Put a Little Bit of Fusion 360 in Your Infrastructure

STEVE OLSON: My name is Steve Olson. My title is manager, training services at Mesa. Mesa is a training and services provider based out of Pittsburgh. We're an Autodesk reseller. My main role there is I'm in charge of all of our training. We're primarily manufacturing , but I'm the civil guy because I'm kind of a weird mix of mostly manufacturing is what my background heavily is in, but I picked up the civil applications about four or five years ago.

And so just to give you an idea of where my mind was when I came up with this class, I've been using InfraWorks and I've seen other folks saying, hey, if you want to put something in InfraWorks, you've got to either model up in AutoCAD 3D or 3ds Max. And my background is I don't know either of those products. I know AutoCAD, but my experience of AutoCAD 3D is it's brutal, and I avoid it like the plague.

So I was like, well, there's got to be an easier option for folks. And I was like, Fusion is such an easy product to learn, there's got to be a way to bridge between the two. And I figured it out after some time. So this class is basically going to be a little bit of how to model in Fusion if you aren't familiar with it.

While I'm saying that, how many people here from familiar with Fusion? OK, we've got a good couple. How about InfraWorks? Anybody using InfraWorks right now? OK. So good. This is the group that I was envisioning. I have people who might know Fusion, some people are using InfraWorks, maybe not using either one right now.

This would be-- this is perfect because this is what I was envisioning when I put the class together. So let me go over my objectives here real quick for you. So I want you to learn how to create 3D models of infrastructure elements in Fusion. And I racked my brain for some time trying to figure out what can I show you that's compelling but I can model up in like 10 minutes? And so I came up with a little bus stop shelter.

But Fusion has two modeling environments. It has a real mechanical environment where you sketch and extrude, but it also has a really cool free form environment. So I'm going to show you both of those. I also want to talk about what you can do to get stuff out of Fusion and prep it for InfraWorks and then discuss different methods. I have a preferred method. So I'll share with you what the three methods are, but I'll show you my preferred method. And hopefully, once you see what it is, you'll say, well, yeah that's makes a lot of sense why that's his preferred method.

And then, once I've got it, I want to make sure I get an opportunity to get into InfraWorks. So I've got a little bus stop and a bench here are the two things I'm going to model. And again, I'm just going give you a brief overview of Fusion, because a couple of you know it, so this is probably like, oh, you can sleep for about 10 minutes. But for those of you who aren't, I want you to see how easy it is.

Because I don't know-- like I said, AutoCAD 3D is kind of brutal. I don't know much about 3ds Max. I'm going to learn that at some point here. But I want to-- this was an easy way to learn it. So just little quickly about modeling and Fusion. I made a really quick video because I figured, well, if you don't know what Fusion is or if you've never used Fusion, you may not know what it is, so I wanted to give you an opportunity to see here.

I just made a quick little minute video, minute and a half video of what Fusion does. So it does mechanical modeling, where I'm going to sketch and extrude and make pretty mechanical looking type stuff. So there's that. Give it a second here. Hopefully it's playing and not pausing. Oh, there it is. It's just playing slow. It does mechanical type modeling.

And then, it also does some free form modeling. So give it a second here. So I just basically sketched a few things. I just did the very basic beginning of what I was going to show here. Free form-- and it's not playing very smoothly here. I apologize for that. Free form, I can start with shapes. I can stretch and pull and drag and-- boy, this is playing like garbage. Let me see if I can get it to play any better. I have the video by itself. Let me see if I can get that to play any better. I'll just do it like-- nope. See where I have that. Fusion Infrastructure. Let's see if this plays any better for me. So yeah, it's playing a lot better.

So it does mechanical type modeling, and it also will do free form type modeling. What's this little-- you can see this is definitely playing a lot better, so I'm glad I put it into this environment. So I'm sketching, extruding, creating constraints, locking things down, making things the way they work the way I want them to. Then I'm doing stuff like that.

