Master the basics of Autodesk Fusion by understanding the creation and manipulation of solid geometry. This article provides a step-by-step guide to creating simple 3D shapes in Autodesk Fusion, such as boxes, cylinders, spheres, and more.
Key Insights
- To create solid geometry in Autodesk Fusion, select the "Create" dropdown under the "Solid" tab to choose from a series of basic 3D shapes.
- The created objects, known as primitives, can be manipulated by hovering over different work planes. The object's size can be altered by dragging the up arrow to increase its height.
- The shapes can be thoroughly examined by navigating through various views in Fusion, using the view cube, the mouse wheel or the trackpad on a laptop. These tools allow you to pan, orbit, or zoom in/out of the objects.
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Let's create some solid geometry in Autodesk Fusion. To get started, we'll go to the Home tab in Fusion and click the New button. This starts a fresh workspace in Fusion.
We'll notice at the top, there is a Solid tab and a Create dropdown. Let's click that Create dropdown. And if we scroll down, we'll notice a series of basic 3D shapes, box, cylinder, sphere, torus, coil, and pipe.
These are known as primitives. Let's start by selecting the box solid. And before clicking anywhere, let's move our mouse around to explore.
And as we move it around, we'll notice the screen is flashing and it's highlighting different work planes. This can be a little tricky on our eyes, but what it's doing as we hover around is to select a vertical plane in the back, a vertical plane on the side, or a horizontal flat ground plane. And that's the plane we want to work on.
So once you have that selected with the red and green axis highlighted, we click. And it expands that ground plane. We're seeing that ground plane in a semi-perspective view.
And now we can click right in the middle one time and move our mouse up, and that's creating a rectangle. Now we're having fun here, so don't worry about the dimensions. Simply draw a large rectangle and click a second time.
And voila, we have our solid right there. We can drag the up arrow and increase its height. And that is our first solid, our first primitive.
Once we're happy with it, we can click the OK button. All right, let's practice a little navigation now. There are a couple of ways to navigate in Fusion.
One is the view cube up at the top. We can go ahead and click the top view or click the front view. Any of those straight-on views are selectable by clicking.
We can also click the corner of the box to get these semi-perspective views. Or if we ever get lost, we click the home arrow to go back. And that zooms to extents.
Now we can also use our mouse. If we press our mouse wheel straight down, we can pan. If we hold Shift and press the mouse wheel, we can orbit and see all sides of our box.
We can also use the scroll wheel, push it forward and back, and that can zoom in and out. Now if we don't have a mouse, we can also use the trackpad on our laptop to pinch and zoom. Also, we can right-click, and we have a few other options here.
If we right-click, we have pan. Let's just pan around. Right-click, and we can zoom, and we can orbit all from the right-click window.
Let's go ahead and go back to our home view, wherever we are, and let's create another primitive. So let's zoom out. I'm gonna use my mouse.
You can use your trackpad. Pan over so that our box is to the right, and we have a little empty space on the left. We'll go back to that Create tab, and a quick note, if we ever don't see that, notice that there are other workspaces.
We're in the Design workspace right now. If we were somewhere else, we may not see that Create tab. We wanna be in that Design workspace.
Pull down the Create tab. Let's create a cylinder. We have those options again for the different workplanes, and we wanna pick the ground plane again.
We'll click that ground plane one time, click somewhere, pull away from that center point, and click again, and now we have a cylinder. We can drag that blue arrow up and create a cylinder as tall or as short as we like, and then we click OK. All right, we're on a roll creating primitives.
Let's zoom out and scroll over a little bit yet again to create some more blank space on the side. Go to that Create dropdown, and we want to do a coil this time. Let's click Coil, and we'll grab that ground plane, and we'll click, and we're setting a diameter for the coil.
We'll click again, and now we have a few more options. I'm gonna move this to the center because the coil gives us quite a few options. On our previous shapes, we simply dragged the arrow up and down, and we can do that, but notice the height is changing.
We can type a value in as well. We can also start to adjust some of the different sizes. For example, the section size is 26 in my case.
I can change that size and make it a skinny coil, or I can increase the size and make it a larger coil. I can also play with the angle, and that will start to, that actually didn't work. It started to overlap itself.
It'll make it a smaller angle. There we go, and now that coil is angling. I can also change the section, square, triangle.
That one didn't work. I might have to change the section size down because it can't overlap onto itself. Square, triangle, all sorts of shapes.
This is the option window we get for coil, and all of these shapes have an option window. This one's just a little bit more advanced with a few more options. We can even change the rotation so it rotates the opposite direction.
Have a little fun with that, and then click okay. All right, so we're having a ton of fun here. Let's create a few more shapes.
Right here under the Create tab, we'll drop that down, and this time we will do a torus. Click that ground plane again. Click a center point, pull it out, and there's the torus.
Again, we have the visual cues, these arrows to adjust the shape, or we can grab our Properties window and manually type in all of the different dimensions. We'll click okay on that, and let's create one more. This time we'll do the sphere.
We'll click on sphere, find that ground plane, and we'll put the sphere right here, and we click one time, it makes the sphere immediately. And all we have to do, this one has very few options, it simply has a diameter, which we could type in, or we can drag the blue arrow up and down. Notice that it can't overlap another shape.
For these primitives, they want to be their own shape, and once we're happy with what we have, we click okay, and we're good to go. Thanks for making your shapes and having some fun with shapes.