Sketch Creation and Solid Modeling Techniques in Autodesk Fusion for Beginners

Now let's take a look at creating sketches in Autodesk Fusion to create solid geometry. Let's start by closing down any work we have. No need to save.

Back to our Home tab, click on the New button. We have a fresh workspace. If we take a look, one of the first tools we have is Create Sketch.

Go ahead and click that button. We want to hover over and then select the ground plane. Notice that Fusion orients us to looking directly onto the ground.

We are now in the top view. The first tool we have is the Line tool. Let's click that Line tool.

We'll click one time in the center, and we'll go straight up. Any dimension is okay. Click, go to the right, another dimension, and this time we'll click and hold.

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And that puts us right into an arc. How cool is that? We'll let go, and that'll end that arc, and continue clicking. We're having fun, so any shape you'd like to make is okay.

Maybe add three or four more lines. The trick is to make sure you go back to where we started, back to our origin point. If we click on that origin point, we will notice that our sketch shades.

It fills in with a solid color. That lets us know that it is a completed sketch. Now we can go ahead and click the green Finish Sketch button, and click the Home button.

It takes us back to Home. There is that beautiful sketch that we have created. Now let's click on it.

It will turn blue to let us know it's selected. The tool we want to use is the Extrude tool. It's the second tool over.

We can also select E on the keyboard. So click Extrude, and a blue arrow appears. We can drag that shape up as tall as we'd like it.

So select a height, and once you're happy with that height, go ahead and click OK. So there is our shape. If we take a look at our design history, we'll notice that we started with a sketch, and then we extruded into a 3D solid.

That was a ton of fun. So let's create another sketch, and go back to that first tool called Create Sketch. Now this time, instead of clicking on one of the default planes, I want to click on the top of my new geometry.

So go ahead and click on the top of your new geometry. It selects it and changes the view so that we're looking straight down on top of it. We'll select that Line tool again, and we will draw a sketch inside our existing sketch.

Make it about four or five lines of your choosing. Just make sure when you're done that you go back to the origin point to click. And that's it.

It can be a little harder to see the shading because we have a solid object in the way, but we'll know that we've created a solid sketch as long as we go back and click where we started. Also notice that we have some symbols here. These are sketch constraints, and there are several.

For example, Parallel, Coincident, Horizontal, Vertical, Tangent, and very popular, we have the Perpendicular constraint. All of these constraints define relationships between the lines we're drawing. It's okay to go with the defaults for now, but we will continue to use constraints as we work along.

Let's go ahead and click the Finish Sketch button and click back on the Home view. Now we'll see our sketch in the middle of our existing sketch and geometry, and we can use that cool Extrude tool again. So back to Extrude, we'll click on it, and this time we'll drag the arrow down.

We'll notice that the operation by default goes to Cut because they're overlapping, and click OK. Now I've used one sketch to create the solid geometry and a second sketch to cut away at some of that geometry. Very powerful way to create models in Fusion.

Now how do we edit our sketches if we want to make a change? There's two ways to do that. One is to take a look at our timeline, and notice that we can find our two sketches. We can right-click, for example, on the first sketch and click Edit.

So go ahead and do that. Right-click on the first sketch in the timeline and click Edit, and now we can make a change. We can click and drag on any of these lines and make a change.

Do notice that it can be a little bit weird. Why is it weird? It's because of these constraints. I can move the lines around, but I must follow those constraints.

For example, I'm trying to grab this point and move it. This line here stays perpendicular. It stays parallel.

I can click on those constraints and delete them. Now I'm unconstraining this sketch. And as I delete those constraints, now I can move that line.

See, I can make it an angle now and get crazy with it because it's no longer constrained. And that can be something that can be confusing at first. Like I want to make this change.

It's not happening. And it's often because the sketch is constrained. Fusion puts these constraints in by default.

So they are there and we can use them or we can delete them and make it unconstrained. All right. So make a couple of quick changes.

We want to make sure our shape is still continuous and then click the green Finish Sketch. Go back to our Home View and see the result. Now there's another way to do this.

We'll notice in our Project Browser here that we are creating a folder called Sketches. If we expand that folder, we'll see our Sketch 1 and Sketch 2. We can edit them right from here as well. Let's go ahead and right-click on Sketch 2 and click Edit Sketch.

And we can do the same drill. We can make some modifications. We can drag some of the points around.

Kind of notice how those constraints work, how they force the sketch to be modified a certain way. Or we can select those constraints, hit Delete on our keyboard, unconstrained our sketch, and make some crazier modifications if it's no longer constrained. Once we're happy with our changes, we click Finish Sketch, go back to the Home View, and see the result.