So now I'm going into a free form environment where I start with a shape. I can stretch, pull, and drag. This is like the bench that I'm going to make here in a few seconds. I can orient things in space the way I want, pull things out. And it's just a T-Spline, so I'm working with that. So it's a really cool environment too, just fun to play around with the free form stuff.

So it does free form for modeling. It also does renderings. So you can see there I took that same bench, I put it into an environment doing some renderings of it as well. It also does collaboration, where I can-- everything is cloud based. So I can share and comment and do thing and share ideas, work on a project with folks over Fusion. It also does 2D drawings.

Again, this is a little bit-- again, you can see here it might have its foundation in more of a manufacturing environment, but hopefully, once I get into my product or my demonstration, you'll see what I'm talking about. There's some cam work. It does FEA. Again, this is just the overall idea of what Fusion's capable of, but we're going to hone in on the areas that it's applicable to a Fusion to InfraWorks workflow. So that's my overview.

AUDIENCE: Is this a BIM program? Would you consider this BIM or not?

STEVE OLSON: Fusion itself? It's not necessarily BIM, but you do have the capabilities of-- you'll see here once I get something created, I could put it over a Revit or something like that. So it is a very good foundational modeling tool. We've been actually teaching this at colleges, and I think it's a great educational product because it's very easy to learn, and then they can take those skills and put them into other products.

AUDIENCE: OK, but it's not BIM like--

STEVE OLSON: Not BIM specifically, no. But you can, like I said, take these and put them into those other products. So let me just give you a brief overview, again, my demonstration here. I've got two products or two designs I'm going to do. I'm going to do a real manufacturing or mechanical looking one in a bus stop shelter, and then I might do a free form one.

So here I am in Fusion already. I'm going to tell it I want to create a new component. It's going to create one here. I'm going to call this the foundation of my bus stop shelter. I misspelled that. That's all right. So here I am in that component.

I'm going to tell it I want to create a sketch. It's going to say, hey, here's your 3D or your three coordinate plains. Where you want to sketch? I'll pick this one right here. I'll just do a rectangle, my favorite three-point or my center rectangle. And then I'll say, well, this should be seven feet wide. Seven feet wide and 11 feet long. Come on. 11 feet. So there's my foundation.

I can then say, well, I'm done sketching that. I'm going to extrude it. Pick on that profile, just pull it down. I want to go six inches deep, so I'll go negative six inches to go six inches deep into the ground. Now I want to create my posts that go along to that. So I'm going to then say-- I want to say new component. I'll call this My Posts. I'll tell it I want to create a sketch. This time I'm going to sketch on the top of my foundation.

I want to set the posts in from all the edges six inches. So I'm going to go to Sketch here. I'm going to say I want to project into this sketch the geometry of that face. So I'm going to say project include. Project. Pick this face. And now it's got that geometry. I'm going to offset that in six inches. I'm just going to select it, pull it in.

I want to go negative six inches. So I've got a sketch to help guide where I put my posts. I'm going to select all of it and turn it into a construction geometry. That way, when I go to extrude this in a minute, it's not going to see it as a profile to extrude. It's going to say, oh, that's construction. I don't need to worry about it.

But I'm going to draw some two-point rectangles just like this in the four corners. And then I'm going to try and draw one here. I want it to be on the edge here or in the midpoint, but I'm going to draw it off, and I'll constrain it down later. Because that's what's cool about Fusion, is I can draw things really loosely, and then I can go back and add dimensions.

And when I'm teaching folks how to use the software, teaching classes, I say, well, we're all going to sketch. We're going to sketch it loosely. We'll probably all have different sketches. By the time we're done, we're going to have all the same because we're going to constrain it.

So I'm going to just hit D for dimension here. I want my post-- come on. Pick these two lines. Say six inches. Six inches this way. And then I could dimension all of them, or I could use this equal and just say, well, this line is equal to this one, this one's equal to this one, and just work my way around getting them all equal. That way, I can go back, and if I need to change anything, I can change that first dimension, and then we'll be good to go.

