John Helfen
Elevate your design and manufacturing processes with Autodesk Fusion
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Ever wonder how to copy a drawing in Fusion 360? Learn how to use the Copy with Drawings feature to copy a design and its related drawings.
We’re excited to announce Copy with Drawings, an enhancement to the Copy Design workflow that lets you copy a design and its related drawings.
In the image above, you can see the Controls Plate is from a previous project and has a detailed drawing. You might need to create a new variation without the trackball opening in the center of the plate.
When you copy the Controls Plate design from the Data Panel, you can now include its related drawings.
When you copy a design that is referenced by a drawing, a list of related drawings displays. You can choose to Include Drawings or Skip Drawings.
After you select a location for the new copies, Fusion 360 sends a copy request to the cloud. You can return to your work while Fusion 360 is creating the copies.
After you click Copy, a notification displays in the Notification Center to tell you the copy job has started. Once the copy job is complete, a second notification displays.
The new design and its related drawings appear in the Data Panel.
Now you have an independent copy of the design as well as independent copies of its drawings. Any changes to the new design are only reflected in the new drawings.
Instead of recreating each drawing from scratch for the new design, you only need to remove disassociated dimensions or annotations from the new drawings.
Important considerations
There are a few considerations to keep in mind when using the Copy with Drawings feature:
- You can copy only a single design at a time.
- The limit is 20 drawings per copied design. You can copy designs that have more than 20 related drawings, but you can’t include the drawings.
- The copy job includes only drawings directly related to the copied design.
- Assembly Contexts (except for Local) are broken in the new design copy. The best practice is to break the link on those contexts in the design copy by right-clicking each context, then selecting Break Link. This keeps referenced geometry available in the design copy. (Note: The referenced bodies are hidden automatically in the design copy, but they are visible in the drawing copy, so you may want to manually hide them.)
- Drawings associated with the design will be copied if the drawings are up-to-date with the associated design, you at least have read access to the drawing or the location where the drawing resides, and the total number of drawings associated with the design is 20 or fewer.
Now you know how to copy a drawing in Fusion 360! Ready to put what you learned to the test?