Fusion 360 101: Introducing Fusion 360

PHIL EICHMILLER: All right, good morning, everybody. We're going to get started. I'd like to welcome you to AU. Welcome you to the first Fusion class of the week. My name is Phil Eichmiller.

BRYCE HEVENTHAL: Good morning, everyone. I'm Bryce, and over there we have Aaron Magnin as well.

AARON MAGNIN: Thanks, Bryce. Sorry.

BRYCE HEVENTHAL: We'll figure out that. All right, well, welcome for the first Fusion class. Hopefully a lot of you joined us at the Fusion 360 meet up last night. We got to see a lot of customers, and we saw what they're going to be adding to Fusion over the next couple of months, as well. Today Phil is going to do a little demonstration of Fusion, but really this is for an overview for you guys to see what Fusion is.

We're going to point you in a bunch of different classes. If you want to learn more about Cam, for instance, we'll tell you where to go, what day it's on, as we get through this class today. But first, do you have anything else, Phil?

PHIL EICHMILLER: I just wanted to just briefly introduce myself. I'm a QA on the Fusion 360 project, and I've been there since day one. And so I know a lot about Fusion as a result of that. You might see me on the forums posting as Phil E., and I'm also an instructor at Portland Community College. I teach Inventor, so I have a passion for teaching, and I'm glad to see so many bright shiny faces here this morning.

BRYCE HEVENTHAL: Awesome. And then, we asked a couple of minutes ago, but we saw a lot of people trickle in. How many of you have used Fusion so far? Installed it, downloaded it, tested it a little bit. About half. That's awesome. Good to hear.

We'll show how to install as well for those of you haven't yet. It takes five to 10 minutes, super quick. But today what we're going to explain first is what Fusion is. So Fusion is what-- we call it product innovation platform. It's our theory of replacing the traditional method of a very linear process where it's broken between industrial design to mechanical engineers, all the way to manufacturer.

We see it as a cyclical process, all the way from designing to making. And then we're going to be able to use and collect that data and redesign. So that's been our vision moving forward with Fusion. You'll see a lot of this going on at the manufacturing booth. I'd highly recommend going over there after the keynote today.

There's going to be a lot of different talks on the product innovation platform. But what we're here to talk about today is what Fusion is. And we're going to give a summary, overview of what it is, and how to do a couple of tips and tricks as we start with Fusion.

So Fusion's a lot of things. It's a huge, huge product. To come master at the whole entire thing is going to take a very long time. We have people who specialize in different parts of the product, whether that be the sculpting, Freeform stuff, the Cam tool path stuff.

So to start off, it's a Freeform design. So if you want those high curvature continuous surfaces. The cool thing is with Fusion, usually these are different tools that don't really talk well together. There's a translation that occurs. So if an update occurs, you usually have to rebuild those mounting bosses, those parametric ribs on the Freeform surface.

So it is also a parametric modeler, so your 2D sketching and all your eD features, similar to an Inventor or a SolidWorks is also in Fusion as well.

And then we get into 2D drawings because we still see a need for manufacturing drawings when you go to the manufacturing process. It also has a collaboration aspect to it as well. We can do things like live reviews, commenting, redlining, all on the file. So it travels with the file. We're only working on one file, which is awesome.

When I used to work on desktop CAD tools, I can't remember how many copies we made at my old company. We would just copy files all across, and produce a PDM nightmare.

Then we could get into some finite element analysis. And we just had one of our most major releases last Wednesday. And we'll talk about the update process a little bit later. But we added the NAStran Solver to all our simulation study types, as well as we added four of these advanced study types as well for nonlinear, explicit solver, and then topology optimization.

And there's some classes on specializing just on simulation, if you're into that type of work.

And then we can get into some cool things with rendering built in. We'll see some renderings as well throughout this class. And then what we're going to be working on very soon, we're going to be introducing things like sheet metal to the Fusion 360 to round out our product development process.