So this is parametric modeling too, which means that I can go back to my sketches, I can go back to my features and make changes if I decide I need to make changes later on. So how am I going to get this guy right here in the middle? Well, the easiest way I've found in Fusion is just to drop a point. I'm going to drop that point right about here, just out in the middle of nowhere, and just so you can see the effect of what I'm about to do.

They have this mid plane or midpoint command, which I can take a point and pick a line, and it just drops it on the midpoint of whatever line I picked. And I'll repeat that with this line and this point. So it brought the midpoint of those two lines to that point, and now since there's a shared common midpoint, I know it's exactly where I need it to be.

So I'm going to stop my sketch. I'm going to extrude these profiles. I've just got to pick all of these profiles. And somehow it missed this selection. I'm going to pull this up. Let's go eight feet. What's cool about Fusion too is I'll have a dimension unit set, and as long as I don't type the unit, it'll just assume that whatever I defined is that unit. And like I say, eight, ten, whatever.

If I'm in inches, it'll say, OK, that's eight inches. But if I define some other unit while I'm defining my dimension, you can see here I put the little foot mark in there, it says, OK, well it's not inches anymore, it's feet because he put the unit type in there. So I'm going to go ahead and say OK to this. And apparently, doing what I did confused it. Let me just back up.

I keep missing this one for some reason. I left my mouse at home. When I got to the airport, I realized I left my mouse at home, so I had to buy one of these little itty-bitty travel mouses. So I am a little bit handicapped here in my use. So actually it probably slows me down well enough that you can see, because otherwise I get real excited and I keep going and going and I probably would go too fast. So I'm glad that this probably is a happy accident.

So I got my posts all defined. I'll make another component just right-clicking on this top line item here which represents my model. What's cool about Fusion is I can define it, an assembly or a part model, all in the same environment. There's no separate environments. In Inventor, which is the product I have about 12 years of experience in, you have two different files. Here it's all one file.

So I'm going to go ahead and here I just want to project into this sketch the footprint of my foundation, because that'll probably make a good profile or footprint for my roof. So I'm going to scroll down here and tell it I want to project into this-- oops, I was already in the sketching environment, or I thought I had already created a sketch. Let me start that one over.

So I'm going to say sketch. I'm going to tell it I want to sketch here at the top of my post is not the footprint. So I'm already up in the air where I need to be. And so now I'm going to project into that, in that sketch, the profile of my foundation. So now why is it not doing-- of course.

Whenever you're doing stuff like this in front of folks, it never works out quite right. So I'm going to project this again. I'm going to say bodies. There we go. So now I'm getting this nice purple line showing where that is. And if I orbit around, you can see that's up in the air. It's not down in the foot. It's where I asked it to be.

So now I'm going to extrude this. And for some reason, I've got to pick that profile too. I'm going to tell it I want to come up. Let's say I want to come up 30 inches. But this is a roof. I want to taper this. So I can grab this grip here and start pulling it one way or the other. And you can see it's going to taper it in. Now if I use negative 60, that works like a pretty good angle. It completes in that taper. I forgot to name this component roof, so I'll do that.

So there is a good start to my bus stop shell. I don't have any windows or wall panels on it yet, so I'll get into that here in a second. So for these windows, I want the window to be halfway through the thickness of that post. So what I can do is I can create a construction plain, just a mid plane, which is basically-- a mid plane is going to let me pick two planes or two faces, and it will create a work plane or construction plane right down in the middle of that.

So I'm going to pick these two, the two opposite sides of my post. Now I get this nice little orange work plane or construction plane right down through the middle of it. So now I can sketch on that. So I'm going to pick this. I'm going to tell it I want to create a sketch there. I'll project into my sketch. I want to turn back the edges. Project these edges in.

