleague, Meagan, and her desktop screen. And see how we can start using Automated Modeling in Fusion 360.

MEAGAN MASON: All right. Well, let's take a look how this tool works and a few best practices to keep in mind when using Automated Modeling. Automated Modeling is used to create new geometry in either a part or an assembly context. The geometry creation is meant to be a source of inspiration to help you get started. This can mean a starting point for your own design using it as a starting shape for generative design or, in the case of this presentation, an end use design for work holding automation. A design created by Automated Modeling is fully editable and allows for downstream changes in your workflow.

You will find the Automated Modeling tool has its own icon in the toolbar as part of the design workspace. The tool itself is just a single dialog box that only requires a few selections to be made. The first selection is for faces to connect. This selection set is for the faces that you would want joined together by the newly created geometry.

The key here is that they are faces and not bodies. The main thing to note is the entire face selected will have geometry grown from it. If you need to keep areas clear on the face, then you'll want to use the split face command to allow for this.

In the case of the cylinder, we may not want the whole face selected, maybe only the middle for the connection of the new geometry. To do this, we can go ahead, and we can create two construction planes. And offset each 1 inch from the top and the bottom of the cylinder.

Next, we can use the split face tool found in the Modify toolbar. Select the face of the cylinder, and then use the two construction planes as the split tool. Now we have three separate phases on the cylinder we can choose from. We can go ahead and re-select the Automated Modeling tool. Select the faces on the cylinder, but this time, only selecting the center face.

The selection set-- or sorry, the next set is Bodies to Avoid. This selection set is meant to be in areas where geometry cannot go and should be avoided. And finally, we need to specify if we want a new body or component to be inserted into the design.

And lastly, we select the Generate Shapes button, which then passes the data off to the cloud for processing. The results come back in real-time, which takes roughly two to three minutes and which we sped up for this presentation. You can see the results that start to populate in the dialog box almost immediately.

The thumbnail preview shows the design as it's being processed, as well as the completed percentage of each design as it's being calculated. In total, you'll be looking at a max of six potential designs to choose from. There are two main connection types-- smooth and sharp, each displaying three outcomes of each design. The smooth and sharp connections can be recognized by the purple icon in the dialog box or by placing your mouse cursor over the icon to display the tool tip. We will have a closer look at these on the next slide.

Notice that alternative one and alternative four are generally the same shape, but their connection types are different, with one being smooth and four being sharp. The same paradigm applies to design number two and number five and number three and number six. To get a preview of any of the designs, simply click on any one of the options for a display in your model.

In this case, I will be selecting alternative number two. And also notice that you have the option from the slider to increase or decrease the volume of the model. Once you are satisfied with the shape, simply select the OK button. And the model is brought in from the cloud and placed in your design as a component or body depending on what you selected.

Now, having a closer look at the two connection types, we can see the smooth interface uses a wrap piece line that covers the faces that were part of the selection set. The sharp interface option uses a base feature on the face selections and combines with the t-spline. The parametric sequence for the shape is automatically added to the timeline. For smooth connection types, this includes the t-spline shape, which can be edited using the form tools. For the sharp connections, this will include a t-spline body, base, and boundary fill feature to form the new geometry.

If you decide you want to explore a different design shape, simply go to the timeline and edit the automated model. This brings up the same dialog box back up, allowing you to select a different outcome. So in this case, I can select, let's try, alternative number six. I can hit OK.

And then you can see how the design automatically updates. So some final tips to keep in mind when working with Automated Modeling. If a change is made earlier in the design of one of the selected Faces to Connect or Bodies to Avoid, the Automated Modeling results will need to be regenerated to reflect these geometry changes. Also, if revisiting an automated design after two weeks, the design will need to be regenerated.

So how can we leverage Automated Modeling in Fusion 360 to provide next generation work holding? Well, remember, Automated Modeling is a modeling tool in the design workspace that automates the process of exploring and creating new design concepts based on simple definitions of what to connect and what to avoid. So if we can imagine simplifying your work holding methods with defining multiple Faces to Connect and specific Bodies to Avoid, and within minutes you're presented with several design alternatives of various shape, style, and complexities as solutions to move forward, this could really start to change things.

