Description
Key Learnings
- Learn how to edit imported geometry
- Learn how to fix corrupt models using the wound and heal method
- Learn how to create in-context models using direct modeling techniques
- Learn how to make changes to geometry without worrying about history issues
Speaker
- Brad TallisBrad Tallis is a Customer Success Manager on the Fusion 360 Team at Autodesk, Inc. He has over 22 years of experience in the CAD field with a focus on direct modeling. He started at Hewlett-Packard supporting their direct modeler, CoCreate Solid Designer. PTC acquired CoCreate about 8 years ago, and Tallis was a technical specialist with PTC for many years. In the last few years, he was asked to join the Federal Aerospace and Defense Team to be an application engineer for those larger companies. He has been with Autodesk for 2 years now on the Fusion 360 Team. Tallis demonstrates the power of Fusion 360 software to many customers nationwide.
BRAD TALLIS: My name is Brad Tallis. I'm a Fusion 360 success manager. I actually got hired on at Autodesk as a technical specialist in the direct modeling side of things. In today's class, we're going to basically learn how to use direct modeling techniques to do a bunch of different things.
First of all, make changes to history-based or history-free models. You know, ones that you download off of GrabCAD, or from a vendor, or something like that, that has no history. We're going learn how to de-feature models. We're going to heal corrupt models. And this one's, I think, really important, because I hear all the time where people will get models that sometimes are 10, 12, 15 years old. The person that modeled them aren't even at the company anymore. And you can't manufacture it, because there's something wrong with the design.
We're also going to talk about modeling in context. And what I mean by that is, in other CAD systems you have a part mode and an assembly mode. And then you have to switch into the assembly mode and start assembling everything together. With Fusion 360, we don't have that. I call it in-context design. So we're going to learn about using some of those techniques.
Now, I am not a PowerPoint person. We're going to do a lot of live demonstration today. So I'm just going to get through here pretty quick. So hopefully by the end of the class, you'll be able to know how to use direct modeling to move features around, recognize and remove features we're going to use drug modeling techniques to heal corrupt models, and the direct modeling techniques to create those in-context designs.
So with modifying geometry, we're going to see how to take maybe simple to complex changes on a history-free model. We're going learn tips on capturing direct modeling design intent and to reuse instead of recreate. And I think this one's important, and I'll explain that when we get into there. I'm just going to kind of flip through these really quick. We're going to learn about de-featuring imported geometry.
This is a GrabCAD model. I just went out there and did a search for a bearing block. And we're going to learn how to find features on there. There is a command in Fusion that not hardly anybody knows about called Find Features, and it's very, very powerful.
We're going to learn about fixing bad geometry with what I call the wound and heal method. And I think this is probably going to be the meatiest part of the demonstration today. We're going to learn how to fix smaller sections and then join them back together. And then lastly was using direct modeling techniques to create these in-context designs. You see that little blue part on this rocket assembly. We're going to learn how to do that.
So let's dive right in. Like I said, I like doing the live demos personally. If you have any questions, please feel free to just raise your hand or whatever, and I'll try and answer them during or at the end. So what we're going to start out with is doing Direct Edits.
Now, in Fusion, we actually have a direct editing mode. Do Not Capture Design History it's kind of like a light switch. We're not capturing features, sketches, or anything like that. But you'll also notice that this model does have a timeline, but there's nothing in it. This is an important model. Maybe an IGES file, a STEP file, or something like that.
You can actually do direct edits in history mode, and that's what I'm going to show here. So here's a model I get. And maybe I want to make some changes to it. For example, I notice there's these really small ribs compared to the larger ribs next to it. And we don't want these ribs anymore.
Another thing I'm going to do is, I'm going to try and throw out some tips and tricks. Just regular Fusion modeling tips and tricks so what I want to do is delete this rib. So I'm going to go ahead and select these faces. Now, I need to select this space here. And here's one of my first tricks. If you just click and hold your mouse button for about half a second, you get this probe kind of command. You can kind of see how it's actually like a laser beam probing through my design.
So I'm going to go ahead and select that guy there. So what that did is it selected those three faces. Now, here's the catch with Fusion-- or with direct modeling, I should say. Notice that this face is at a slightly different plane than this face. They're offset slightly. If I said delete, Fusion has to grow the faces. It has to heal that region. So is it going to grow this one? Well, where would it stop? It would fail, actually.
So what I'm going to do is actually select a fourth face. I'm going to go out and grab that one there. And watch what happens when I hit the Delete key on my keyboard. So I can undo that real quick. So you can kind of see there's where it was, and then here's where it went to. So notice that because I deleted this face, it grew this face to the next boundary, which was this one here.
Does that make sense? See how it kind of grew to that boundary. So let's do that again on the other side real quick. I'm going to go ahead and select those faces, click and hold to grab my little kind of probe command, grab that guy, grab that guy. I can hit the Delete key on my keyboard, or I can use the Marking Menu, hit Delete there, and boom, we're done.
Then there's other ways to use direct modeling. For example, notice this, there's an edge right here. This is an angled face, but for whatever reason, this face is slightly off. It's not planar. And I want it to be, because maybe that'll come out of the injection mold easier. So I just select it and hit Delete. Select it, hit Delete, and it has to heal that region. And so we just got rid of that weird angled line.
Same thing with an area like this. Maybe this was a modeling mistake, and it actually got cut away or machined away, and it wasn't supposed to be. In other CAD systems-- I've been to thousands of customers, and I've seen them, where they would actually extrude this face to this face here. But then it covers up this slot area. So then they'd create a sketch, project it, and then they'd extrude that up. Lots of rotation, lots of extra sketches and everything like that.