And so now when I draw my two-point rectangle here in a second, it'll give me the ability to then say, well, that one-- I don't know why my phone is talking to me. I silenced it. I'm going to have to silence it again. So sorry about that. Stupid thing. All right. Now you'll be quiet.

So now I have this. I'll stop my sketch. I'm going to make a new component for this one. I haven't done that yet. So I'm going to make-- call this Window. So there's Window. And now I can tell it I want to extrude that profile. I want it to be a quarter of an inch thick.

And what's neat about this is over here under Direction, I can pick if I want to go one way or the other or symmetric. I'm going to pick symmetric so that way it works out from the middle there. Symmetric. And then when I do that, I have to tell it if that half inch is half the length or the whole length. I always use whole length because that's just the way I think. I don't think I want to go this way and then double it. I think that's what I want it to be.

So now I have that window. And if I activate my top level again, you can see here I'm just picking where I want to be. Do I want to be at the top level? Do I want to be in a subcomponent? So now I'm at the top level again. I can pattern that component over to the other side. So I'm going to go here. I'm going to say a rectangular pattern. And actually, thinking about it, I usually rectangular pattern this, but I don't even need to do that. I can just mirror it. It'll be a little bit easier that way.

So if I come up here to Create, Mirror, I'll tell it I want to pick Components to Mirror. This guy right there. I'll turn on my origin. Now I'll tell it I want a mirror around my origin. So now I'll make two wall panels and we'll get moving on here. Some I'm going to make a new component, call it Wall Panel.

So we've got that. I'll have to create another work plane or a mid plane let's say between here and here. So the process for this wall panel is going to be identical to what I had just done on the window. It's just going to be a wall panel versus a window. So I'm going to project. Project this-- See? What was I doing? Let me back up here. So I want to sketch on that plane. I want to project these edges. Say from here down.

One thing I do want to point out here a while I'm thinking of it before I go on, everything that I do here, all these workflows, I recorded them and they're in the extra material for this class. So if I'm going slow and you want to say, man, I'd really like to watch it again, they're actually narrated too, so hopefully that will help. I do a lot of video creation, just something I enjoy doing. So I figured also it's my backup plan. If for some reason my computer wasn't working, well, I had a backup plan.

AUDIENCE: This whole thing is recorded?

STEVE OLSON: Pretty much. I have them broken up into workflow segments, so if you want to go back and say, hey, that was really cool, but you don't have to be so engrossed in, like, oh man, I've got to remember everything he's doing. You can just sit back, relax, and chill because everything I've done, I've got videos and I've got narration over it. You just have to download the external or the extra class material for what I've got.

The handouts got a lot of good information in there as well. So don't feel like-- obviously, if you've got something that you want to remember, obviously write that down, but you don't have to be like, oh, I've got to write down everything he's doing in this video or I'm not going to remember how to model in Fusion when I get back to the office because you'll be able to download those and kind of work through those.

AUDIENCE: Do you make components first and then put everything in it or can you make everything and then later just drop in a component?

STEVE OLSON: You have the ability of, whenever you create these, you can make them as bodies, and then there's a really cool right-click Make Component command, and it just takes your body and makes it into a component. So you could do it after the fact. Fusion has this rule one that the Autodesk folks talk about, which is do you make components or bodies?

To me, the biggest thing that I try to figure out is, is this something I want to represent and break down with a bill of material? In a manufacturing world, yeah. If I'm going right in InfraWorks, I don't know if I necessarily need that. If it helps you identify things better, than that's a great idea.

Now, one thing about components is I could accidentally just grab one of these and pull them out in space. Now, with a component, I'd have to actually try to make some sort of relationship between them. They have what they call joints. But they have these as-built joints which are really cool.

Because if I've modeled it right where I want it to be, I just pick the two components, and it will then make a joint between the two. And you can see how they're rumbling like there's an earthquake. It's just trying to show me that they're locked together, that it's a rigid joint, that the two can't move apart from each other.

