A Beginner’s Guide to Designing in Fusion

As seen before, our tree climbing went from an idea to a physical design on an ipad. Now it was the time to execute this and actually make the 3D-printed prototype. There was a major step between this though: designing the printable model.

CAD, or Computer-Aided Design, is a software that allows engineers to turn ideas into precise three-dimensional models that can be modified, tested and eventually manufactured, through methods like 3d printing. This was my first experience with CAD, where I used Autodesk Fusion, and assumed that it would be easy, and all I had to do was digitally draw the same design on the ipad again here.

I quickly realised that it was much more than simply “drawing things in 3D,” and therefore I decided to make a beginner’s guide to this process and on how to turn an idea into a manufacturable design.

Firstly, a main suggestion would be to start with a 2d sketch. You can do so by creating a design and selecting a specific plane, and then using the rectangle tool, or any other tool as per your requirement to illustrate a base sketch.

Here dimensions and the scale of the design matters, and it is important to calibrate these, because the dimension you use here is the dimension of the 3d printed object. You can use the dimension tool that hovers over the objects you make to do so.

A measurement tool, with the shape of a ruler can also be used to measure these objects or any imported designs to ensure the dimensions are accurate.

Along with the shape tools, while sketching images a few helpful tools I found included the trim and offset tool which are in the modify category. This enabled me to easily cut out parts of designs that I did not like, and also make parallel copies of the same figure at different positions rather than having to manually copy paste it or redraw it.

Here, another important concept I learnt was the application of constraints. These act as a lock on your diagram that keep certain parameters as constant or in a range even after you change the design later.The perpendicular constant is one example which I consistently used to ensure that the protruding edges of the tentacle were at the same angle from the base.

For further reference, a few other common ones are:

1. Horizontal
2. Vertical
3. Coincident
4. Parallel
5. Perpendicular
6. Tangent
7. Equal
8. Symmetry

Lastly once the base sketch is done, it is time to convert it into a 3d object. I mainly used the extrude tool to do this which essentially just helps you move it out of the flat plane into the z axis, making the model 3d.

This image illustrates one such example, where the box on the right further showcases how the design can be extruded in different ways, and also the dimension property which is very important.

There are multiple other tools in the same category that you can use to refine these sketches and their 3d image. However, once this is done the design is still not ready to print.

Right now it is just a sketch of the image, but while printing you must account for the volume, the surface texture, the color, and many more features. It is important to test and identify these before randomly printing designs as without doing so, you may just end up wasting material or having a rigid body, even though your design was supposed to be flexible.

I will discuss these parameters in the next part, but I hope you understood the process of making a sketch and the importance of parameters.