With Fusion, you select the faces you don't want, and you hit Delete, and it has to heal. So it even extended these fillets and grew those faces, et cetera. And you can go crazy with this. I mean, I can quickly delete this whole region right here.
So if I say Delete, draw a box around that, for example, I just did a Selection Window, say OK. We got rid of that. So, really quick way of de-featuring models. Maybe you're taken to the FEA simulation or whatever, you can use that.
Let's kind of take it to the next level. I want to change the location of a screw boss. Maybe where it attaches on the other part, it's a little bit off or something, so we want to make this change. So all I have to do is draw a selection box around it, right mouse click, and here's the commands that I can use. And I'm going to use Move.
Now, here's the catch. You want to make sure it says faces. Sometimes it'll come up and say bodies or whatever. We're going to be moving faces. And then I can grab this guy and move it up or down. And notice how it's actually extending those faces to allow me to do that.
Now, here's one of my first tricks. In the move, you have what's called-- whoops, that's what I just talked about. It comes up with bodies, you want to make sure it says faces. You have what's called Free Move. And if I were to move this down 5 millimeters and say, OK, it actually recorded that into my timeline. You can see that move right here. But if I edit that, notice that there's no dimension, or distance, or anything like that, because it was a Free Move.
So I'm going to go ahead and undo this. I'm going to do the exact same thing. Make sure it says faces. But instead, I'm going to say Translate. And now it looks exactly the same. Let's just go minus 5 millimeters. There it is on my timeline. If I edit it, notice it records that.
So if you're wanting to capture the history of your direct edits, like with moves and rotates, I recommend not using the Free Move and use these Translate, Rotates, et cetera. Because that means I could come in here and say make that minus 2, and it's going to move it down minus 2.
Let's take that to the next level. I'm going to to draw a box around it. Not only do we need to move it, I want to rotate it. So I'm going to go ahead and pick on like a curved face or an edge. Like that, for example. And now when I rotate this-- Oh, I'm sorry. I did the wrong selection. I want to instead of just doing this right here, I want to rotate the whole arm.
So I've been dragging left to right, that's a Window Selection. If I drag right to left, it's a Crossing Selection. See how it highlighted that whole body? I'm going to come in here and say Move Faces, do a Crossing Selection, and it's only going to select the faces that that window crossed.
I'll come in here, grab this guy, and start to rotate. And notice we're getting a live preview of what that would look like. Now, you'll notice a warning that comes down here. It says, "additional faces have moved or changed." And it's actually talking about this blend right here. Because notice what it's doing, it's actually changing that by keeping the tangency and everything. I mean, look how quick and easy that is. I just draw a box around it, I tell it to rotate 30 degrees, 15 degrees, whatever you want, and it does it.
So using that information, let's kind of take a look at this. I noticed these ribs right here. And to me, it would make more sense for strength if they kind of terminated more in line with these screw bosses instead of way over here. So I want to rotate these ribs. So all I'm going to do is select one of them, let's go ahead and say Move. I'll select the other face also.
I don't have to select the fillets, or the blends, or anything like that. I'm going to say Rotate, grab either an edge or a face, and as I start to rotate, it gives me a live preview of what that's going to look like. I didn't have to machine it away and recreate it, which I see all the time with some customers of other software.
Now, here's kind of taking it to the next level. I think this is pretty impressive. Notice how this fillet terminates on this face. Watch what happens when I go past that. It actually extends that fillet down to the next boundary. It's very, very intelligent, very handy.
So let's just kind of look at it from the top. And so it looks like around 5 degrees. Let's just go maybe 5 degrees. In this case, I'm just going to rotate that 5 degrees. Do the same thing over here. Select one face, probe through to grab the other one. Make sure I'm on rotate. Let's just go ahead and rotate. And I'll just say minus 5 degrees. And we've just fixed those ribs in a matter of seconds.
OK, now what about something like this? Maybe we've done an analysis, a simulation that this could get hit, or something like that. And with only one rib, it's not quite strong enough for how thin this is. So instead of one rib, I want to have two.
So I'm going to use direct modeling to do this. I'm not going to machine this away, create a new sketch, draw two ribs, and extrude them. I'm just going to come in and say Move. I'm going to select just these two faces. I don't even have to grab the fillets, or the top, or the bottom, or anything like that. I'm just going to grab those guys and tell it I want to rotate around that edge.
And watch what happens. It's moving all of those fillets and everything. So let's just go maybe 35 degrees. I just rotated that rib. Now I can use other modeling techniques, such as Mirror. This time I am going to draw a box around everything. What's my mirror plane? Let's just do the midplane there. Say OK, and boom, we're done.
And it's capturing these steps in my timeline. So I can always go back and say 30 degrees instead of 35, or whatever. Does that makes sense? So that's kind of the basics behind direct modeling.
So this model here I actually brought in from GrabCAD. It was created in, I think, SolidWorks 2013. Notice, no timeline, no history whatsoever. I'm in direct modeling mode. And I'm working on a project where I need to have a bearing block. But the one I have in my hand, the customer doesn't have a 3D model of. But it looks really similar to this, and I want it to be pretty similar. So I want to tweak this to make it match this imaginary one I have.