And then also integrated electronics, which is going to be able to bring in the eCAD board and visualize that in 3D, so you can really design close to that package.

And then we're going to be introducing several levels of generative. You'll see a lot of talks on generative at the manufacturing booth today. But we have one currently called simulation optimization, but we'll see some latticing as well throughout the year. That is the topology optimization that we have in the tool today.

And then we get into Cam as well. So we-- in that last update last Wednesday, we introduced four- and five-axis as well, to our three-axis and two-and-1/2-axis, as well as turning water jet, laser cut, and plasma.

And finally, we're going to be introducing over the next year a zero client, so you'll be able to access your data and edit from any device, whether that be a Chromebook, an iPad, or you're just one your-- you need change a dimension or check a dimension out at the shop. We'll be able to access Fusion through any device and make changes.

But I'm going to go ahead and give it to Aaron.

AARON MAGNIN: Thank you sir. All right, thanks, Bryce. Yes, I didn't really get a chance to introduce myself earlier. My name's Aaron Magnin. I actually work with Bryce. We do technical marketing. So if you go to our YouTube channel, you might have seen our faces before we like to pretend like we're famous, but-- anyway, more about Fusion and what we're going to be learning today in this class.

At the end of this class, we want you to be able to leave here with the knowledge of how to get Fusion 360 installed and logged into your account. You can access your data from anywhere right now. I mean, you can jump on any computer, log in, and it will bring all your files over. It will bring all of your settings over. It's a pretty amazing feature. It's a pretty awesome tool to take advantage of.

And at the end of the day, we also want you to be able to create a simple sketch, and part that's going to be Phil's work. He's going to be showing you how to make some models, to assemble some models, to do some of the Freeform stuff as well. I believe.

And we're also going to show you to make a simple assembly relationship. Here's a little animation, a little GIF of our saw that you might have seen. It's all over the place. We really like this reciprocating saw. And then also we're going to show you how to create a rendering or to even print a design. And that image you see right there, I'm going to blow that up a little bit bigger. That is an actual rendering from Fusion 360. You can see the level of detail on that.

The background is actually an HDR image, but everything that you see on that part is done in Fusion, and you can see the tool paths actually created from the CNC side of Fusion, which is pretty darn amazing.

And I do also want to talk about Autodesk commitment to education. How many of you are in education or are students right now? How many of you know that all of Autodesk products are available free to you, OK? Good. You should know that. Because this is our commitment to the community. It's our commitment to startups and to new businesses. It's a great way to get in and start developing your products before you actually need to go and purchase anything. So make sure to check this out, not just Fusion 360. All of the Autodesk software is available. Make sure to get on there and check it out. And I'm going to pass it back over to Bryce. He's going to show you some of the stuff that you can use to learn this too.

BRYCE HEVENTHAL: Thank you. So we wanted to introduce-- give you guys a little high level overview of Fusion today. But we didn't want to leave you guys stranded right after this. There's a ton of learning opportunities at previous CAD tools that I've learned in the past. You basically have to pay a $2,000 fee to take a four-day class, and you have to take off work for four days.

We have so much learning content all over the website, all over YouTube. It's a different way of learning we see for CAD tools nowadays. Rather than you having to go ask an expert, you just Google it, and you'll get a small video.

So on our website, Autodesk.com/fusion360, excuse me, we have a learning page, which has three levels of learning, whether that be high-level learning all the way down to the feature level. If you want to learn something about the fill it, if you needed to. And we have certain things like foundational concepts, all the way to, if you're a SolidWorks user, how to transition over to Fusion 360 as well.

There's a whole slew of videos.

In addition to that, we also have different learning opportunities. Some people don't like to watch videos. They like a one-to-one touch, a person there. So we offer webinars, virtual labs. Deep dives are similar to webinars, but it goes deep dive into, let's say, rendering, or Cam, where the webinars are more of an overview.