There's also different degrees of freedom, like revolute and things like that. But for you folks that you'll be most likely modeling something to take it on to InfraWorks, or if you're trying to do this workflow, I would make-- you can make bodies, obviously. They work almost exactly the same except for components. You have to add those as-built joints. But that as-built joint is fantastic. You just pick the two components, tell it it's rigid, and you're good to go.

AUDIENCE: Well, I always thought you're supposed to have a component. It sounds like it doesn't really matter. It could just be all body.

STEVE OLSON: It could be all bodies, because whenever I-- here in a little bit-- you can see this is all just gray and dull and nearly not anything cool. In a second here, I'm actually going to apply some appearances to these that would then give them some interesting colors. The appearances can be applied to bodies or components.

So realistically, you could do either one. I'd say try each one. See what you feel more comfortable. If there's something that works better for you, by all means do it. They're so similar. Even me that's been using Fusion for about four or five years, I always when I step into a project, I'm like, OK, should this be components or bodies? And I probably, because of my background in Inventor which is a little bit more-- would be a more component driven, I have a tendency to think that way first.

But I'm doing a project now where I'm trying to model up a shoe. Well, there's different components that go into that. They'll be bodies because I don't necessarily want to have to go back and define constraints between them. I'm going to put different layers in the sole. I don't want to have to go back and put joins between them. So bodies will probably work out just fine there. So it's like a choice that you just have to make. And like I said, probably the best thing to do is try each one and see which one works better.

But like I said here, I've got these dull and drab and just not so pretty. I'm going to go underneath my Modify command, and I'm going to tell it I want to go to the appearances. Now, there is also physical material which I could assign that. In a manufacturing based workflow, that would probably be ideal. But in this where I'm just trying to get a pretty picture, the appearances will work well.

So over here, underneath my dialogues, here's the library where I have all these different classifications of materials. I'm going to go to Environment, expand that out. And you can see there's things like concrete, asphalt, et cetera, et cetera. You see a couple of these here, I actually have an icon on them. They're not downloaded. I'd actually have to download it. But it's not a big deal. You just click on it. It takes about three to five seconds, and then all of a sudden you have it.

But I'm going to drag concrete onto my foundation. Now it looks like concrete. I come up here under Paint. There's a glossy. There's a paint enamel, glossy, black. I'll put that on my four posts because that would be-- or I'm sorry, my five posts, because most bus stop things I've seen are more typically black for whatever reason. And I'll put that on.

So I'm just dragging and dropping them right on that object. If I decide I want to put something else on it, I just drag on top of it and it will just put it right over top. It's not a big deal. Put it right back to black. And as I drop these into the environment, you can see over here they become cached into the environment. So I could actually make edits to them there. If I decide I want a little bit different shade of green or blue or whatever, I could easily edit this and make changes to it there.

So I also want to make those wall or windows glass. So come under Color. There is a-- actually, not color. There is smooth, and there's this glass clear. And I'll drop it on one. Drop it on the other. And if I want to put something, maybe a different color on these two here, I'll just drag and drop them on that. And now I've got something a little bit more interesting. So let me just quickly save this.

So let me show you free form. Free form is really a lot of fun. I actually showed a bunch of eighth grade junior high kids free form, and they did nothing for an hour but make spaceships. They start off with some weird cylinder or whatever, and they start pulling out wings and stuff, and they just made like spaceship after spaceship. But let me show you free form because it's really, to me, it's cool.

So I'm going to go to Create Form here, which is a little bit different command. It's going to jump me into a different environment altogether. Typically with this, I can sketch and extrude stuff a little bit more similar to what I was doing before, but it also works out really great to start with just a primitive. And I'm going to start with what they call a quad ball, which kind of looks like a volleyball to me because it's broken down into panels. It's not broken down into slices like an orange.