So first thing I want to get rid of is this logo. Notice there's a ton of faces, and edges, and all that kind of stuff. It would take me a long time to come through and select all of these or machine those away. Well, with direct modeling, you draw a box, you hit Delete, and instantly, it's gone. I didn't have to select those 96 faces or however many there were.
I want the grease Zerk to be on the top. So I just draw a box around it, I tell it I want to rotate, and it recognizes these edges even from imported geometry. So I'm just going to reference one of those and start to rotate. And let's just go, I think maybe 35 degrees, and boom, we're done. My bearing block doesn't have these curved edges, so I select them, hit Delete, and it heals that geometry.
Now I've been showing a lot of deleting. What if I want to change the size of this fillet? And notice it goes all the way around the model. That's a lot of faces to select. I don't have a feature or anything like that to change. So this is where we have, under Create, Find Features. You will only see this when you're in the direct modeling mode, when you don't see a timeline. You won't see this when you see a timeline. I'll show you what I mean by that here in a second.
But I'm going to say Find Features, and it allows me to select all of them. Or I could just search for fillets, or just for holes, or for fillets and holes. So you have lots of options here. I'm going to say Select All, we'll draw a box around everything, and this blows me away. In literally about two or three seconds, it analyzes the model and figures out all of the different features on this model to the best that it can.
So you'll notice, here's a chamfer. Sure enough, if I rotate around, you can kind of see that chamfer there. There's revolves. Now, was this particular feature or face created with a Revolve in SolidWorks? I don't know. I'll never know. But it recognizes that as a revolve.
And check this out. As I kind of go through fillet 20, I hover over it, and click on it, it selects that whole thing. I can edit that and say, instead of 2 millimeters, I want that to be 1 millimeter. And it updated it. So you can work with anybody's data. Whether it's Inventor, SolidWorks, Pro/E, STEP files, IGES files, you can move things around like I showed on that green part, delete features, or even recognize features and use those to change certain things.
So if I kind of go through to see all the-- here's the outside fillets, and a little bit of the inside fillets, and stuff like that. There are some small ones underneath. So you can kind of see all the stuff that it figured out. It recognized this as a revolve, for example.
Now, if I want to, I can right mouse click and say Capture Design History. I now have a timeline. It shows up as a base model, basically what I would call a dummy model. But I can now do things like, for example, let's go ahead and throw a chamfer. Let's just do a 1 millimeter chamfer on there. And you'll see, there's my chamfer in the timeline, just like a regular Fusion model.
If I were to create a sketch or something like that on here-- let's just do a quick rectangle. Something like that. And I'll go ahead and modify these. Let me do something like that. Pull it out, say OK. You'll see that there's my sketch, there's my extrude. I can come back to my sketch. I can change that, make it different or whatever, and it's going to update accordingly. So it's just like capturing history.
So what I like to show in this example is, I brought in a SolidWorks model. I tweaked with it, changed it the way I wanted it to be, got rid of faces or whatever. Now I want to kind of engineer it and make some changes. You know, add some slots, screw holes, whatever it might be.
Any questions so far? Is this making sense? OK, so let's move on. This is what I call the, fixing really bad parts. And this came from Pro/E. As I look at it, it looks pretty good. But notice some weird oddities, like why is there this extra little edge in this blend? And as we get over here, why are there a bazillion extra little faces all the way around this fillet?
And if I were to manufacture this, I'd be really nervous that I would see those lines, because they're not nice, and tangential, and smooth, or whatever. So I would be really nervous sending this to my machinist. And so I want to fix this. I mean, all the way around the part, there's weird. There's one edge there, there's an extra face there, there's three edges over here, but two on this side, et cetera, et cetera.
Oh, am I not plugged in? I'm not plugged in. Sorry, guys, I should have checked that really quick. I'll make this really quick. There we go, made it in time. I do have one of those machines where it's like, you have 20 minutes. Boom, then it crashes.
OK, so let's do a really simple direct edit. I want to remove this blend. So I select it, and I hit Delete. And we sit, and we wait. And I see a little red x in the corner. And it says, "the operation does not have a meaningful shape change." And you're like, it's a blend, why can't I remove that?
Any idea why that didn't remove? Any guesses? There's no wrong answer, by the way.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
BRAD TALLIS: Exactly. Something-- its neighboring faces are causing the problem. My guess is it's this guy right here. What I call neighboring faces, now, here's a prime example. It could be this one, or it could be that one because that's connected to that one. Or this one, or this one. And you see how it walks all the way around the part. It could be any of those faces that are causing the problem. So how do we delete something as simple as this?
Well, this is what I call the wound and heal. We're going to get rid of what could be the problematic area. To do this, I want to draw a sphere. And we're going to basically subtract that sphere. We're going to scoop out that problematic area. But to create a sphere, I actually have to have a plane to put that sphere on.
So under Construct, you can see we have lots of options. Midplanes, offset planes, et cetera. I've found that Plane Along a Path is the best one. So I'm going to say Plane Along a Path. I'm going to select this edge right here, and you'll see that it put a plane along that path. And I'm going to drag it as far to the right as I can.
Now, here's another trick. Why did I select that line? Check this out. Plane Along a Path, I'm going to pick that edge. Notice how tiny my plane is? It's itty-bitty. It's scaled, basically, a ratio of the length of the path. So you'll notice that this is a very short path, so it's a very small plane. This is a fairly long path, so it scales up ratio-wise. Here's another trick. If you click on the corner of a plane, you can actually make it grow. I don't know if you guys knew that or not.
