说明
主要学习内容
- Learn about the basics and overall functionality of AI-powered Drawing Automation.
- Learning how to optimize templates and presets for maximum efficiency in Drawing Automation.
- Gain knowledge about the best practices for using Drawing Automation.
讲师
- Clint BrownProduct Manager with 20+ years of real-world engineering experience. I've designed everything from automotive fuel systems to playground equipment, rotating machinery, and consumer products, along with the tooling, and documentation needed to build it all. I'm passionate about design & engineering. When I'm not at work, I enjoy being outdoors. I've even spoken at AU a few times: https://autode.sk/3Sl0gKQ
- Varun PatilI am a developer for Fusion 360.
CLINT BROWN: Welcome to "The Ultimate Guide to Drawing Automation." I'm Clint Brown. I'm one of the product managers on Autodesk Fusion. And my co-presenter, who's not on this recording, is Varun Patil. Varun is our software architect.
So I joined Autodesk in 2021. And for the last nearly four years now, I've been working on drawings and documentation in Fusion. And before that, I spent a lot of time in industry, creating automations and building products that went into production, so things like fuel systems, play systems, and those sorts of things.
Varun joined Autodesk in the development world and has worked his way up to becoming an architect. And together, we've been working on drawing automation for the last few years.
So before we get too deep into this, I'd like to share the Safe Harbor Statement with you. Please remember that our roadmaps are plans and not promises. And if you're watching this recording, please pause the screen now and read fully through everything you see on screen here.
One of the main reasons for this is I'm going to be showing you some of the upcoming technology that we plan to ship. And sometimes, these things don't make it into product. All right, so with the Safe Harbor behind us, let's jump in and have a look at everything we need to know about drawing automation.
For a bit of fun, we're going to start with the summary. We're going to start with the end at the beginning. There's a little bit of a standing joke in our team where we share a lot of information and often just a TLDR, Too Long, Didn't Read, what do I need to know. And we're starting with this at the beginning, and I'll share it again at the end.
Effectively, for drawing automation, to be successful, you need to have a template with no placeholder views set up. Other things that you need to be successful are to get into your Automation tab in Document Settings, because this is where all the magic happens. This is where you set up everything to do with your automation. And you can then test and tweak your template with your data sets.
You should also expect during automation to do 60% to 80% of the work for you. It's not going to do everything. And we'll talk about that in the upcoming slides. But if you came for the first five minutes, and this is your takeaway, you have everything you need. But I'm pretty sure you want to stick around for the full presentation and everything we're going to talk about today. So let's jump in.
I want to start with a little bit of history, explain how we got to where we are and how we went about building some of what we've done. So if you think about drawings, drawings are still very much seen as a necessary evil. They are the lingua franca of manufacturing.
Most things are still made with a 2D drawing. And drawings haven't really changed that much for hundreds of years. If you go back to the days of Leonardo da Vinci, he's probably seen as the first draftsman or engineer with his drawings, and from there, things evolved to the drawing board, as you see in the bottom left hand corner over there.
And if you think about automation that was available to folks on a drafting board, there wasn't a lot. We're talking about things like stencils, maybe blueprints of photocopies. With the advent of CAD, it was really out of the reach of most small companies and the common man, because CAD was run on mainframe computers.
And it wasn't until the 1980s when Autodesk bought out AutoCAD that we all of a sudden had access to CAD. And being a digital file, all of a sudden you could copy a file. You could share a file. And you could make edits to existing designs digitally. This was a huge productivity gain.
In the 90s, the Parametric Technology Corporation brought out a product called Pro/ENGINEER. And this was the first time that there was a link between a 2D drawing and a 3D drawing. And it wasn't until the 2000s that the MCAD revolution happened, with products like SolidWorks and Inventor came to market.
And if you look at drawing automation across these, you can see the image on the top left there. Where sketches have been, the dimensions from sketches have been put onto the drawing. And it's a form of automation. But it's messy because you know as a designer, when you're creating a sketch, you're not worrying about how this thing is going to be made. You're worrying about getting that sketch fully constrained so that you can build a robust model.
So often, the dimensions in the sketches are not great for drawings. And on the right of there, you can see some iLogic script that I wrote for Inventor a few years back to create drawings automatically. And if we think about this evolution on a curve of productivity, you get something that looks like this.
