Discover the versatility of the Form Tool as we experiment with creating, modifying, and understanding the normal of a cylinder. Learn to control the curvature of the cylinder's lines, fill in open ends, and change the direction of the surface's normal or the 'inside' and 'outside' of the surface.
Key Insights
- The Form Tool in Fusion allows for the creation of different shapes such as cylinders and the modification of those shapes, specifically controlling the sharpness or smoothness of the edges by scaling lines closer together or farther apart.
- Open ends of a surface can be closed using the 'Fill Hole' option in the 'Modify' dropdown, and the normal of a surface (the 'inside' versus 'outside' or 'up' and 'down') can be altered using the 'Reverse Normal' option.
- The material applied to a surface only applies to the 'up' side, or the side determined by the normal. Therefore, reversing the normal changes which side of the surface the material applies to.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
We're having a ton of fun with the Form tool, so let's keep going. Let's go ahead and go back to File and select New Design. And here, we want to go back to that Create Form tool again in Fusion.
We're just in an untitled document, and now we want to try a different Create tool. Go to Create, this time we'll select Cylinder. And last time we selected the ground plane, but now we will select the front center plane.
We'll click one time. Now this requires a center point, so we'll click one time right in the center, move our cursor away. Don't worry about the dimension, just click a second time.
And voila, like that we have a cylinder. Now before we close the cylinder options, we'll drag this blue arrow. We can make it a little bit longer, and we can leave everything else the same and click OK.
So here is the cylinder. Now unlike the box, this is a surface only. There's no thickness to this, but we can still modify it.
So let's go ahead and right-click and select Edit Form, and let's double-click the ring in the middle. Now we'll notice that we can scale it in any direction, and it starts to modify our cylinder. The other trick to notice is that the tighter the rings are together, the sharper the edges will be.
So let's go ahead and finish scaling it in or out. It's okay, just a little bit. Remember again, we don't wanna go so far or extreme that we break something.
Go a little distance out, click OK. Then double-click on another ring, right-click and say Edit Form, and use the arrows to move the lines closer together. And notice, as those lines get close together, we start to get a really sharp edge.
And again, we want to avoid extremes. At some point here, you'll notice I'm breaking it. I'm crossing over, I went too far.
But I can get pretty close and create a nice, sharp edge. Or I can go the opposite direction and get a smooth edge. So that's how I control the sharpness or curvature of the line.
Let's go ahead and click OK. Now, we'll notice that this is a surface and one end is open. Let's imagine we want to close an end.
Let's go to the Modify drop-down, and we're going to look for something called Fill Hole. So Fill Hole. That brings up the Fill Hole window, and all we have to do is pick an edge.
We'll pick one of these edges, and that closes it down for us. Now, we'll notice there are some different modes. The default is Reduced Star.
There's something called Fill Star or Collapse. Let's go ahead and leave it on Collapse, and then click OK. Now, this is a surface still.
It is closed on one end, but opened up on the other. Let's go ahead and click Finish Form and take a look at a couple of surface tools. Now, we are totally scratching the surface, pun intended, but there's a couple of important things we need to know.
Number one, there is a Surface Area Infusion. Go ahead and click that. All the tools here are kind of a yellowy-orange, and the tool we want to look for is the Modify Area.
We can make a couple of basic modifications to our surface. Now, let's go ahead and apply a material so we can see what's happening. Let's expand our bodies.
We see Body 1. We'll select it, right-click, and select Appearance. Opens up the Appearance window. We'll search in our library for a bright color.
Let's do red, so red, and we'll open up the Fusion Appearance library, and we'll scroll down to one of the first ones that pops up, Aluminum Anodized Rough Red. We'll drag and drop that onto Body 1. And we'll close our Appearance library. Now, we'll notice that our object turns red.
If we orbit to the inside, it's yellow. That's really weird. What gives there? Well, Fusion has something for surfaces called a normal.
Normal is a fancy word of saying what is inside versus outside, so we can change that normal. Right now, the normal is facing out. It's gonna modify, and we're looking for Reverse Normal.
We'll click that, click our object here, and click OK. And what happens? Now, the outside is yellow, and the inside is red, so every surface has basically an inside or an outside, or another way to think of it is an up and a down, and the material only applies to that upside. Let's go ahead and reverse it again.
We'll go back to Modify, and we will go to Reverse Normal, click our object, click OK, and it reverses it again. Now, we're just having fun here, so we can go ahead and close this untitled document, and we can click Do Not Save.