Discover how Fusion's built-in tools can aid in breaking down and managing complex design history. Learn how to make the most of the Display Component Colors feature in Fusion's Utilities area to better understand and navigate your design process.
Key Insights
- The design history in Fusion captures every action taken during the design process. This includes creating components, sketches, 3D geometry, adding fillets, and logos.
- Fusion's Utilities area hosts several tools, including the "Inspect" feature that allows users to display component colors, aiding in understanding and managing complex design history.
- Understanding and controlling design history allows for adjustments to individual components without affecting the entire model, supporting flexibility and precision in your design process.
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Let's take a moment to explore everything we have modeled so far. If we look at the bottom of our screen, we have the design history and that is a history of everything that we have created so far in Fusion, every action we have taken. For example, if I hover over the first one, it's creating that scooter deck component.
The next one was creating that top of deck work plane to work on. Then we created a sketch to create the deck. Then we extruded the sketch into 3D geometry.
Then we added some fillets to round it off. And then we added a VDCI logo or the logo of your choice on the top. So that is that history that we followed along.
As we start to have a lot of design history, a lot of components, bodies, construction planes, this can get pretty long and confusing. But Fusion has some tools built in to help us break everything down. If we look across the top, we'll notice one of our options is Utilities.
In the Utilities area, we have a menu we can pull down called Inspect. And we can select Display Component Colors. Let's go ahead and try that.
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We'll notice that everything changes color and every component has a color as well as the top line of our project browser. Now if we look at the design history, we've added color. And this first color is that main top line.
It's kind of a main operation. And it's creating the component. So create a component.
And then all of our design history from there was working on that deck. Then we have that main color again. And we're creating another component, this time the wheel.
And then we have the color, all the design history for that wheel, and so on. We can break this down even further. If we go and activate, for example, one of our components.
We click the Activate button. We will limit that design history to just the actions that we took to create that one component. Pretty cool, right? We can jump in and go back any time in history.
So let's look at the break. The break, we created a center plane and then a sketch for that break. We brought that in.
We extruded it and added our fillets to round the edges. And that completed our break. Now, you might have wondered, as we've worked along, why do we keep creating so many construction planes? This is kind of a preference thing.
As we're working together, it's something I like to do when we have a complex set of components. Because everything has its own construction plane or its own base. And it lets me change things.
For example, this is the center of the break. And if I wanted to change it, I don't recommend doing it. But you can watch me do it.
I'm going to edit that feature. If, for some reason, the center of the break needed to move, and I'll move it significantly so it's obvious, 400 millimeters, and click OK. We'll notice the center of that break changed.
And the whole thing moved. But nothing else in our model moved. It stayed stationary.
But imagine if we had created all of our components with the same center work plane and moved it. Then everything would move together. Sometimes that can be desirable.
And sometimes that can be an outcome that we don't want. The important thing is to know how to control it. And to know what I am setting up so that I have good success as I work along my design history.
I'm going to undo that. I didn't mean to move it. I just want to show that we can move one thing at a time.
Once we're done looking at our model, we can go back to the top level. Make sure it's active. And to turn off all these colors, we go back to the Utilities area, pull down the Inspect menu, and select Display Component Colors once again, or hold Shift-N on our keyboard, and we're back to normal.