Automated Modeling in Fusion 360 is going to change the way you approach and explore new ideas for clever work holding on complex parts for CNC machining. So now, let's take a look at some common examples of where we might use an off-the-shelf dovetail fixture or even a self-centering vise to hold on to a workpiece that allows for machining rigidity but also to access more machining features.

KEVIN LEE: Thanks, Meagan, for leading us through the Automated Modeling workflow in Fusion. What we'd like to do next is shift over into Fusion 360 and show how we're going to demonstrate the manual modeling process to maybe create a tab to anchor our part down to something that's more secure in a dovetail fixturing device. And then as well, I want to show on the same example how we would use Automated Modeling to have more of a creative work holding method to allow access to more machinable features on the part.

So I'm going to shift over to Fusion. Real quick example. You can see this is what we're ultimately going to do if we were going to manually model something to extrude up into the golden part. And then I'm also going to show this example of maybe how Automated Modeling might grip onto the side curved radiuses of the part to allow us a lot more open area to get some machine tools in there.

And to work through this, just to show you some of the mouse clicks and picks, you can see that all we did here was bring in this dovetail fixture out of the Fusion 360 work holding examples. And I brought in this-- it looks like a game controller part-- as an example to machine. And from here, what we might decide to do is go in and start creating a sketch on this lower face.

And when I'm on that face to create a sketch, I'm going to use p for the project command. And I'm going to project this curved surface onto that sketch. And OK to that dialog box. And I'll hit e for extrude. And I'm going to grab that sketch and pull it up towards the controller part.

And I'm going to use extend type set to Object. And I'm going to choose the part that we're trying to machine. And I'm going to extend that geometry up into the machine part. It's important to note, at this point, instead of joining the bodies together, I'm going to use new body because I want to make sure I have a separation between the tab versus the actual part of the machine. So I'll ahead and hit New Body.

And that is just one simple way of creating a quick tab up to the part. And the idea behind this is that we could then select the part we're going to machine, as well as the tab, and include both of those bodies as part of our CAM setup, all right? In which case, we could apply toolpaths to both of those bodies. And as a result, we're going to see that this tab still remains intact with our part.

Now, another workflow to look at how we would use Automated Modeling to look at new creative ways of holding on to this part, I'm going to go into my Bodies folder here. And I'll just rename body 18. We'll call this one Manual Tab. And I'll turn the visibility of that off for now.

So the next thing we're going to do is I'm going to look at different ways of how we can use just going straight into Automated Modeling. And I'm going to look at how we can connect some faces. So I'm going to try to connect this rounded face down to this face of this body down here. And it's also optional that we can use Bodies to Avoid, but sometimes it's really handy just to go right into generating some shapes and to see what Automated Modeling is going to give us as a result.

Now, as it's working through this, you can see that it's going to start calculating and preparing for us six different alternatives. Meagan had mentioned these earlier in her part of the presentation, where usually alternative one, two, and three is going to give us more of the rounded edges as a solution. And then if we're looking more for sharp corners, it would be more lean towards alternative four, five, and six.

And so as that's kind of computing, it's going to start showing us some results, right? Now, sometimes these aren't exactly what we're looking for. But right away I can start to see there being a problem. What I really was hoping for here is that I could gain a lot more access to get some tooling in here into this kind of curved area below the part.

And you can see what Automated Modeling is doing here. It's actually gripping a hold of that circular face that I selected. And it's mapping down some geometry to meet that lower base, right?

So I could also go ahead and pick alternative number two. And you can see, it's giving me some more wild looking geometry. And even if I skim down the list here, you can see alternative six, right? I can also use these little sliders to minimize some of the volume of that alternative solution. Or I can increase the volume of that solution. Either way, I can see with these six quick alternatives to look at and see if they're going to work for me. I can already tell that this is not going to give me the result I'm looking for.