And then we also have several meet-ups. It's very group oriented, all around the world. We have them, I think, in several different countries. I can't even tell you now. It's pretty insane how big they're growing. But you can meet other Fusion users, see what they're doing. And they usually have a certain topic that they talk about, whether that be additive manufacturing and how they're using Fusion 360 to do that. I'd highly recommend going to one of those. And

Then as well, we have several-- I would highly recommend checking out our YouTube channel. We have several playlists, whether that be quick tips that you just want to learn. Every day we publish out one every week, all the way up to a really long, oriented hour-long videos to really get you a deep dive into rendering.

All right, with that we'll go ahead and throw it over to Phil and see how Fusion works.

PHIL EICHMILLER: All right. Oh, this way. There we go. So we just were talking about this, so I wanted to start off with what's what's your gateway to Fusion. And so, there's, I think, there's probably a couple of ways of getting there. I always type in Fusion360.autodesk.com. But you said the alternate one, which is probably correct better. What was it again? Autodesk.com/fusion360.

This takes you here, OK, well, either way you can find us. You know, right up front, you got the download the free trial. And you know, I'm not going to click on this, because it goes into a workflow. But all it asks you for is your email address. And next thing you know, you're downloading and setting up.

You know Fusion runs on Mac and Windows, so you don't really have many concerns there about your operating system, other than whether, as long as it's not a Mac operating system from eight years ago or something like that. So if you're up to date, you should be just fine installing and running Fusion.

AARON MAGNIN: Your hardware requirements are a lot less than you'd expect from like a 3D parametric model, so it's definitely something to check out.

PHIL EICHMILLER: Yeah, we strive to make Fusion run on what would normally be considered very anemic graphics and stuff like that. So give it a try, and see what you find. Definitely don't worry too much about that stuff. If you're doing business with your machine, you should be able to run Fusion.

And just scrolling down the page, you know, you can see there's access to some of these more specific learning and areas of interest, you know, so you can deep dive right there, from the main page. And then you get down to the bottom and you have links out to the gallery where people post up their designs and things like that.

One of the cool things about the gallery is that you can also post videos and models and things like that. So you can put a lot of information or get somebody else's information. You can download the model and look at how they built it and stuff like that. So it's another great learning tool, and also fun eye candy. For me, I just love renderings and things like that.

So let's see, where else? Also, right here from the page, there's the link out to our forum. And there's also the link to the gallery and a few other things. Idea station, where you can send us your ideas. If you're running Fusion and you're like, I really wish it did this. You know, post it up in our idea station. We've incorporated what? 300 something ideas?

BRYCE HEVENTHAL: 382. Our PMs have a meeting every week to discuss those idea stations. And then other users also give you kudos, so the higher the rating, the more likely we are to implement it quicker.

PHIL EICHMILLER: Yep, so don't be afraid to go to the website, and check it out and download your free trial. Now there is one key thing about-- how many people here have an Autodesk ID? And you know for sure you do? OK. You're going to want to use that, right? Because your data in Fusion, and in our world, your data is all attached to that ID.

So if you already have one, don't punch-- unless you want it to be your own personal Fusion account, don't create a new ID unless you really want one. Let's put it that way. If you've already got a business associated ID with Autodesk. So, any questions? All right, cool. You guys feel free to ask questions as we go.

I'm going to click over to Fusion right now, and just make it full size here. And let's talk about what we're looking at here. So this is when you first start in Fusion, I've got a couple of designs open right now. Up at the top, you can see those across the ribbon up here. Your first brought straight into the modeling environment, and there's some things that you need to know about what's going on here.

So this little ice cube tray up here is called the data panel opener or whatever. And it's where you access the data panel. And your data panel is where-- this is like your file cabinet in the sky, right? It's got all of your designs. Your organize by projects.

So if you're like a contractor, and you've got you know, like Nike and Adidas as customers of yours, you can have them in completely separate silos, and those are called projects. So if I bounce out to my project list, you can see that, whoops, there we go I've got a lot of projects I help a lot of people and customers and things like that. I get invited to a lot of stuff, so I can check out people's designs and things like that.