OK, so we go ahead and do Plane Along a Path. I'm going to select here. I'm going to drag it to the right. Now I have a place to create my sphere. And you'll notice I use it a lot, so I have it shortcutted up on my menu. But it's just this sphere right here. I click on that plane. And it's hard to see, but there's the 0.0 point right at the end of my line. So I'm going to go ahead and click there. And you'll notice it creates kind of this little red scoop. And I can drag this to be larger.
I kind of think it's funny, I call it the wound and heal, and it's like a red wound. It's kind of ironic. Now, the trick here is you want to make sure you're getting rid of all of the problematic areas. So notice when I go like that, I now have a nice boundary here, a nice boundary here, nice boundary here. But you'll notice I do not right here. So I have to go a little bit larger.
Now, don't go crazy, because then you'll start to blow through other geometry you don't want to remove. So you need to go about as big as you want. And sometimes you can't use a sphere. Maybe you do a rectangle or something like that. But notice how that's giving me nice, clean boundaries all the way around. I'm going to say OK, and we just remove that weird area.
Now, I mentioned before there could be problems over here. So I'm going to do the exact same thing on this side. Plane Along a Path, drag it to the left, throw down a sphere on that plane. Make sure it's big enough, like so. I get rid of all of that stuff. And now notice that this blend isn't touching any other fillets. In fact, none of these are. Let's go ahead and select all three of these, hit Delete, and instantly, it deletes those. I was able to remove that blend.
But what about these ugly holes now I got in my part? Well, it's a single face. I select it, I hit Delete, and Fusion has to heal that. Notice how it extended that fillet down, it extended that fillet there. Same thing over here. I'll go ahead and delete that. And it even extended that one and extended that one. I can now come in here, and if I wanted to, add a new fillet into it or whatever. And notice the nice corner that I'm getting. I don't have that extra edge. It's actually created correctly. Does that make sense?
So this is a simple-ish example where it's like, hey, I just want to delete one face, and it wouldn't let me. So I use that wound and heal to do that. And I might have to do that in multiple areas, like here, for example. But due to time constraints, we're going to jump up to this guy. I want to fix this area.
Now, this isn't the best example, but hopefully it makes sense. The last example I showed, the reason I couldn't delete that blend was because of a neighboring issue. If I try and delete one of these blends, it touches this face. This face touches this face. This face touches these blends, which could be problematic. So if I go and try to make a simple change, it might actually fail.
So one of the tricks-- I call this the amputation method-- is to actually physically remove this from the rest of the model. And I think the easiest way to do that is to split the body. So I'm going to just draw a quick rectangle. Let's just do it on like this front face here. I'm just going to draw a box, like so, and use Split Body.
That's the body to split. What's my splitting tool? I click on my rectangle. Kind of gives me a preview, it's extending it. I'm going to say OK, and watch what happens under here when I say OK. We now have two separate bodies. I just split them in half. In fact, I'm going to turn that guy off.
Now when I try and delete like this fillet, it touches that face and touches that face, and that's it. It's not touching any of the other problematic areas of this complex model. Does that make sense? So we just kind of remove this for a little bit.
OK, looking at this model, looking at it from the top-- let me just do it like this-- I can see that I have one rib that's nice and centered, I have one that's kind of off center a little bit, then I have one that's way off center. And in my design, I'd rather have them perfect. So I'm going to draw a box around that and hit the Delete key. Boom, we just removed it off of there.
Do the same thing over here. Draw a box. I didn't quite get all of the faces, but I can do that, and say Delete. Then I'll probably come back and pattern this a little bit later. We'll use the good one. In fact, let's go ahead and remove the blends, because we've got weird faces and blends on here So I'm just going to draw a box around this, and it selects that whole thing. But I don't want it to delete the whole thing.
So I can come in here and unselect the three faces. Does that make sense? Instead of coming in and selecting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6-- all the way around-- I just drew a selection box and then removed the ones I want to keep. Now when I hit Delete, either on my keyboard or with the Marking menu, you can see how quickly it removes those fillets around there.
OK, so we're starting to clean this up. So the next one, really easy, you just draw a box around all of these problematic fillets on the top. I'm just going to draw a box around it. But notice it selected that top face. So I'm going to unselect it and hit Delete. And quickly, it does nothing. Again, it failed. This should have been simple. Why did that not work? Couldn't heal the edited region. Any ideas why? I'll give you a hint, it's the same answer as the last one.
Yep, it's a neighboring face. It's probably not this one, but I'm assuming it's probably this. Why is there these three triangles? Do you guys know the rolling ball method with fillets? Does that sound familiar? Yeah. If you put a whole bunch a caulking along those edges, and you took a marble and kind of scooped them around, you'd have these nice smooth surfaces. You wouldn't see these sharp edges in the corner. So my guess is that it's probably something with this.
So in this example, it's better for me to remove all of the blends at once. Now, there's a lot of blends on here, but it's just a kind of a multi-step process. We're going to do the exact same thing. I'm going to draw a box around those faces. I'm going to hold down my Shift key to unselect those. Then maybe looking from the top, I'm going to hold my Shift key and draw a box around that fillet region. And notice how it's selecting all of those.
So that's all I'm going to do. I'm just going to kind of walk around, draw a box around here, draw a box around here. You know, pretty quickly. Something like so, something like so. Now, it probably will work, but I might as well remove these bottom blends also. So I'm going to look at it from the side, hold down my Shift key, and kind of draw a box like that.