We peaked in the 2000s. We've done a bit better over the time. But we haven't really gone anywhere drastically different for quite some time now. So with drawing automation in Fusion, we really want to push this last piece of productivity and really move towards a really fully automated system. And I want to show you how that works and what we've built.
So what is automation in Infusion? Well, we want to automate the creation of drawings, saving you time. Now, we've already seen from our commercial customers that they're seeing a 43% time saving in the time it takes to create a drawing. So that's pretty cool, really impressive time savings there.
And Fusion's drawing automation works out of the box with no setup. You can use from-scratch templates to get basic automation. I really don't want you to do that. Hopefully, from this class, you'll learn how to set up your own template because our templates are fully customizable. And once you've set them up, you can really tweak things to make your drawings look a certain way and to ensure that the automations work the way that you want them to.
And that's pretty much what we're going to run through today. All right, so what should you expect from drawing automation? This is really important. The right expectations will get you good results. You should expect Fusion to do 60% to 80% of your work for you. It's not going to do 100%. You are still co-authoring this with Fusion.
You are absolutely responsible for the drawing. You need to make sure that your drawings are correct and fit for manufacture. But you can expect smart automations and tools powered by Autodesk AI to make your drawing creation fast and efficient. And you should also expect to spend some time setting up and tweaking your templates.
So with that in mind, let's change gears a bit and look at how are we doing. We launched drawing automation in January of this year. And we've already created over 7 million dimensions. That's a lot of dimensions. And that's just with commercial users. That excludes everything else we do with, say, educational users and others.
So effectively, every three seconds, drawing automations are adding a dimension for a commercial customer-- pretty phenomenal. All right, so what does drawing automation actually do? Let's jump in and see all of the things that we do. Because a lot of people, when they think about drawing automation, just think about dimensions.
Drawing automation is way more than just dimensions. I'm going to show you 10 things that we do. And let's jump in. So first off, we'll automatically create your sheet for every single component in your assembly. And we'll lay those sheets out for you. And there's rules to set as to how you'd like those to look and what to create sheets for.
We automatically scale and nest your views. So we take into account dimensions, the views, and the size. And we fit them onto the page so that they're readable, and neat, and tidy. We automatically place parts lists and balloons for your assemblies as shown on screen. And then we do things like this. We do auto rotation. This is an extremely smart tool that is probably quite undersold in here.
So let's have a look at it and discuss in a bit more detail. If you have a look at the assembly on the left hand side, you'll see that pedal is rotated at a slight angle. And if you created a drawing using traditional means-- and this is a problem that many CAD systems have-- you'll see that the views show this component slightly rotated over.
Now, relatively easy in a manual drawing infusion to fix, what you do is you open the model. And you create a named view where you're looking straight onto the face of that component. And that's easy for one component. But what happens if you've got 10, or 100, or 1,000 components? You don't want to go in and edit all of that and do the work to automatically rotate them.
Well, drawing automation just does this for you. We have these smart algorithms that go and look at the geometry. And they'll create you the orientation that you need. So here's an automated drawing of that pedal. And you'll see that it's perfectly flat. And it's in a good orientation. And it's been nested and rotated on the sheet so that it's most legible when reading the drawing.
The long components like the shaft, we automatically add breaks, again, making the drawing more legible. And you don't have to think about it. We just do that for you. There's options to apply center lines and center marks as well. Now, the caveat here, this won't work with from-scratch templates. So the out-of-the-box templates don't do this.
And the reason for that is that with from-scratch templates, we've left them pretty much as is. When we added automated center marks and center lines, those aren't turned on by default. That's something you set up in your template. So they're not turned on by default with automations either.
All right, for sheet metal components or flat patterns, we automatically place bend tables, bend IDs for you. And you can set up rules for the dimension types that you want as well. Remember that folded sheet metal components have their own settings. And those are available in your Document settings in your template.
When it comes to standard fasteners, we don't include them in drawing packs. So fasteners that have come from the Fusion drawings-- apologies-- from the Fusion Fastener Library are omitted. We don't create drawing sheets for them.
And the main reason for that is that for hundreds of years, people have had things like the Sears catalog here that have thread notes and all of the information that you need to create these standard components. They're known entities, so there's no need to create drawings of nuts, bolts and washers.
You might want to list them in your parts list. But you definitely wouldn't want to go and create a drawing for them. So we exclude them automatically. To help with this, we also have an omit list. And the omit list is there to hide or just to ignore nuts, bolts, and washers. We'll talk about the omit list a little bit more as we move through the presentation.