So that's one cool thing about working this way is that when I need to help somebody, I just send them my email address, and they invite me to their project. And I open up their data and figure out what's wrong with their model. I help a lot of customers that way on a just a nearly daily basis.

Creating new projects is as easy as clicking the New Project button. And then you can define, once you're in a project, let me go over to our class project here.

BRYCE HEVENTHAL: Yeah, and if you need more levels of permissions or high level control over your users, there's something called Fusion team that we have as well, to give you more access to tools to be able to control people's access to your files and data.

PHIL EICHMILLER: Roles and permissions and things like that. But inviting people is just as easy as just clicking on the People tab, punch in an email address, and it sends off an invite. And next thing you know, they can log into Fusion, and look at the project. So it would show up in their project list. It's pretty seamless.

Other than that, this acts kind of like what you would expect a File Explorer to do. There's new folders. You can put-- you can have folders and folders and things like that. However you want to stay organized. You can also change to a list view, if that's your thing. And right here is the Upload button, which is a very key part of your experience with the data panel.

Basically the whole idea is that, well, I've got to put some design up in here, right? Sometimes it's going to be anything from like Inventor or SolidWorks or any kind of CAD model that you want to put up there to work on. When you use the Upload button from the data panel, what we're going to do is we're going to translate it for you into a Fusion design. So you're going to get the results that you would expect from a traditional CAD modeler. You're going to get, essentially, it's going to turn Inventor and SolidWorks files into step files.

It will preserve the browser structure and the naming and some of the colors if it can. But it is a pretty much traditional CAD translation that you might be used to, if you've done that sort of thing. And there's tools to help, once you get your assemblies up there, and we'll kind of go into that a little bit later. But just rounding out the data panel here, you can also search for things and search through all of your data for things, so it's a full-featured sort of file system over here.

When you're looking at objects in the data panel, you can also click on the little eye right here to get more information from them. So if there was a drawing for this, it would be listed as a related file here. There's also the concept of versioning. if you'll notice that my little demo file here is at v4, because I've saved it four times.

So that's another unique thing to Fusion is that if you find that you've gone down a wrong path or completely broken the model somehow, I mean nobody's ever done that, right? You've never broken a parametric model. You can roll back to a previous version, and just pick up where you left off.

Every time you save a version, you know, you click Save, like you're saving it. You're prompted to say, well, do you want to put a little note on here and say, like, oh, this is the one that I got ready for AU. So I can tell that if I'm looking at the version history, I can roll back to a milestone really easily.

Let's see, anything else here? And it also punches out to the web, so the other side of the data in Fusion 360 is out on the web and through the Fusion, the portal out there. Is it, do we still call it A360? I'm horrible at this.

BRYCE HEVENTHAL: No, it's called Fusion on the web. It's another way to access your data, through a web browser. You can view redlined markup, see comments. It's another way to interact with your data. And it's free, so you don't need to have a-- you don't need to pay for a subscription. So it's really good for CAD managers or non-CAD personnel to be able to still work in the product development process.

PHIL EICHMILLER: Yeah, you just send the web page out to somebody, and then they're looking at stuff, and they can tumble the model, and it's right from a browser. So--

AARON MAGNIN: I want to emphasize how cool that versioning is, because it's saved me many a times. If you make a mistake, you can go back and you can see whole history has been expanded out there now.

PHIL EICHMILLER: Yeah. It allows you to do some clever things too. If you make a decision about an older version, you can actually open that older version. It opens it. Either, well, you got two choices. One is to promote it, so it just puts it right back up to the top as a new version. Or you can open it as read only. And then save it as something else, and just branch your design right there if you want to. Not to be confused with branching and merging, but that's a very simple version of that workflow.

AARON MAGNIN: You've got a question over here.

AUDIENCE: Can you cherry pick out previous versions though? So you can go back, pull it out, and bring it to the latest version?

PHIL EICHMILLER: Yeah, well, so that would be a little bit more manual of a process.

