Learn how to apply materials to your designs and add a decal in Fusion Design in this article. Master the steps to select the appropriate appearance, drag and drop it onto your deck, and finally add a decal for an enhanced look.
Key Insights
- In Fusion Design, you can select the appearance of your design from a library of options like steel satin or plastic, with sub-menus such as translucent.
- You can apply the chosen material by clicking, holding it down, and dragging and dropping it onto your deck. The deck changes its look according to the material chosen.
- Besides applying materials, you can also add decals to your design. This can be done by swapping to the render workspace and using the decal tool to insert an image file of your choice.
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Now that we have our deck created, we can apply a material. So right here in the product browser, we'll notice under bodies, we have deck. We can select it and then right click.
And one of the options is appearance. This controls what it looks like in Fusion. So let's click appearance.
And right now we have the appearance window open on our screen. And it says in this design, steel satin. That's the only appearance we have right now.
But there's also a library. Let's go back to the top of the library. And one of these options is plastic.
Look for plastic, double click to open it, scroll down and there are several sub menus within plastic. One of these sub menus is called translucent. So find translucent, you might have double click the word translucent to open it up.
And now you can select any of the matte materials. So you'll see there is plastic, translucent, matte, blue, gray, green, white or yellow. I will go ahead and select the white one.
I will select it by clicking, holding it down and dragging and dropping it right onto my deck. And I'll let go and it turns white. I'll notice that I could do that with any of these materials drag and drop and it will apply that material to our deck.
Once I'm happy with that, I will click close. And that looks really good. But let's take it to the next level and add a decal on top of our deck.
To do that, we will have to swap over to a different workspace. Right now we are in the Fusion Design workspace. If we click the word design, all the other workspaces populate.
And the one we want is called render. So click that. And that moves us over to the render workspace.
Now up here in the render setup menu, we have the decal tool. We'll click that decal tool. And here it opens up our project.
We don't have any images yet to use as a decal. Feel free to browse your own. Fusion can take any image file.
For best results, look for a transparent PNG. Those just look the coolest. Once you have that image file, you can insert it from your computer.
In the course files, there is a VDCI logo. You can use that one as well. Click open.
Now we get a decal menu and it says select a face. We want to click right in the middle of the top of our deck. We'll click and that places that decal.
Now we can zoom in a little bit. We can even go to that view cube and click the top view. And it can be a little easier to move that into place.
We get this double arrows. We can try moving it. We can even scale it.
And just get that rotated or moved into whatever position you would like your decal to be found on the top of your deck. Once you're happy with it, click the okay button. Wait for a moment and then swap back over to that design workspace and click the home button to see the result.