So I'm going to pick a plane to start my quad ball on. And I'll tell it I want to start the circle on the origin there. You can see now it's saying, well how big do you want the diameter to be? I'll say I'll go with 30. So now my diameter is 30 millimeters. And then it says, how many spanning faces? I'll just leave it at two. But basically, you can see it looks like a volleyball in the fact that it's broken down into panels and not slices like an orange would be.

So I'm going to go ahead and say OK. So let's think about-- I want to make a bench out of this. So what I want to do here is I actually want to move it off the origin a little bit and up in space. So there's this command in here in the right-click menu were under Modify called Edit Form. From my experience, Edit Form is 50% to 75% of what you do in free form. You're just basically going to grab objects and stretch them is I'd say like 50% to 75% of what you do in free form.

So I'm just going to double-click on one of these cells. It's going to grab the whole object. I'm going to tell it I want to move it. I want to go negative 30 to the left, and I want to go up. I'll go 10 and 1/4. So now I've got this. If this is going to be a bench and this is going to be one end, I need this thing to be flat on the bottom. I don't want it to be having issues.

So what can do is I can grab these four faces, and underneath Modify there's a command called Flatten. Should I have grabbed there? I probably grabbed the wrong ones. Let me back up here. So let me grab these four faces. I got an extra one over here by accident. That's what I did wrong.

So I've got the four bottom faces now. I'm going to go up here to Modify. I'm going to go to Flatten. It's going to say, well, how do I want to flatten it? Do I want it just best fit? Do I want to select a plane? Or do I want to select a plane parallel? I'm going to say I want to select a plane, and I want to pick what's going to end up being my ground, which is the xz for me.

So now I've got that. I'm going to grab my edges here. Because I want to do what they call a crease and make those a sharp edge. Because this is a T-Spline. It's trying to fit it to a nice smooth shape. If I grab those edges underneath Modify, I have a crease operation which will then make that nice and sharp.

So let me start building my bench a little bit better. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to do an operation that's called mirror duplicate. I'm going to grab this whole object. I want to tell it I want to duplicate it and mirror it across one of my origin planes So now I've got a double. So whatever I do to this guy on the left or the right is going to happen to the opposite one because I have this symmetry built between the two.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab these two faces and start building the bridge between them that's going to make the bench. So I'm going to grab this guy and this guy. I'm going to go into Edit Form. One of the things that I like a lot about Edit Form is typically with Edit Form, as I move a face, it's just going to move it. If I hold down Alt when I do the operation, it adds faces as opposed to move them.

So I'm going to hold down Alt. I'm going to grab here. And you can see now I'm moving that out. These faces are blue because I've selected them. These are yellow because they're the result of the mirror operation I had set up. So now I'm just going to move this a little bit closer to the middle.

I want to flatten this out a little bit. I also want to get rid of these two. So I'm going to delete these two faces. See, now I actually have a hollow object in there. So I'm going to double-click this loop of edges. If you ever want to get an entire group or an entire loop, just double-click on it and it will give you all of those.

I'm going to go into Edit Form here. And Edit Form, I didn't explain this. And I think this is really important to understand. With Edit Form, I have three different type of operations I can do. I can move, I can scale, and I can rotate. So these arrowheads here are my translations. They're going to move them. This little line here and this little line here are scalars. So if I pull it, it's going to scale. This little arced one is a scale in both directions or in both that plane.

This little square right there is a planar move. So I can move it in that plane, both the x and the y at the same time. The reason I bring that up here is I'm going to grab this scalar, I'm like click and drag, and what's funky about the scale, if I scale to zero, it has a flattening effect on that group of edges. So I could have done Flatten there too, but this is a neat thing there to do.

So now what I'm going to do is I'm now going to build the bridge between these two. So underneath Modify here, I have Bridge. I'm going to grab this loop of edges with a double-click, tell it I want to pick the other group of edges. Double-click here. So now I've got both selected. It wants to know how many faces I want to have in the middle there. I'm going to say four. It's going to add two to each side essentially. I'll say OK. Come on, say OK. There we go. So now I've got my bench.