BRYCE HEVENTHAL: [INAUDIBLE]

PHIL EICHMILLER: Yeah, so completely outside of the concept of branching and merging, which is coming. The way I would do that is I would open it up as read-only. I would find whatever was interesting in there, and I would have to manually save it out, and then insert it into the other design. So you can do a save as. It winds up in your project list, and then you just insert it, and it becomes a linked file. So--

BRYCE HEVENTHAL: But we do have something coming very soon called branching and merging that's a more automated process of that.

PHIL EICHMILLER: Cool, thanks for the question. All right, so I think that wraps it up for the data panel. So you get the idea. I tend to always shut the thing. Some people run with it always open. I like to have the real estate. But this is the best way to do it. There's also-- you can close that by the x here. So I guess if you're mousing sloppily, you'll hit something right there that will shut the data panel.

So, all right. So now looking at the modeling environment. OK, let's take a look at this. First of all, there's the kind of things you would expect to find in a regular app frame, right? You have access to a file menu, which gives you various commands, and you know, some of them like we just talked about, like save as.

Or you can, even if you've managed to lose your connection and you need to recover documents you can go in there. Basic file menu kind of stuff. There's the three-and-a-1/2-inch floppy save button That hopefully will be with us till the end of time. I just love that icon. I don't want it to go away. What are you going to replace it with?

This right here is the workspace switcher, and it's basically just a list of the different workspaces that are available in Fusion. So when you go there, you wind up with a different set of tools, right? So if I go to the patch environment, I'm treated to a bunch of surfacing tools, right? So this is not surfacing like you're going to find an alias. This is more like I've imported an IGES file, and it's got holes all over it. And I need to patch them up and stitch it. That sort of thing.

Or if you're if you're using surface bodies to do modeling, to make modeling bodies, and things like that, this is a great place to-- obviously where you would do that.

The rendering environment puts you into-- there's nothing really to see here. But you know you can see there's rendering tools and so forth. There's an animation environment that allows you to sort of tear apart the assembly, kind of like Inventor Publisher did. You can make animations, and fill out your timeline here with events and that sort of thing. And it's good for, you know, you can also record it, make a video, that sort of thing.

A simulation environment. All the sort of stuff you'd expect to find. Anyone here use Inventor Simulation? So you're going to find a basically the same kind of workflow. You know, you start off by creating a study and defining materials, constraints, loads. I mean it's almost exactly the same workflow, and it's-- which makes sense, because that's how you do that stuff, at least with our software.

There's a Cam environment, and you know, this is purely just for setting up the Cam stuff. You know, the whole time you're working on one model. That's the cool thing about this, if that model changes, all of this stuff has to react to that. And it's all automatic and seamless.

You, know, the only thing that you're going to have to do is if, well, like I said, hey, you can sometimes break a model yourself. But that's OK. There's lots of tools to patch and edit those things. And there's our drawing environment as well down here on the list. So you can do new drawing from design or new drawing from an animation. So you can put your exploded views into drawing form and so forth. And that opens up the 2D drawing editor.

So that's your workspace switcher. We're going to go back over to the model environment, where I'm going to get started in just a minute. Let's see. Hopefully, my toolbar isn't customized. I can't help myself, and so I always wind up with a non-stock toolbar, and I'm showing customers this kind of stuff. So I forgot exactly if this is a-- a couple of tools are added. But you can see as you're looking through the menus for each individual section-- I'm in the sketch menu right now-- you can actually add these tools to the toolbar as you're going. Or drop them, you know, drag them off of the toolbar if you're done using them.

So rather than sort of a static toolbar definition, you know you just basically set it up as you're going. When. I'm going through workflows, I'll put some tools up there, and I'll take them off. And every once while, it gets too crowded, and I just clear it all away and start over again.

So you have your basic sketch environment right here. You have create tools, like for creating extrudes and revolves and lofts and things. And your modified tools for adding fillets and chamfers and doing some things like split body, hacking up solids that are on the screen.