So I'm going to hit Cancel of this. And this is where I'm going to create another piece of geometry. I'm going to create a sketch on this flat plane over here. And on that sketch plane, I'm going to use the Project tool again. And I'm going to project this circular edge here.

And I might go ahead and grab this little edge. And I'm just picking off some of the geometries on the edge of the part. And we'll hit OK to that to project those down. I'm going to hit l for line and strike a line down through the middle, something like this. And I might decide to create another vertical line over here somewhere.

And as you can see, I'm just creating some geometries. We got projected edges. We got two lines. I'm going to go up here and grab the Trim tool. And I'm going to start trimming some of these pieces that we maybe don't need anymore.

I might actually hit Project one more time and grab this edge down here. And I'll hit t for trim. Trim that little piece out here. And now, I have a closed profile, right?

Now, if I hit e for extrude, I'm going to grab that profile. And as I pull it in one direction, I might decide to change the direction from one-sided to be symmetric. And in this case, again, I want it to be a new body, OK? And I don't quite need it that big. And I'll go ahead and hit OK.

So this-- what I was trying to do was create some geometry that becomes an obstacle, right? This body is going to consume volume of space. And this is where I'm going to go back now into the Automated Modeling tool. I'm going to select my faces to join. I'm going to grab this one and this lower face down here.

Bodies to Avoid. I'm going to select the body that I just created. And now tell it we want to generate some shapes.

So now, what it's going to try to do is try to create some new geometry between that curved blue face down to the lower face down here. And that red obstacle, or what we call bodies to avoid, is going to occupy that space to prevent it from creating a solution in that area. Again, my goal to this is to try to come up with a solution that allows me to get the clearance in there to get some more tooling in there for a better reach of features.

So as this starts to populate through, I know for the sake of time in this recording, I'm just going to hit Cancel this and go over to a file here that I already had showed that I can kind of go in and explain a little bit more of this detail. So with these results, you can see they're joining down to this body. And it's allowing us just to grip on to that face on the edge of the part and give us some stability to hold on to that part. The outcome of this is that now I have a lot more area in this section, where I can get some tools down in there and start machining more of these features on the part here.

So there's one decent example. I also wanted to go in and show back on my PowerPoint on the next slide in when we're creating these automated models, it's creating this form geometry in our timeline, right? And the power of the form geometry is basically it's the power of t-splines. And it allows us for this free-form manipulation of shapes by moving or rotating and scaling vertices, edges, or faces of a t-spline form shape.

And so when we're in the form contextual environment in Fusion, you can create organic t-spline designs with tools that are very similar to sculpting clay, right? And you can push on these faces. You can pull on the edges and the vertices of these t-spline bodies. And this gives us another strong advantage to manipulating the outcome of these automated models that the Fusion is giving us.

And so when we look at this example here in the center of the screen, this may present a challenge of, hey, we got this automated model to secure the workpiece for rigid machining purposes. But again, we're looking for a bit more clearance to get more tool reach, right? So being able to grab a hold of this t-spline body, stretch it down, and create that clearance.

So I'm going to go into Fusion and show how we would do that. I'm going to go over to my other helio rotor example. And as you can see down in the timeline here, we've got this organic t-spline body, this foreign body.

So when we right-click on there and we choose Edit, one of the options that you're probably most commonly going to use is under the Modify Edit Form tool, right? And you can see this form geometry has all these different individual faces and surfaces. So if I want to select a strategic set of surfaces, I'm going to do a left-click up and drag so I can grab hold of these surfaces like so. And I'm noticing it's grabbing a few of these faces on the backside, which I don't want, so I'm just going to go over here, hold down the Control key, and deselect those.

And I'm going to come back to what would be the front view of my view cube. And now, I can look straight on to see, you know what, we want to create more clearance in here. So I'm going to grab this slider bar and drag it down. And I'm really manipulating that form shape right now.