This green line lights up because that's my line of symmetry letting me know I see it. I didn't see it before because there was nothing at that line of symmetry, but that green edge is now letting me know there's a line of symmetry there.

AUDIENCE: And yellow means mirrored [INAUDIBLE]?

STEVE OLSON: When I was making my selection and I get back into Edit Form, if I pick this face right here, it's lighting up blue because I've selected it. It's letting me know this one's lit up because it's selected by the result of that mirror being present.

AUDIENCE: When you hit the Crease command a while back, though, that whole thing turned yellow.

STEVE OLSON: Yeah. That yellow is letting me know what faces are impacted by that creasing operation. So you won't always see the whole thing yellow, but it just happened to be yellow in my case here because the object was small enough and it was impacting the entire object at that point.

AUDIENCE: So yellow means it's impacted by something else, or it can be mirroed, or what's happening?

STEVE OLSON: They mean two separate things in each of those instances. In the creasing environment, it's letting you know what it's impacting it. In this case, yellow is letting you know that it's being picked by the-- it's being picked because of the mirroring operation.

So I want to just do a couple more edits here. I'm going to go to Edit Form. I'm going to pick this little point on the top of the left-hand side. I want to flatten out this top edge of my object. I'm going to click and drag. You can see it's pulling down both of these. There we go.

So what I'm going to do here, I'm going to do one more thing to this, and then we'll get moved on here. My little tutorial on modeling here will be over. So let me just-- I want to put a back on this real quick. So I'm going to go here. I need to add some edges to this, though, so I can make the back.

So I'm going to go to this Insert Edge command. I'm going to grab this one with a left click. And actually, I want to clear my symmetry before I do this, because if I don't clear the symmetry before I do this, I always get this little valley right between because the mirror. So I'm going to clear my symmetry. Just a matter of hitting Clear Symmetry under the Symmetry command. And then picking the object, my symmetry goes away.

I can always assign symmetry later. If I go Mirror Internal, pick this guy, this guy, it will then try to figure out the symmetry line and give that to you there. But I'm not trying to do that in this case.

So now I'm going to go back into Insert Edge. I'm going to grab this edge, hold down Shift, double-click this edge, and it'll get everything in between. Because here, it's giving this green line of where that edge is going to be. This dialog box is asking me for an insert location, that 0.5. That's a percentage of the face that it's going to try to assign it to. I want my back to be on this top edge, so I'm just going to pull it over here.

And let's go with negative 0.35. Say OK. And now I'm going to grab this face, double-click at this one, go to Edit Form. I'm going to click and drag. Oops, I don't want to click and drag me. I want to do the Alt drag so I can add faces. So I'm going to double-click over here. Insert or Edit Form. Hold down Alt, click and drag up, and now I've got a back to my bench.

So I'm going to do two more things, and then I'll get back out of this. So I'm going to finish this. This is a solid object right now. So what I want to do is I want to hollow this out. So once I've gotten out of the free form environment, what I can do here is I can go to what I call Shell, tell it I want to remove this face and this face.

And what it's going to do, it's going to hollow it out according to a wall thickness that I designate. So in my case here, my wall thickness will be, say, 0.25. Say OK. So now I've got an object that's hollow. This is a little bit more representative of what we would have in-- what would end up being made.

So let me-- I've spent enough time on that. I don't want to leave too much time. I want to definitely build the bridge between the two. So let me talk about bridging the gap between the two. And this is actually probably the biggest thing that I had to struggle with, trying to figuring a gap.

So possible path number one. So my first thought was Fusion's going to have some export options. Maybe one of them is right for InfraWorks. I was disappointed, though, because I have IGES, SAT, SMT, and STEP, which really weren't really at the time-- and maybe things have changed, but at the time, those weren't types that InfraWorks could take. So my thought was, well, I could always take an STP, put that into AutoCAD then over to maybe InfraWorks, and that just seemed like too many steps.