You have assemble tool. We have a pretty good set of joint tools here. So if you're familiar with joints in Inventor, you're going to feel right at home here. We have a cool thing called the As Built joint, and I'm going to go into that a little bit later, and show you how that works. It's basically a great tool for if you have stuff that's already, you know-- if you're doing a top down design, And the bodies are already relative to each other, you can just apply a joint between them without having to tear things up.

Lots of good tools here. There's also-- we also have the concept of contact sets. And you know designing with contact, right? Has anyone ever done that, where you're trying to define the range of motion of something, so you define contact. It's not something you leave running all the time, because it really slows things down. But you can then move the mechanism till it bumps into something. Figure out what the angle is. That kind of thing.

So it's a pretty robust set of assembly tools there. Nice set of construction tools here. So if you need to set planes up and build something, you know, the fun ones for me are when I find that I have to-- I drill down, and I figure out, oh, great. I'm going to have to put two points in here, and then put an access through those points, and then put a plan, add an angle to that access. That's always the fun ones for me.

And then you get to drive the whole thing, and that's my favorite part of modeling. But there's some good inspect tools. We have things like Zebra Analysis and Draft Analysis so, you know this gets down into manufacturability, right? You know, you want to quickly find out that your plastic part is going to have the right draft angles. There isn't going to be an undercut in there or something like that.

There's an insert set of tools for putting in decals in canvases, so if you like to draw on top of an image of something, or sketch rather, or model, whatever you're doing. You have access to that as well. Or putting decals on, for like stickers. It works really well. They look great in renderings and stuff.

And a couple of other tools for bringing in data from other places, like SVG and DXF is a big favorite of folks who are doing commercial work for other folks. They've got to get the logo in from a company or some kind of something that is art that's not properly done by sketching with parameters.

There's also insert mcmaster-carr components. So this just punches right out to the Mcmaster-Carr site. Has anyone ever done that? You can get CAD models from them for a lot of their stuff. Be careful, be wary of their IGES components. I would say, never insert IGES from McMaster-Carr. Just take my advice. And--

AARON MAGNIN: What's the best file type?

BRYCE HEVENTHAL: Step. Step is absolutely the best. Does anyone know the difference between Step and Sat Import. When you have like an assembly that comes out of SolidWorks or Inventor, and it gets saved as a SAT file, everything gets converted into bodies. So it crushes the structure of it. And you wind up with-- you don't know what the assembly was anymore. So Step is definitely the best, because it preserves that assembly structure.

AARON MAGNIN: And the beauty of that McMaster-Carr insert is that you don't have to spend time designing bolts and things that you don't make, right? So it's a great way to make your designs a lot faster.

PHIL EICHMILLER: Yep, if you'r doing cabinet hardware, hinges, and things like that. They don't always have a CAD model, so you just have to kind of learn what they support. Let's see, there's the make menu, so this is obviously all about 3D printing. There's add ins, so there's-- we have an API engine in here, so if you're into scripting. There's people that are-- and there's even a whole forum page about it, and you know, there's some community around that. So if you're into doing that kind of scripting to make your tedious workflows more automatic, that's certainly supported. And we like to hear from people who are using that.

And then there's a set of selection tools over here on the end. I always run with my selection filter wide open, but every once in awhile, you get into a complicated model. And you just find, you know, it's going to be worth it for me right now to just shut all this stuff off, and just let me pick edges. Or faces. Or whatever it is you're after.

So you can isolate stuff that way. I tend to-- you want to be in the habit of going back and turning it all back on again, or you'll go, why isn't anything picking?

There's-- you can do selection priority. So if you're working primarily with bodies, this is actually fairly useful here too, because if you're working primarily with bodies and moving them around, for instance, you'll want to have body priorities set, so that it's easier just to go and, without having to play around with this big long checklist of filtering, you could just make a priority out of picking bodies.