And I can specify that I want to pull that down an extra minus 350 thousandths of an inch, and go ahead and hit OK. And then at this point, we would hit Finish Form. And now, I've created this much larger void that allows me to get in there with the tool and get the reach that I'm after to get in here and start machining some of these surfaces, right? So being able to leverage the power of form modeling and using those t-spline outcomes from Automated Modeling provides a great tool for you to really get the geometry that you're after.

Now, I'm going to jump back into my PowerPoint here and really lead us forward here in looking at what some next generation work holding examples could be. And at first glance, the basic concepts of Automated Modeling probably sound very similar to other modeling tools in Fusion. But as we look closer, you'll see that Automated Modeling is quite different and incredibly powerful.

And when we ask ourselves what sets Automated Modeling apart from existing modeling commands in Fusion, commands like using the Loft tool or the sweep feature, these traditional commands only allow you to create geometry that connects selected faces or profiles together in a single operation, right? And so they're very limited to just two locations, really just having a start and an end. So being able to create much more sophisticated geometry and connecting multiple locations in a much smaller space really allows for us to get more results in allowing us to have this next generation work holding method available to us.

Now, some might say that generative design may also sound very similar to Automated Modeling. However, its purpose is to create multiple design alternatives that connect multiple locations in space with very little restriction on complexity. And it usually requires substantially more information to get started, things like creating loads and constraints, specific desired manufacturing processes, and material selections to generate the shapes within generative design. So really, beyond needing more information to get started, it takes many more than just a couple of minutes to get an outcome from generative design.

And so using Automated Modeling, you're going to see that it's quite different. And going through some examples here next of seeing different ways that we can use this technology in Fusion to really allow us to explore and look at new ways of approaching different work holding methods for the parts that you're going to be making. So on this next slide, I have a few examples that I'd like to bring up really quickly and to show different applications of how you could perhaps use Automated Modeling.

Going to shift back over to Fusion. And I'm going to go into a different folder here my data panel. I'm just going to go back one folder into here. And I was going to start off with-- let's see here-- I was going to open up-- well, this could be another great example just to show how we would maybe want to gain more stability on a part.

And this one's already a completed design here. You can see it down in the timeline. We kind went for the three events in the timeline. So that's telling me we've got sharp connections on this solution.

And you can see this part here really shows a lot of different features from many different angles. And being able to position this on a five-axis machine to where we can rotate this part around and get in there, the problem is how would you hold on to this part, right? So using this Automated Modeling technique of securing what would be the flattest face on the bottom of the part. But then this other side of the part over here could potentially vibrate and cause some chatter, right? So this is where you could grab that face on the side of the part and create this featured model that gives it some stability so that we can actually increase our feeds and speeds and machine the features accordingly.

So that's a great example there. I'm going to go over in another one and have a quick look at-- let's see here. I wanted this pelican handle. This one's a complete file showing a few different examples. I was going to go in here and show a different body that I created earlier. And I'll talk about that here in just a moment. If we go back into the timeline into the Automated Modeling feature-- wrong one. I'm going to go back another one. You can see I have two in the timeline feature here.

And just looking at the two faces that I decided to select, you can see that on here I created this localized surface on that face because I was really trying to create more area where I can get the tool to go around the perimeter of the part, but at the same time, be able to hold on to that work piece. And this was one of the alternatives that it came up with. So I decided to keep that one as an outcome, right? You can see body 6. And over here, those are two ways we can hold on to this.

I also decided that maybe I wanted to try to gain some more stability off the end of the part. So I'm going to hide the visibility of those two bodies. And we'll go over here and turn on body 18. And this is a little different example where we could use a different face selection and to support the sidewalls of the part.

Now, if we wanted this on the other side, we could easily use the Mirror tool, Bodies to Mirror. We'll grab this one here, Mirror Plane. We'll mirror across over on the other side. And now, we have a solution that might look something like this. So just a different way of perhaps holding onto that part.