We also have a new option coming, which we'll talk about again a little bit later on using AI to detect and omit fasteners with really smart AI tools powered by Autodesk AI that will go and look at your model and decide on whether something is a nut, bolt, or washer, and exclude that as well.
And once we've done these 10 things, we then go and apply generative dimensioning strategies to your model or to your drawing, I should say. And you can choose your preferred dimensioning strategy in your template. And we'll talk about that, too.
So it's not one thing, it's many things as is everything with Fusion. And remember that dimensioning is that one piece at the end. We do a heck of a lot to get you there. And we create you really nice drawing packs.
All right, so we obviously want to be as open and transparent as possible when we talk about these things. And I want to make sure that we talk about what we're good at and what we're not so good at yet. This is an evolving space. And over time, hopefully we'll be able to improve.
But right now today, our sweet spot, the things that we're good at our prismatic components, sheet metal components, turned components, and 2.5 to 3 axis components. We're still not very good at things that a human would find difficult to detail. So highly surfaced components or things with really tricky splines aren't going to be great from a dimensioning point of view. But we'll definitely lay out a drawing really well for you.
So here's a quick demo. We'll talk about how this works, and look at some of the key points, and then we'll keep on going and looking from there. So I'm going to go and create an automated drawing of this model. And you'll see that I'm just setting up my automation to use all levels. And this is going to create a drawing job in the background.
You see that job's being created. And while that job's being created, I want to talk about this component in the middle of this ABC table here that's been rotated. If you were to create a drawing using any other tools, as you saw with the pedal, that view would probably look something like this. It would be rotated just like the one in the model.
OK, we are going to use drawing automation to go and create a drawing specifically of the single component. And we're going to run that automation alongside the one that we've already kicked off. So that job's been added to our Job Status over here. And we can see the two jobs running side by side. The single parts can run a lot quicker than the assembly. And it's ready to go.
We can open that up. And you can see our component laid out on the sheet over here. And while I'm in here, I'm going to go and apply two key dimensions. These might be for fitment, something that I'm really interested in. And I can use these as seed dimensions while I apply my dimensioning strategies.
So all of my strategies have been built on the right hand side over there. And when I'm happy, I can use my Tidy Up tool, and I can show my dimensions on the sheet. Really fast I've created this drawing.
Now, we want to go and see the drawing that's just been finished. You would have seen it pop up in the top right hand corner over there, the little notification. We can open that up. And you can see that 24 sheets have been created over here. I've got my top level assembly, a sub-assembly. And we can start exploring some of the components.
So if we look at this plate over here, you'll see all of our dimensioning strategies have been laid out. And I can go and choose the dimensioning strategy to suit what I want. Maybe I just want the overall dimensions because I'm laser cutting it. Perhaps, I just care about the hole locations because I need to drill these holes, or maybe I want to add a baseline dimension.
So I can choose my baseline dimensioning strategy. And you'll see that it's got a default datum of the bottom left. I can change that, perhaps, to the top right. And it'll rejig all of the dimensions to go from the top right hand corner. I can also go and say, well, I'd like to do a manual datum.
And I can choose the middle of this part, and all of my dimensions will re-associate themselves to the middle of the part, or I can reset it back to the bottom left. And I can say, OK. And those dimensions will be applied to the design. Again, Tidy Up will just censor everything and renest all of my views. And I can then move through the drawing.
You can see automated censor marks, dimensions. And on this long component, this long shaft, we've added a break. And a top tip is we can click on a dimension with that panel open, and we can move a dimension from one view to another. We'll look at that again a little bit later on. But hopefully, this gives you a really good overview of what drawing automation can do.
Now, to get there, we need to get into Settings. And we need to set up templates. And we need to understand how to make drawing automation do everything that we needed to do in order to get fantastic results. So that's what we're going to move through to next.
And in saying that, we're actually first going to look at what's new and what's about to ship. So if we consider what we've just shipped, in July, we shipped ordinate dimensions. Now, pretty much straight off the shipping drawing automation, the first request we got from customers was please add ordinate dimensions. So we've just done that. It went out in July.
And we shipped two types of ordinate dimensions. So the first type is a normal ordinate dimension, as you see shown on screen over there. And if I bring your attention to this area of the sheet over here, you'll see a 0, a 0, and a 6.35.