So I selected a whole bunch of fillets pretty quickly. I say Delete, and instantly it removes all of those blends. That time it worked. Then all I have to do is come back and say, fillet, let's just do our 3 millimeter fillets. I can even select through since I'm in the Fillet command. I don't even have to rotate. There's my 3 millimeter fillet. Let's put the 1 millimeter along here. And look how gorgeous that looks. No extra edges or anything like that, right? That will machine nicely.
Same thing here. I'll go ahead and do a 3 millimeter fillet there. Let's do our 1 millimeter fillet here. And then lastly, maybe I want to create a pattern. Now, I'm kind of going through this pretty quickly. I probably could have and maybe even should have switched into history mode and captured these additions that I'm doing. Because maybe I want to come back and make that a 1.5 millimeter instead of a 1. But you see how easy it is? I could just remove it and make it 1.5.
Let's just go ahead and draw a box around that rib. What's my axis? I want three of them. I say OK. I have beautiful ribs now. They are perfectly centered and filleted, and we've fixed that part. And now what about this other guy? Well, all I have to do now is use the Combine command. What's my target body? That guy. What's the tool body? This one. I don't want to keep it, I want to join them together. Watch what happens over here. I say OK. It's all one body again. We reattached it. Does that make sense? Are you guys learning anything? Is this-- OK.
OK, so let's take it to the next level. I've got this imported-- notice, no history tree, or timeline, or anything like that-- got this imported truck grill. And as I'm looking at this, as a designer, I'm sitting here thinking, you know, this mounting tab, it's going to get kind of flimsy. It could flex this. It'd probably make more sense to be in line with these ribs right here, right? So I just want to move this over.
In fact, it's literally only what, 5 faces or something like that, if that? So let's do that. I'll come in here, say Move Faces, draw a box around it. I'm going to do a Free Move in this case. I'm going to drag to the left. Operation cannot create a valid result. Again, very simple move. Why is it not working?
Unfortunately, it's because this part was poorly designed. There's lots of issues with it. For example, in my investigation, I noticed this little tiny sliver face right here that kind of tapers off. In fact, you can see it get all chattery and stuff at the end. I mean, this is a tiny, tiny sliver face.
This face here, why is there an edge right here? It doesn't need to be an edge. This is supposed to be all planar. Same thing with this guy, this guy, and this guy. There's just a lot of stuff wrong with where this region is. So the easiest way to solve this is to fix it.
I'm just going to click on that face and hit Delete. And it has to heal that geometry. We just got rid of that sliver face. I'm going to grab that face and hit Delete. And you can see how it got rid of that edge. So in fact, I might just continue on here. Let's go ahead and delete that face, and maybe this one here.
OK, now we've got a nice, smooth face. Everything's perfect. I'll come in and do the move, draw the box around it. Let's do the Free Move again, drag to the left, and it still errors out. So I fixed all the problems, I thought. But the problem is somewhere else on this body. Where? I have no idea. A fillet, a missing face, or something like that.
So again, this is where removing the problematic area away is going to help us with our design. So let's just go ahead and draw a rectangle. I'm just going to draw a rectangle like here. I don't care what size it is. I'm not typing in any dimensions or anything like that. Let's go ahead and split this body using this rectangle.
I now have two different bodies, so you can kind of see that here. And I'll just go ahead and turn this guy off for now. I don't need to see it for now. So now I have just this little piece. Let's try the Move command, Faces, Free Move. Ta-da. Why? There's no other problematic areas around it. We just have this little tiny piece.
Now, in this example, I want to be very precise. I want to line this up with this rib. And I think one of the easiest ways of doing that is actually projecting the geometry and using the geometry. So I'm going to create a sketch and project this face here, and this face here.
Then I can create a line that kind of comes from the center up. Let's do the same thing over here. It kind of cuts through the center. And go up, like so. I don't even have to go to the other edge or anything like that. I just wanted this line, because now I have a distance. I have two points right here.
Let's do the Move command again, do the faces. I'll just draw a box around it. I've been showing Free Move, Translate, Rotate. There's one here called Point to Point. And I actually now have two points. I couldn't say-- like, it won't capture the center here. So I could go from this point here to this point over here, but obviously that wouldn't get me the result I want.
I needed this measurement. So I'm going to say Point to Point, and go from there to there. And you'll see it moves the exact distance. Perfectly centered, if I look at it kind of like so. Don't need to see the sketch anymore. Let's turn our other body back on, and combine them back together.
Combine that guy and that guy. I want to Join, I say OK. Voila, we're done. Any questions on that? Is that making sense?
AUDIENCE: Are there any other [INAUDIBLE] to figure out what might by causing it, or do you just kind of recognize [INAUDIBLE] right away [INAUDIBLE]
BRAD TALLIS: That is an excellent question. Yes, there is. I usually don't show it in the direct modeling, but if I go into, like, the patch, where you can actually delete surfaces, and faces, and stuff like that-- so for example, I could come in here and physically delete that face, and now we're looking inside the model. There are some-- and I haven't done this in a while-- I can't remember which one it is. But basically, if I-- yeah, I can't remember.
One of them, maybe it's Patch, will actually show you some of the missing faces. And I'm not a surfacing guy, so I apologize that I don't know the answer to that. But it will actually highlight. And if we have time at the end, I'll make sure I get that answer for you.
But yes, you can go into the patch mode and kind of draw a box around everything. It'll show you sliver faces that are missing, that kind of stuff. You'll see in the next demonstration, I do clash analysis, I do section analysis, stuff like that to help me with my design.