The Selection tool select by name, boundary size, and invert selection. Now this is a great one if you have a huge array of things on the screen, and you're trying to isolate just one. Anyway, we don't need to go into those workflows. But there you have it. That's basically your toolbar. And all the other toolbars in all the other environments with their tools act the same way. So when you want to throw something up to the top, you just put it up to the top.

BRYCE HEVENTHAL: And one of my favorites that I always use is the S key. It's also customizable.

PHIL EICHMILLER: Yeah, so this is an idea that SolidWorks was kind enough to show us. And we were smart enough to pick it up. Basically you can search for anything. So if I'm looking for a zebra, and I want to have it in my toolkit, you know, I just put it up there. And this acts like the toolbar, except it's a tool box. And it shows up, and you can have any list of things here. So as are working along, it's right where the mouse is, wherever you're at.

So if you're a hot key kind of person, there you go. And the--

AARON MAGNIN: Help you stay focused on what you're working on. And it's mobile as well. So if you're in simulation, it will show you simulation-related commands.

PHIL EICHMILLER: Yeah, you have a different tool box for every environment, which makes sense. You wouldn't want to be having a bunch of animation tools popping up right now when you can't even use them, right?

OK, so let's see, what else is in here. I'm sure you're all aware of the view cube. How many people in here know and love the view cube? OK, so it's actually particularly handy if you're not well-versed in the kind of gestures that make things happen. You're running without a mouse, perhaps, on a Mac, and you're not very good at gestures. You can always mouse up over to this thing, and use it to twiddle the model around.

I find that a lot of people that are new to 3D CAD in my Inventor class at the college, they respond very well to the view cube. The thing I like it for is isolating your ISO views. Right? That's the main thing I use it for is, like-- there's no better way to get straight to it than-- excuse me-- orthographic view right away. And down at the bottom, you guys can all see that, because the screen's really up high.

You have a bunch of navigation tools and then settings for your screen. So if you don't like the color of the environment, you can go and change environments. Or if you want to know, see what's another good one? Visual style. If you wanted to turn off the edges, so it looks a little more realistic, or look at it as a wireframe. That kind of thing is controlled there. We support multiview ports, that kind of thing. Whoa, made my grid really dense.

So anyway I'm going to go so right now I'm going to do some modeling. OK, so those are the basic things. Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you. There this thing on the timeline that you guys are going to want to pay attention, to this thing at the timelines. We have-- in Inventor, you're used to just things stacking up into the browser, right? And that happens in a particular order.

So time and objects are mixed together in other Cad packages, and in infusion, time and the object you're creating are actually separate and so over here in the browser just think of this as the file cabinet for the design that's where all the bodies and sketches and components are going to show up. And all the things you do are going to show up down here in the bottom in the timeline.

So that's how you can quickly, you know, go in and figure out, oh, I need to put something before something else. Or edit something that's further back in time. Yes? Your question?

AUDIENCE: Could you go into a little bit of detail, just [INAUDIBLE] detail about the program [INAUDIBLE]?

PHIL EICHMILLER: Yeah, absolutely. So let's see, anything else to mention here? Just one last thing, while we're looking at the UI, is there is a commenting thing, so everybody that's on the project can get in and look at things and comment. And anyone that's accessing your data through the web page can also drop comments on your model that show up in here. So the commenting is very robust for being able to do hopefully all your communication about a model without having to dig into email. Right? We're keeping all the focus on your data.

Now let's draw something. That's what you guys came here for. I'm just going to start a sketch line command. And the first thing it wants me to do is say, well, OK I need to start a sketch. I haven't actually even formally started a sketch. There is a formal Create a Sketch command, but I usually just dive right in and start drawing on something.

So I've started the line command, and I'm going to click on this plane to start drawing on. And the auto rotate gives me that orthographic view, and I can start drawing, and based on the origin, which is always a good thing to do.

So this should-- if you're familiar with parametric modeling-- this should make you feel comfortable. And if you're new at this, this should also make you feel comfortable. Everything you can see right in front of you is actually telling you exactly what you're doing. So right now, the heads up display is asking me, how long should this line be?

