Unleash the full potential of Fusion's modify tools and learn how to create intricate designs with ease. This article provides a comprehensive walkthrough on using the modify tools and illustrates how they can aid in creating box designs, fillets, shells, and combining different shapes.
Key Insights
- The first modify tool in Fusion, 'Press and Pull', allows you to adjust any face of your design, including edges, by dragging it in or out. It's a versatile tool that not only works on faces but also other objects.
- The 'Fillet Tool' is more apt for creating fillets on several edges. You can select the various edges and type in the millimeters you want the fillet to be. Faces can also be selected for applying the fillet to every edge of it.
- Utilizing the 'Combine' modify tool, you can overlap two different shapes to form one unified body. This feature requires you to create two individual geometries (bodies) and then combine them. Additionally, the 'Split Body' tool allows you to split the combined body into two separate parts again.
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Let's jump into the modify tools in Fusion. We will start a new Fusion design and let's create our box. So create, box, click on the ground plane and draw a simple rectangle.
We'll drag this up so we have a cube-like box and click okay. Now the modify tools are right here in the middle. The first one is press and pull.
It lets us click on any face of our box and drag it in or out. Let's go ahead and click okay after doing that to a face, press and pull on a face. What's cool about the press and pull tool is we can also press and pull on other objects.
Let's try it again, press and pull and now we'll hover over just an edge of our box. We'll click one single edge and that blue arrow if we drag it in, presses and pulls into a fillet and then eventually a whole curve and eventually flat. So pretty cool little tool, lets us do that.
Let's go ahead and click okay there. Now the next one over is the actual fillet tool. This one's more appropriate for creating a fillet, especially on several edges.
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We'll click that tool and we can see we can add in the various edges or even faces, you can fillet every edge of a face. Let's go ahead and click the edges. So I'm gonna click this edge first and it says it found three edges and I can type in the millimeters I want that fillet to be.
Then I can click the plus and click the backside, another three lines and those can also be, for example, five millimeters and click okay. All right, the next utility over here is shell. Let's go ahead and try that.
We'll scroll so we can see the bottom or orbit. So to do that, a couple of ways to do that, I can click and drag one of the corners of this box. I can also hold shift and press my scroll wheel down.
I'm looking up from the bottom. We'll click on shell and faces bodies, I'll do select, I'll click the bottom right here, this bottom, and then I'll drag this in. You can see what I've done is create a shell of this shape.
It was fully solid and now there's a shell. I dragged it in visually, but I can also type a thickness right here into the shell properties window and that will adjust. I can also change the direction, inside, outside, both directions.
We'll just do inside for now and click okay. So that's the shell command. The next modify over is combine.
So to do that, we need another shape. And so we'll go back to the create tab. We'll go back to box.
Now, if it's ever difficult to click one of these default planes, one trick is to zoom out, out, out, out, out until the planes are no longer intersecting with geometry. Then we can click the ground plane. And I'm going to draw another box here, so rectangle.
Make sure it overlaps the first box, drag it up. Now, in the properties, I'll notice the default operation is cut. And the downside to that is this will disappear.
There will not be a box there. It will just cut the original shape. I want to drop that down and change it to new body.
Every individual geometry infusion is a body. We'll click new body and click okay. So I've got two elements here.
And now I can do the modify combine. And I'll click the first one and the second one and say okay. And you'll notice it combines them into one thing or one body.
All right. Now, the next one over is a split body. This one requires a sketch.
We don't currently have a sketch, so we need to create one. Let's go ahead and create a sketch. And we'll click that center vertical plane.
I'll zoom out again, make it easy to click on it. Center vertical plane. And we will do a fit point spline.
Keep it pretty simple, just curving through our shape. And finish. Finish sketch.
Go back to the home view. And now we can try that tool, split body. So bodies to split.
We'll select our object we've created. And our splitting tool, we'll click select and click that line, that curved line. And click okay.
And now we can see that split runs through all of our shape right there. We've split it into two, which is pretty cool because now we're going to try the move command. The move copy is the next one over.
We'll click that. We'll click on our top shape because we've split them in two. We have a top and a bottom shape.
Now notice with the move command active, it can snap to certain points. That can be really helpful for rotation. But for moving, we can just click right on the top center.
And we've got the up arrow. We can lift the lid off because we've split that object. Now notice what else we can do.
We can rotate in any axis. We can move in any axis. And these little squares let us move on any plane.
So Fusion is incredibly flexible with this move tool. It's like a Swiss army of moving. Swiss army tool of moving because we can rotate in any axis, move even the little point anywhere, very free in our movement.
We can also be instead very precise. We can type in distances. We can translate along certain axes or the free move.
We can orbit anywhere, a lot of options for moving. All right, so we'll click okay. We have moved our shape apart pretty significantly and there it is.
All right, a lot of fun using that modify tool.