But yeah, honestly, what you'll learn, when you go to make a change-- like, for example, you might delete this circle here, and your whole part goes away, and just a torus shows up. And that's because it didn't know how to calculate the end of this face, so it kind of does this infinite loop thing. And that's just a poor design of the model.
And sadly, again, there's this model here. Why is that guy there? It should be a nice smooth transition, and stuff like that. I don't want to diss on any other products out there, but sometimes they drop resolution just to make that fillet happen, for example. And it can cause issues. Another thing that happens a lot is people machine, and not realizing they're machining through other parts. And they machine a little bit of a face away, and stuff like that.
So a real world example. I was working with a customer. They designed griddles. So you can think of all the little indentations, the trays for the fat to go away or whatever. He was trying to make a simple change, and it kept failing, and failing, and failing. And we ended up having to cut that into quarters. We cut the grill in half, and then we cut that in half, and we worked on one quarter. And we got it to work, and then we just mirror, and mirrored, and boom, it was done.
And he had spent two weeks trying to fix it, and we probably fixed it in half an hour, 45 minutes or whatever. Trying to figure out what the problem was the biggest time crunch. And it happened to do a bad fillets, was the issue.
Here's another trick-- and thanks for bringing that up. When you're working in direct modeling, one of the tricks I would say when you're trying to fix a model is, you'll probably want to remove the blends or the fillets. Especially the little ones that kind of travel all around the part. I usually start by removing some of those, because they travel all the way around. And something on the far side of the part could cause something on the front side of the part to fail. So if I remove those fillets, they're not touching anymore. It allows you to kind of work better on the model.
I'm doing pretty good on time here, actually. So in this last example, I want to talk about using kind of like direct modeling techniques to design a part. I'm not going to worry about complex sketches. I'm not going to worry about dimensions, per se. I have an idea in my head, and I want to get it on the screen as quickly and as easily as possible.
So I've been tasked to create some kind of a bracket that connects these two parts together. This is part of an airbrake for a missile assembly. And so I kind of have an idea of what it's going to look like, but I don't know the final dimensions or anything like that. So I just want to start sketching. I just want to start drawing.
So I'm going to start with a rectangle, but I want to use existing geometry. So I'm going to use the project command, where it's under Sketch, Project, or the P key. This is probably one of my most commonly used commands, so I just hit the P key, and I can project these two circles, like so.
And what it did is, it basically-- it's kind of hard to see, but you can kind of see it projected those circles onto my plane. Now I can come in and do the Rectangle command. Let's just do a center rectangle here. Something like this. I don't know, kind of just blocking things out. Let's do a regular rectangle. Something like this. I want this lined up. Snap Guide, I love Snap Guides. Hopefully you guys use those. I just came over to this edge, and it kind of snaps. You can kind of see that cyan line show up. That's called a Snap Guide.
I want this rectangle to be taller, so I'm going to stretch that up a little bit. And there's my basic shape. I'm done. Three rectangles. Now I can select these regions, and I can either Extrude or press Pull. Doesn't matter, whatever your preference is. I'm going to go symmetric. And let's just go, I don't know, 100. And I don't want to cut, I want to create a new body. And there's my big chunk of metal.
Especially if you're kind of coming from machining, you can kind of think of this, how would I machine this or whatever? So I have my basic shape. Now, obviously that's way too blocky, way too heavy. So I'm going to start machining this away. So I might put a couple of rectangles on this face. Let's just do maybe 70 by, oh, I don't know, 200.
Now, this time I am entering dimensions. So what I'm showing here is you have the flexibility of just kind of being free, or you can be very precise. I can select these guys, press Pull. And how far do I need to extrude? And the answer is, far enough. I don't care what this dimension is. And you'll see why here in a moment.
Now, you'll notice that it is cutting through my brake. So under here, I have Objects to Cut. I want to make sure it's not cutting through my brake. And you see I can turn that off, and it allows me to just cut through the body. And I'll say OK. I just removed all that material.
Now, obviously these parts are kind of clashing with each other, so I need to make an opening here. So again, I'm just going to project some geometry. Let me kind of zoom up here. I'm going to project-- this is that outside edge of this break. And I can use that. I'm just going to draw a rectangle from there. Kind of hover over that so I catch the snap onto it. And I usually over-exaggerate.
Some people will catch right to the edge, but I personally don't like to do that. What if that face was tapered 1 degree, and if I were to machine that away, you'd have a sliver or whatever. So why not remove a bunch of stuff? So I usually over-exaggerate.
I'll select these regions, press Pull. How far? Far enough. Objects to Cut, I'll turn off that brake. And I just really quickly kind of made an opening for this brake. Now, I didn't give it any clearance. We actually caught to the very top of this circular face, so I want to give it maybe a millimeter of clearance.
So here's kind of the direct modeling part of it. I just click on it, and say, hey, let's press that up or pull that up a millimeter. And now I have clearance in there. I'm not worrying about a sketch, or dimensions, or anything like that.
In fact, let's just go ahead and finish this clevis area. I want to chamfer these. Let's just do 12 in this case. But as I'm looking at this, these clevis arms are too long. So I'm going to press pull these clevis arms, drag them up until I get to kind of where I think they should be. Somewhere around in here.
I could type in minus 19 if I wanted to. It doesn't matter in this case. I mean, you could. In fact, I'll just do minus 19, say OK, and I've now kind of finished that clevis area. OK, what was my sketch? Three rectangles, so far.