Now, if I was to choose symmetric with ordinate dimensions, we get alternate dimensions on the left-hand view, as before. But on the right-hand view, you'll see a 6.35 linear dimension. So that's what those two dimensions do. They work really well. They look quite good on turned components as well.
In September, we've just shipped default dimension strategies per component type. So again, this is a huge productivity request from customers. And we've shipped it, and it works really well. You can now go into your document settings, and on your Automation tab, you'll see Per Sheet Options.
So as an example, I can go and choose Sheet Metal FlatPatterns, and I can choose the dimensioning strategy. So I can say, whenever I create a Sheet Metal FlatPattern drawing, automatically apply overall dimensions. And I'll get something like this. So here, you can see a drawing laid out really nicely with a FlatPattern on it. And it's got automated overall dimensions applied.
Most excitingly, though, is we've been working really hard on our view creation algorithms. So we were very precise before, and the ethos originally was that we provide you with all of the views necessary to fully dimension the component. But we were too precise. So we've come up with a way to give you less but give you better drawings.
So in this example here, you'll see a before and an after. And if you look at the before on the left, the left and right views there were-- they look very much the same, but they're slightly different. And if you look at the right, you'll see we're just giving you what you need to fully document this component.
When we get something more complicated, like this folded sheet metal components over here, we weren't doing a great job before. But we're going to be doing a fantastic job very soon. And we expect this technology to ship in November.
So if you've been slightly frustrated with drawing automation up to this point, and you've been-- we've heard from some people that they've had to delete a few views. This should drastically improve our drawing output. So we're really excited about shipping.
And then. Shipping at the end of January, with the January release, we're going to be putting out this new tool. It's a little tick box in your drawing automation settings. And it's quite something. You can't imagine how many people have worked on one little tick box. And that tick box will, effectively, go and look at your model and decide what is or is not a nut or bolt.
So when you create a drawing, if you've got nuts and bolts in the drawing, and you haven't used the Omit list, or they haven't come from the Fusion Fasteners Library, AI can look at each component and decide whether or not it's a nut and bolt. And if it is a nut, bolt, or washer, we won't create a sheet for it.
So it works really well with third-party models. Maybe you've imported a model from another CAD package, and it doesn't have any data attached to it, or you've modeled a nut or bolt yourself to the standards, you've pulled out one of these. It'll analyze that and say, yep, that's a nut, bolt, or washer, and you won't get a sheet. So it's a really, really powerful AI tool there, and it's something you set up in your template by ticking that tick box.
So with that in mind, we need to look at how we set up a drawing template. Again, it's really important that your drawing templates are set up correctly whether you're doing automation or not, but specifically for automation. So in Fusion, there's three template types. And I want to demystify them quickly and explain the pros and cons of all of them.
So first off, a normal drawing template, and this is where I want us to be using normal templates for automation. And that's what we're going to focus on in this class. And we're going to talk about the others along the way.
Smart Templates are what a lot of folks have today. Some of our early automation was built on Smart Templates. But a Smart Template uses placeholder views. So if you've got a template today, and you've got placeholder views, and you're trying to do automations, you're probably seeing that it's not quite doing what you'd expect. And that's because of the way that these work, and we'll talk about that in the upcoming slides.
And then the last type here is a From Scratch template. So if you've never created your own drawing template, you just use From Scratch every time, you're going to get a sort of watered-down experience. You're going to get the absolute basics. They're pretty good for just sort of kicking the tires and seeing what's possible.
So if you can create a drawing, and you use From Scratch, you get the very, very basic drawing templates. And they've got no automated center lines or center marks. All of the lines and dimensions and views are black. There's no customization.
And they're pretty boring looking. So please go and create your own drawing template. Put your logo on. Set some line types, and build something nice.
When it comes to Smart Templates, again, this is any template that has a placeholder view in there. Now, if you want to convert one of your existing placeholder view type templates to a normal template, it's really easy to do. You can go in and delete anything shown in red over there. You go and delete a placeholder view, anything that's in your browser.
So you'll see that Parts List and those component references if you delete those and the extra sheets and then save the template or do a Save As if you want to keep a version of it, you can convert your Smart Template into a normal template. And that's a really good approach to reusing something that you've already got.
So Drawing Template is going to honor whatever's in your document settings. And you're going to get really nice results by tweaking these. So this is what a really good Drawing Template looks like. You've got Document Settings, where you've gone in and you've set all of your different view types. You've set the colors that you want.
