There are plenty of functions in Autodesk Fusion that make designing easy. In this tutorial, we’ll highlight how to take advantage of the ‘Capture or Revert’ icon that pops up when you move around components.

Understanding components

First of all, what’s going on with your component when you move it around? An origin point is assigned to every component you add to your design. All changes to the orientation of a given component will be reflected by your coordinate system relative to the default origin. Moving around components will trigger the ‘Capture/Revert’ icon to appear. This is how Fusion tracks both the position of all your components as well as joints.

Capturing or reverting positions

All of a component’s movements can be snapshotted and revisited later. When you ‘Capture’ a position, Fusion saves the component’s current location on the timeline. You can think of this as saving a bookmark in your design history. This snapshot will be marked down on the timeline as a ‘featured position.’ The featured position can be deleted, edited, or saved to the finished design. Keep in mind that editing a position will affect everything after it on the timeline.

When using ‘Revert’, the component will return to its last location. Deleting a captured position will also revert it back to the position that it was last in. And so, deleting all captured positions will place the component back to its origin point.

If you move a component without capturing its position and then try to start a new feature, Fusion warns and asks if you want to capture or revert that component. This is so that Fusion understands where all the design elements should be.

Note that Fusion does not keep track of a body’s coordinate system because they belong to components.

Let’s recap what we’ve learned about Capture/Revert

To summarize, capturing will save a position on the timeline. Reverting will take your component back to its last location. Editing a captured location will affect everything that comes in the timeline after it.

By understanding how to capture and revert positions, you can design anything with the ease of knowing you can easily go back and make edits whenever you need to. To get more tips on using Autodesk Fusion, check out our Youtube channel.