So I could do that. That was what I had done for a while. But I was like, I just don't like that because it's too many steps. So my second thought was, well maybe somebody's built a Fusion add-in that gives me better output options. So I was looking for DAE or FBX. Those are the two I was looking for because I figured that would work out well. I found this DAE or this COLLADA Writer. It was free. That worked out well.

But I was partially-- actually, and that was my go-to method for a while. I was like, you know what? That works just fine. There is a couple FBX add-ins out there, but they cost money. And if you're anything like me, you're cheap. You don't spend any money on anything. And they were like $50. And I thought, well, $50 is a lot to spend on an add-in in that I'm going to use for an AU presentation. I just stayed away from that one.

But now comes my preferred method. Like I said, I have a little bit of a manufacturing background in Inventor. And actually, one day somebody said, hey, you can get in Inventor output right from Fusion. I was like, well that's interesting. I didn't see it. So I dug into what it was, and it's actually from what they call the team website. Fusion's cloud connected, and there's a website that sits behind everything that holds all your data. And there's actually expanded output options from that website. As you can see here, FBX was one of them. I was like, that's great. That's perfect.

Now, this is a weird kind of an export, though. It's not like, OK, just here export and here's my file. Save it to my desktop. It's you'll get an email in about five minutes, probably not even that many, saying, here's a download that's good for seven days. It's that file format that you've asked for. So that's how it's done.

Like I said, that's my preferred method. Let me demonstrate it for you real quick. Let me bounce back over to here. Now, one thing that I noticed also that goes along with this is yeah, I can export it, but what about scaling? Is scaling going to be an issue?

I found that there's two ways to bring it into InfraWorks. One way, scaling is never an issue. The other way, it can be. So what I found what's easiest to do is, even though I modeled this up with the documents being-- units being inches, if I just change this to meters real quick, if I just change this over to meters, now, no matter how I bring it in, scaling is not an issue. So that's really easy, simple fix.

If you don't do that, you just have to remember the inch to meter scale factor or whatever that is. So I'm just going to set that to meters and save it. I'm going to come over to this guy, set his units to meters. Oops, not millimeters. It want it to be meters. Then I'll have really a scale problem. Let me save this. I'll call it Bench. Or Concept Bench.

So I've got them saved. How do I get to that website though? So this little three by three grid in the upper left-hand corner is what they call the data panel. And that gives me exposure to what's in that website out there. The very top is the name of a project. I can have different projects inside of Fusion. If I click on that, it will then launch my default web browser to that design in that website.

So you can see here is my bus stop. So yeah, just recently saved. So here this little download icon is actually that export. And I'll say I want to give it an FBX. And then here's that little message saying it's being exported. You'll be sent an email with a link for the export file once the process is complete. The link will be good for seven days. So I'll say OK to that. Let me jump back over to Fusion. Somehow I didn't get this guy saved. I did. Maybe it just wasn't updated over here. There we go. There's my concept bench.

And just another thing here. If I click on it, I can get some information about the design, and then I can click here. This is a viewable. So if you want to share this with folks, then you can share links here, but I can also just download the FBX from here. So I will get an email. So let me launch my Outlook. Hopefully I don't get anything too sensitive while I'm doing this, but shouldn't be.

But I wanted you to see it's literally just in a matter of moments I get that email. Typically, by the time I download this one, the other one's ready to go. So I'm going to download this file, download it to my desktop. Jump back over there. And there's the other one. You see how quickly that was? That was super quick. I'm going to save it to my desktop. Let me close my email.

So now I've got my FBXs. How do I get that into InfraWorks? So placing these designs in InfraWorks. So you can connect to the FBX as a data source, just like anything else. What's goofy about it is it's not going to be geolocated, so we'll have to place that differently and we'll have to configure it. Or I can create it as part of a style. I can define that as the model base of a style in InfraWorks.