You've set your drawing up to look the way you need it to. And then you've gone into your Automation Settings, and you've set these up to work the way you'd like. And again, we're going to touch on all of these as we move through this class.
So make sure, number one, that your Document Settings with your Automation Preferences are set up well. Number two, you want to make sure that you've got a nice, clean browser. So as we spoke about with the previous slide, you want to make sure that there's no placeholder references or parts lists in there.
It needs to be nice and clean, as you see on screen, no extra sheets. And you want to have a customized type of block. You want this to have your logo on there. And you want it to include some of the properties that you'd like to show in your drawing.
So let's have a look at what happens with different templates and some of the results that you get. This is going to run real time. This is a normal component, and I'm going to go and create a drawing using From Scratch template. So we're going to run this automation. We'll get a little notification to say that our automation started.
And then we're going to get a little pop-up to say that our drawing is ready. And when we see that, we can open that drawing. So it's ready already. I'm going to click Open. And I'm now going to see my automated drawing.
You'll see it's pretty boring. It's all black and white. There's no tangent edges shown. And now we're going to go and do the same thing. And I'm to go and use a template that I've created previously.
So here's my Fusion Template that I created. It's got a little bit of color on it. I've set up a title block with a logo on it. That title block is populated with nice properties from the model. And I've set up some nice-looking tangent edges, which you'll see as soon as I open it. So in a second or so, that drawing will pop open. And there we go. So that's my automated drawing that I've created.
Now, if we lay them side by side, it's exactly the same information. But I'm sure you'll agree that the drawing on the right is far more compelling and looks a bit better than the one on the left. Even if it was all in black and white. I've got more information around properties in my title block. And the tangent edges that I'm showing give me far more rich detail about what I'm looking at on the sheet.
Let's jump into Smart Templates. So the same components, and now we're going to do the same workflow, but this time, we're going to use a Smart Template. So I'm going to use an automation. I'm going to say use a Smart Template to do this.
And again, exactly as before, my automation is going to run in the background. I'm going to get a notification to say that it's started. I'll then get a notification to say that my job is ready, and I can open the drawing. And when I open that drawing, I'm going to get exactly what my smart template was set up to give me. It's going to look like this, which might be confusing.
Well, let's look at why. That's the resulting drawing. And this is the original smart template. So you see that the original smart template has a component view which we've got over there. It's also got an assembly view, but there's no assembly in this design. And it's got a parts system, the balloon.
The only difference is that I'm now getting some automated dimensions on top of it. So with your Smart Templates, you can decide if you'd like to have just one view. And I've got customers who want exactly that. That's OK. But if you want to have a full automation, remove those placeholders. So there's your three results-- From Scratch, boring black and white, my Drawing Template with my logo nicely set up, and my legacy Smart Template doing exactly what I've asked it to do.
Let's move on. So we've spoken about omitting standard fasteners. And let's see what some of our options are here. So we spoke about the omit list earlier on and the omit list is really there to help you. So out of the box, it ships with the following omitted. It's got nut, bolt, washer, and screw. And those are removed automatically for you, which is great.
The omit list works on component names. So if you want to add other things in there, like bearing or brackets or specific part numbers that you have within your business, you can do that. But just be aware of what we call the walnut problem.
The walnut problem is interesting. Any-- because "nut" is in a word, it won't create a sheet for it. So in some testing early on, we learned that, if you've got something like a walnut panel, you won't get a sheet for it. And there's a few words that have nut in them, like "minute" or "minute," "donut," "nutrient," things like that, where, if those are in the file name, you won't get a drawing for them.
So you can remove that from here. And you can use the AI to remove them. Or you can use a part number to remove them. Or even better than all of that, use the Fusion Fastener Library. But be aware that this is one of the limitations of the omit list. Hopefully, that makes sense to everybody on the call.
Now, as I said, in January, we're going to ship the AI tool that will allow you to detect and omit fasteners. And literally what this does is it looks at your assembly, it analyzes every single component, and it decides on whether or not those components are nuts, bolts, or washers. And if they are, it will exclude them from your drawing pack. I'm going to talk about the pros and cons of these soon.
So the things to remember here is that the omit list is really fast. And you can include other components as well, so not just nuts, bolts, and washers. As long as the component name up front, you can include that in there.