Same thing with this guy here. You can kind of see when I hover over it, there's an area in there we need to machine away. So I'm just going to draw a rectangle on this face and just kind of guesstimate where it is. Machine that away, make sure I go far enough. Objects to Cut. I'll turn off the sliding shaft. And you can see, I was sort of close, and sort of not.
But then, using direct modeling techniques, I can come in here and just pull this down a little bit. Not too far, something like that. Say OK. Here is one of my favorite commands, check this out. I'm going to say Press Pull. I'm going to start to drag to the right. And what this is saying-- let me rotate a little bit-- it has moved that face 9.294 millimeters from where it was. I want it to be near this face, but offset 2 millimeters.
So I'd have to use a sketch to do that, right? I'd have to draw a sketch. Not with Fusion. I can come in here, press this little down arrow, and there was a command here called and Re-Anchor. So I'm going to Re-Anchor my measurement to this face. Now it's telling me that I've moved this face 44 millimeters from that face.
Well, I want it to be 2 millimeters from that face, so I say 2. And it snaps over there and moves it 2 millimeters. Does that make sense? I'm going to do that again. It's a really cool command. Not a lot of people know about it. Press Pull. I start to drag just so I can kind of see something. I say Re-Anchor, I click on that face, and I'm going to say minus 2 millimeters. And even though I dragged it to the left it, brings it back over, and offsets it 2 millimeters. And I now have the clearance that I want without creating a sketch.
So I can obviously remove some more geometry here. So I'm just going to go ahead and maybe draw a rectangle down to here, and maybe another rectangle down to here. This time I do want to be precise. I'm going to throw a dimension on here. Let's just do maybe 20 millimeters in this case. I'll do another one here.
Do you guys know this trick? I've placed my dimension. I want it to be exactly the same as this dimension over here. All I have to do is click on that dimension, and it references it. I'm going to hit Enter, and you'll notice that that becomes 20. So if I were to change this guy to be 25, that other one would become 25. It's kind of a cool little trick.
So again, basic shapes. Two rectangles, Press Pull, drag it through, far enough, make sure I'm cutting just the part I want, say OK. I'm going to go ahead and fillet these edges. I'll just do 10. Here's another trick I'm going to show you. In the Fillet command, you can pick through your design. Now, this is an easy one. But I want to grab the fillet that's way back here. Where the heck is it?
So here's a trick. Hover over this edge, and you can see where that edge terminates, and then you can get near it. So I'm just going to hover over that. I kind of see where that edge terminates, and then I can grab that other fillet or that other edge back there instead of having to rotate around. Kind of a neat trick.
Now, you guys are probably ahead of me. You're like, oh, your part's clashing, ha-ha. I purposely did that to show you I use the Section Analysis quite a bit. So I go under Inspect, Section Analysis, it's asking for a face, and then I can start to slice through my design.
And I'm going to go about halfway through that circle. And obviously, we can see, of course, my concept is clashing with an existing design. My concept of will not work. I can actually fix this in 2 and 1/2 D. I call this 2 and 1/2 D instead of 3D. Check this out. I just click near that face. It recognizes it as a face. Press Pull. I'll grab both of them. I can lift up, move down, et cetera, and move those until I get the clearance that I want or whatever.
And again, I could say minus 15 if I wanted to be precise. Then I turn off my analysis, and we're moving forward with our design concept. Maybe we throw fillet on here. Let's just do maybe 20 in this case. I can probe through. I'll grab this guy here, say OK.
And it doesn't matter which order I'm doing any of this. Let's just do a chamfer. Let's just do 12 in this case. Notice it is keeping track in my timeline. I can always go back. But now I'm finally done to the point where I'm like, this needs to fit inside of a sheet metal enclosure.
I'm going to use Split Body, split that body. What's my splitting tool? I can just click on this face, for example, and it's going to split my body into two separate bodies. In fact, I could come in here, let's just remove that out of there, and there's my part. And it matches the curvature of that sheet metal.
Now, my machinist will be angry at me if I sent this to him. What's the length of this? Let's go ahead and measure it. I'll say from that face here to that face there it is 288.515. What's my tolerance [? saying ?] and all that kind of stuff.
So now, here's where I want to start tying things down and being more precise. But I really don't have a lot of sketches with dimensions or anything like that. Check this out. I'm going to use the Re-Anchor command. I'm going to say Press Pull. Let's Re-Anchor to this back face right here. And there you can see that it's 285. I might even kind of concept and say, you know, this arm doesn't have to be this long. I could probably bring it into the 250's, 260's, something like that.
So let's just type in 255, Enter. And that is exactly 255.00 millimeters. I'm going to throw a fillet on this edge and this edge here, say OK. Remember, I added clearance up here, but I didn't add any clearance face-to-face. So I want to add a little bit of clearance in there.
So I'm going to go ahead and do my Press Pull. I'll select both of those faces. And check this out. When I start to drag, it's actually going to go in both directions at the same time. So I could come in here and say, let's go 1 millimeter in both directions. And I've now added-- hopefully you guys can kind of see that-- that clearance in there.
What about this? Check this out. I'm going to say Press Pull, grab both of these faces. Watch what happens. Notice how the fillets update accordingly and everything like that. So I can change the width there. And I can even come in and say, you know what, let's Re-Anchor to this face. And it's around 72. It doesn't need to be that wide. Around 60 looks pretty good, so I'm going to just type in 60. And I've just made that change, the fillet's updated accordingly.
