Creating Offset Planes and Exploring Advanced Primitive Techniques in Autodesk Fusion

We are doing great, creating some fun shapes in Autodesk Fusion. Let's take it to the next level. We will begin with a clean workspace.

To do that, we can close our existing tabs. We'll click on the X, there's no need to save, and go back to that Home. Here in Home, we can click New to ensure we're in a brand new workspace.

Let's go ahead and start with one of our primitives. We will go up to the Solid Area and Create. We're looking for our box.

We will click on the ground plane and click one time in the center, click one time up above, and there is our box. Let's give it a little bit of a height and click OK. We've created a box on the ground plane just as we've done before, but we have all sorts of ways to make different work planes.

If we go back up to our tab across the top, we'll notice that there is a Construct dropdown and all kinds of ways to make planes. Let's go to the Offset plane. It's the first option.

Now, instead of clicking on one of the existing planes, we'll click on the top of our box, and that puts a work plane right at the top of our box. You can see it's offset 0 millimeters. If we drag that up, it will now be floating off of our box.

Feel free to drag it up whatever dimension looks right to you on your screen. So there is that floating plane. It's called an Offset plane, and when we're happy with how it looks, we will click OK.

Now we have a new work plane in our workspace. We can go back to the Create dropdown and select Box yet again, and now we have some more options. We'll notice the default planes, the bottom, side, back.

We also can click on any of the box faces, but we won't do that yet because we have our brand new plane. It's right up here. It's nice and big, so it's easy to select it.

We hover over it to select it, and then click, and now we're modeling on a work plane up above the box. It can be difficult to see this. If we orbit around, we might notice that work plane is active, floating somewhere above our box, and now we can click again on the center point and click up somewhere to create our box and give it a little height, and click OK.

The result is two boxes, one above the other, floating in space. Let's go back to our Home button again, and we're back to our Home view, and let's notice a new portion of Fusion. Down at the bottom, we have this design history.

If we hover over each element, we can see that Fusion has recorded every step we've made to create the first box, offset plane, and the second box. What's cool about this is we can go back and make edits at any point. So let's go back and click on that ground plane we made, that offset plane called plane one.

We can right-click on it and click Edit Feature, and now we can drag it down or up. Let's move it up and click OK, and once we do that, we notice that the downstream effects take place. The plane moved up, so now that box moved up.

Let's take it a step further. We'll click on that first box and right-click and edit that feature. Now our offset plane is based off of the top face of this box, so let's make the top face taller, and we'll click OK, and now that other box is way high up in the sky because it's this plane pushing on the next plane, which that box sits on, and everything affects everything going down the line through our design history.

And you might ask yourself, that can get pretty complex, all those relationships, and you would be correct. Sometimes that design history can get messy. There can even be some errors that we have to resolve.

In this simple case, it works no problem, and a lot of the times it works really well. So that's the design history, and we have a couple of boxes. Now let's go back on something we talked about earlier.

In primitives, we tried to create primitives that didn't overlap, because if we did, they would disappear. Let's go ahead and overlap them on purpose this time. So let's go ahead to our create, we'll do box, and we want to go back to our ground plane.

We'll click that ground plane, and we'll start a new box kind of close to our first box. We'll click, drag, and make sure we're intersecting the other box on purpose, and click. And notice how it turns red.

It would disappear. It will not create a box, but it will cut. So our default operation now is switch to cut.

We can also change this. It could be join, and now it becomes one element, kind of two boxes joined into one. Or we could do intersect, and it will be just what's left over between the two boxes.

Everything else would disappear. Or we can do new body, and we'll have a box that intersects but stays in place. We do have more options.

You can pick the one you'd like. I'm going to go ahead and pick the cut for now, and click okay. So there it is.

So these primitives aren't so primitive after all. There are quite a few advanced operations we can do to get a lot of use out of these primitives.