The cons, though, are you have the walnut problem. And we've been really upfront about the walnut problem. Hopefully, you remember that now. It's very much based on the file name, so you need to know what the parts are called up front.
On the AI side, works on any file. You don't need to know the file name up front. If you're bringing in data from third parties, it might be really useful. The cons, though, are that it's slower. We need to analyze every single component. Each of these models needs to be processed. And it's only going to detect nuts, bolts, or washers today. So bear that in mind.
But what does that mean going forward? What do I do with this information? Well, the good news is that I've set up a quick comparison to show how these work, and I've got a nice summary for you. So let's jump in.
Here I've got a template, where I've set it up so that relatively obvious what I've done. In the title block there, you can see I've got a-- I've put a name in there saying, AI on. And I've gone into the Document Settings, and I've turned on the tick box for Detect and Omit Fasteners.
Next up, I've done the opposite. I've created a template with AI Off, and I've turned off the AI. In the third option, I've unticked Detect and Omit Fasteners. But I've put two words, let's call them, into my omit list, and that is the number 9 and the word "flange." And we'll look at why in a second.
So here's a data set. You'll see that all of the standard nuts, bolts, and washers in here start with the number 9. So I've put that into the omit list. I've also got some nuts, bolts, and washers from my fastener library. Those are green, and I've just toggled them on and off. And I've then got a square and a round flange. So think you're getting the idea of where I'm going with this.
So let's have a quick look. Well, for AI On, when I created the drawing to save us going through the drawing creation process, it's going to show you this little animated GIF over here. I create a seven-sheet drawing. And you'll see that there's no nuts, bolts, or washers in this drawing.
And the reason for that is that the green nuts, bolts, and washers from the standard library were ignored. And the AI has gone through, and it's found all of those red components, and it's ignored those. With the next one, where the AI is off, you'll see that I've now gone from seven to 11 sheets. And you can see that there's a nut, bolt, and washer included in this pack. So we just let the animation run one more time. There's a bolt, a washer, and a nut.
And then in the third example, you'll remember that I had 9 and flange added to my omit list. And I'm not detecting or omitting fasteners. So in this example, I get five sheets. And what it's done is it's automatically ignored the fasteners from the fastener library because that's standard and out the box.
All of the red fasteners start with the part number 9. So they've all been ignored. And the round and the square flange had been ignored because we've asked it to ignore any component of the flange in the name. So hopefully, that gives you a good idea of how these things work.
Now, the good news is that the omit list and the AI tool work extremely well together. They both have their uses, and you can use them in concert. And again, remember that, if you're using the faster library, you don't have to worry about any of this stuff. It'll just work for you.
Let's jump into the Automation Settings. So again, this is what a good automation template looks like. We've got our Document Settings over here. We've set up all the colors for our different entities. We've set the sizes of things.
We've set up how our views are going to look, and then we've gone into our Automation Settings, and we've set those up, too, so really good-looking Document Settings with Automation Preferences. Repetition's good here. We've got a nice, clean browser, no parts lists, no references in that browser. Really important. Down the bottom, we've got no extra sheets. And we've spent the time to customize our title block.
So I'm going to show you two Automation Settings here. I'm not going to run through all of them because it becomes very repetitive. But what you can see here is, on an assembly sheet-- so if you look at our Per Sheet Options in our Document Settings, I've said, for assembly sheets, I would like a single sheet with an ISO view, which is what you're seeing, and I'd like that to include a parts list and I want that parts list to be in the top right-hand corner. And you get exactly what you see on screen.
Next up, we've said we'd like an orthographic view sheet to be created as well, which you're seeing over there. And we'd like to include overall dimensioning strategy for that sheet. That's what you're getting. So that's been set up.
The next one here is for a component. So for our Component Sheet Setup, we've said we'd like to add automatic-- or we want to create a sheet first, which is the tick box up top. Then we've said we want to create Automatic Dimensions. We want those dimensions to use the baseline dimensioning strategy.
We'd like the default origin to be the bottom left. And we'd like to recognize hole and thread notes and to put hole and thread notes onto the drawing for us. And it's doing that automatically for us. So we don't have to go and do anything. When we create a component sheet, we'll get that automatically.
Now, remember that you can create a setting for your main assemblies, which is the big assembly that you're in, all of its subassemblies, any animation sheets that have been created at any point, all of your components, your folded sheet metal, and your FlatPatterns as well. And for each of those, you can create your own dimensioning strategy, so really nice set of settings in there.