And I could keep doing that. I could do this face to this face, and measure that, and tie it down to exactly 75 or whatever. I could keep walking around and doing that on my part. Well, now that I've got my concept, I want to see how it works. So I'm to come in here and make this a component, because I want to see how it's going to interact. And because I built it where it needs to be-- or where it is, actually-- I can use what's called an As-Built Joint.
And if you guys don't know anything about assemblies and stuff like that, we have two different kinds. We have Joints and As-Built Joints. As-Built Joints allow you to-- basically, it's a much simpler way of doing it. Notice, it's asking for the components, like it's going to say that one and that one is a revolute around maybe a circular edge. And just like that, it starts to revolve. And I'll do the same thing here. That part and that part revolute. It goes around that one. I'll say OK. Now when I grab my [? thing ?] there, it starts to move.
So that is it. Hopefully that was a cool demonstration for you. Hopefully you learned something. If you have any questions, we end here in about another eight minutes or so, so shoot away. Anybody have any questions? Yeah, go ahead.
AUDIENCE: I'm just curious [INAUDIBLE]. So you referenced some of [? the mentions ?] [? referenced the other ?] models and [INAUDIBLE] [? updated ?] parts?
BRAD TALLIS: So, the dimensions don't reference another model, but my projections do. So for example, the size of this hole or whatever. Because I projected that hole, if I were to change the size of that hole, my holes would also update accordingly, because it's coming off of the projection.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] so you just go in [INAUDIBLE] dimension [? there ?] [INAUDIBLE]
BRAD TALLIS: Yeah, you could remove the projection, or you could throw a dimension on there, or whatever. And I'm not saying that this is how you should design. Some people actually do design this way. Some people like to have very precise sketches. I like to show this because I didn't know what the final thing was going to look like. I didn't really care about is it 200 millimeters or 220 millimeters. I just wanted to get my idea on there, and then kind of move things around and tweak with it, almost like working with clay sort of. And then I came up with my design.
And I could always go back to my sketches now. I do have sketches in here that I could edit, and all that kind of stuff, and throw dimensions on, et cetera, et cetera, if I really wanted to. And my downstream processes would update accordingly.
So this is that sketch here. I could throw dimensions, and reference this edge, and make those equal, and not even have to do the offset faces like I did the Re-Anchor. But I like to show that, because it's like, I just want it near that face with a 2 millimeter clearance. Good question. Was there a question up here? Anything else, guys and gals?
AUDIENCE: So sometimes I've seen people do things similar to this. We use [? metric ?] [INAUDIBLE] where they'll just start kind of adding stuff and subtracting stuff [INAUDIBLE] and going back after the fact and trying to modify [INAUDIBLE] might be a production part [INAUDIBLE] mass production. [INAUDIBLE] go back and modify those [INAUDIBLE]
BRAD TALLIS: Correct. I would agree with you, yes. Because there was no design intent when they were modeling that part. So if this was going to go to manufacturing, I would probably say, OK, now I know what it looks like. And I would probably come back and say, OK, I don't need to do that offset. Let's go ahead and dimension. What is this width? OK, it's 65.5. I'll throw that dimension on there, and throw away that other feature.
This isn't the, make this a production part. This is more, get my idea on the screen quickly. I'm making a fixture, I'm making just a quick part to do something with. But I'm not making the next automotive part or whatever. I totally agree. A strong, easy feature tree is more powerful down the road.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] direct modeling does make it somewhat easier now to [? model ?] [INAUDIBLE]
BRAD TALLIS: Yeah. Hopefully you saw that in this example, like these ribs. You have to trust me how many customers-- and I hate to admit it, I came from federal aerospace and defense. And I would leave some of these customers and say, how did we put a man on the moon and bring him back alive? I mean, honestly.
[LAUGHTER]
Because they would draw a sketch, and they would hack this away literally, and kind of machine it down, and then rebuild it. And there would be those sliver of faces. And you saw that with this one. And I hate to say it, this is one quarter of a part. You can kind of see how I kind of machined it away. This was an ugly, ugly, ugly part. And even just one quarter of it has all of these issues wrong with it. You don't know how the person before you designed it, or model it, or whatever, so--
AUDIENCE: [? Sometimes ?] [INAUDIBLE] [? translation ?] [INAUDIBLE] [? softwares, ?] going to a STEP file, and then from a STEP file into [INAUDIBLE] That translation can cause that, those [? kind of ?] issues.
BRAD TALLIS: Yeah, you'll see a lot of missing faces in the translation issues. What I think is really cool with Fusion is the fact that we have parametric and direct intermixed. And like, I was doing direct modeling deletes in the history tree, right? I mean, it's capturing the design history. And I can come in here and say, hey, delete that hole out of there, and let's create a new one, or whatever. A lot of the other systems out there don't allow you to do that.
A neat example, we had a customer, they designed suitcase bodies. And they are a lot more complex than I thought they would ever be. Lots of support ribs and stuff like that. And they just wanted to move a rib a couple of millimeters, and they couldn't in other CAD systems. We brought into Fusion and moved the rib. And they were just like, print. They sent it to the injection molder because of that. So little things, like I showed with the manufacturing. I would not have sent that to my machinist with the way those blends looked, because you could probably see those edges, et cetera.
Any other questions or comments? Well, I wanted to thank everybody for attending. Hopefully you got something out of this class and can take it back with you and learn a new thing. My email address, I think, is on the PowerPoint. It's brad.tallis@autodesk.com. If you have any direct modeling questions, please feel free. I have some cards also. Come up after the class, and I'll hand those out. So thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]