And as I'm dragging it, you can also see that there is a vertical icon, showing me that there is a sketch constraint being applied to this that's going to keep this line vertically. So if I type in two and hit tab, it locks in the dimension and allows me to start picking the angle. And I'll just hit Tab again. Oh, and hit Enter. There we go. And it locks it in, so at vertical and at two inches, that's now a parameter in the parametric table. I just hit L, and it starts the line command again.

So we do support hotkeys, so L. I got a line command. There's a short list of, I think we only have 26 hot keys right now. We're eventually going to try to make it customizable entirely. But not right now.

And for the rest of this figure, I'm just drawing a bracket. So I'm just going to go ahead and sketch in the rest of the lines, and worry about the dimensions later. And as I'm doing this, I'm getting this great feedback about what's going on the whole time. I can get sort of some tracking off of the origin there to make sure that I'm aligned with it. And then complete the figure.

What you see there is that yellow fill in there, that's actually the profile. So when you're extruding things, that's actually what you're extruding, you're not extruding the outline around it. This outline makes a boundary that is filled with what we call the profile. And that profile is what you're extruding or working on when you're doing stuff.

D for dimension, and go ahead and finish out the dimensioning on this. And, of course, I'm working in inches because I'm just that kind of person. As you could tell. So-- typical to a lot of other parametric modelers, if I select another dimension that already is sitting on the screen, it's just going to use that same parametric value.

So you notice that this is dimension three, and I'm working on dimension four over here. So I'm just going to click on dimension three and dimension four is now-- equals dimension 3. And that shows up in the parametric table as well.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PHIL EICHMILLER: So that's just-- it's just penciling in the values. So when you look at the parametric table, it says, D4, the value for D4 is D3, and then you could go look up it wherever that is.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

PHIL EICHMILLER: No, no, it does. Watch, so-- so, yeah that's always it's always following here. Let's see, Back up a little bit there. All right, so now that I've sketched my first profile, and I'm ready to make this cool bracket. So the question was: you know, bodies, you know components, things like that. What's the difference? Right now I'm working in what would be considered a single component, and so that's something that's unique to Fusion, is that it's the top down design.

And Fusion, basically starting at nothing, and just working your way into a fully featured assembly. I mean, you always start off as a single part file, but as soon as I add another component, this will become an assembly. So you have the best of both worlds. You have part features and assembly features, all in one place. And so it sort of is up to you to keep track of what is it I'm working on right now? Because you know, you're doing deliberate things to make this design. So you have to watch the browser and make sure you know what you're doing and what just happened.

So if I go to Extrude, and here's another cool thing about Fusion is that almost everywhere you go, you don't have to right click and beg for permission to continue. That drives me nuts. I've got-- why can't I go on? The result is on the screen? Oh, that's right, I've got to right click, and say, OK. How many thousands and thousands of extra clicks have you done saying OK.

Watch this. It says, stop, Sketch. Screw that. Extrude. Pow, I'm extruding with no problem, right? So just go grab the next tool and just move on. I just find that to be-- it's particularly satisfying. So what's going on here, right? You have the-- I'm extruding that shape. And I've got a manipulator for distance, obviously. And also one for draft angle, so I can play around with the draft angle as I'm going.

So this manipulator is pretty ubiquitous to Fusion. You'll find it everywhere you go, and it shows up with either more or less features, but they all basically do the same thing everywhere you go. So you want to be familiar with it. So when you see the little wheel, that's for creating angles and draft and turning things. And then, of course, the arrows are for adding distance.

Over here in the extrude dialogue, and we'll expand this out a little bit, I don't need to, but I like it look a little bigger you have your basic options, you know, where do you want this to go? You can actually pick an offset from where you're starting, which is cool. If you need to build in paint thicknesses and things like that, or do your fits and different things for your design. Obviously you can flip the directions, you can pick a distance, or you can send it to an object.