So changing gears and thinking about some other smart tips and tools, let's have a look at some of those. So first off, this is the most obvious, but it would be remiss of me not to mention it. When you create a drawing, whether you go right-click on something in the browser, and go Create Drawing, or if you go from the top, and you go File, Create Drawing, or you go to the Browser Switcher or the Environment Switcher and choose Create Drawing, this dialog is going to pop up.
Now, you want to make sure that you click on Automatic. And just below that you'll see a sheet count. Now, that sheet count is the maximum amount of sheets you can expect. If you're using the AI Automation Detection tool, that number could be less because we haven't yet done the calculation on those sheets.
You want to make sure that you select a template. Please don't use From Scratch templates. By this stage of this presentation, hopefully, I've sold you on creating your own template and setting it up nicely to work for you. So select that template. Choose your preferred structure. And then decide whether you want to include or exclude external parts. Hit OK, and your automation is going to run. Getting this part right is going to save you lots of time, as well.
The Tidy Up command-- so the Tidy Up command is really there to look at your drawing and to nest all of your views and make sure that everything fits. It understands that there's dimensions attached, and it's going to go and tidy up your view and make it look really good.
So here's an example of the Tidy Up command in action. And it's useful if you've changed maybe the size of your dimensions, or something has happened. Maybe you've changed your sheet size. Try Tidy Up, and see how it works for you. It also works on non-automated drawings.
Another tip here, something that we sort of spoke about really early on during the demo, is that, if you've got your Dimension panel, open your Automated Dimension panel open, and you click on a dimension-- so here I'm clicking on the 35 down on the bottom-- it shows me any alternative place that dimension can live. So it's a fungible dimension.
I can see the 35 down on the bottom. And when I click on the 35 up top, I'm, effectively, sending it to that other view. So it's a really handy tool for moving dimensions between views. You can try it out with that Automated Dimension panel open.
One of the FAQs I get all the time-- I get emails from folks all the time. How can I set my own data? Well, it's really easy. If you're using baseline dimensions, you've got the dropdown. The default's always the bottom left. But you can go into the dropdown, and you can choose manual. And with that manual picked, you can go and choose anywhere else, and it'll re-associate all of your dimensions from that manual datum that you've chosen.
And this doesn't just work with baseline dimensions. It also works on ordinate dimensions. And a top tip while you're in here is, if you right-click, you can choose snap overrides, and you can choose an endpoint or a midpoint or the center of a circle to re-associate your dimensions. So remember, setting up datums can be done on baseline dimension sets as well as ordinate dimensions.
A couple of extra tips or thoughts-- spend time setting up your templates. Do some experiments. Setting this up properly up front is going to save you time in the long run. So it's worth spending a little time doing some experiments.
Make multiple templates to suit different models or manufacturing processes. I have two main templates that I use. One is called Fusion, and I have another one called Expert. My Expert template has no dimensions in it. It allows me to go in later and add dimensions as I go because sometimes I like to add some seed dimensions before I use the dimensioning tools. So think about that as well.
Make different templates with different image lists. Maybe you have-- maybe you've got some components that you don't want to include in some drawing sets and some that you do in others. There's nothing wrong with having more than one template. It's going to live in that dropdown. You can just grab the one that you need.
And use that omit list to ignore any components that you don't want to detail-- for example, bearings. And then, remember, expect drawings to do 60% to 80% of the work for you.
All righty, so Fusion has a really interesting cadence of updates. Typically, we ship a new update every eight weeks. And you might want to have early access to some of the tools that we're building. And we have something called the Insider Program.
So the Insider Program lets you get in early. It lets you try tools out and give us feedback. It's a great way to connect to the community, talk directly to the Development team and the Product team. So if you scan this QR code or just google Fusion Insider Program, you'll be able to sign up and get your hands on tools really early. It's a fantastic place to be, and it's a really nice community.
So in summary, you may have seen this before, the Cliff Notes. This is exactly where we started. Make sure you set up a template with no placeholder views. Automation tab and Document Settings is where everything is set up. Test and tweak your template for your different data sets. And expect your automation to be 60% to 80% of the work for you.
That's it. That's everything you need to know about drawing automation in Fusion. Thank you for your time, and feel free to reach out. I can be found on email, clint.brown@autodesk.com. And I'd love to hear from you.