Explore the fun and flexibility of the Form tool in Fusion, and learn how to maintain control over dimensions while still taking advantage of its fluidity. Discover how to start with a sketch, create specific dimensions, and manipulate shapes while maintaining certain measurements.
Key Insights
- The Form tool in Fusion allows for a more fluid and flexible design process compared to creating specific sketches with hard edges and defined dimensions.
- Despite their fluidity, forms can start with a sketch and maintain certain dimensions, like diameter and length, giving the designer some level of control over the measurements.
- While the Form tools provide the freedom to manipulate and create various shapes, the original dimensions of certain elements, such as edges and lengths, can still be preserved.
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Isn't the form tool in Fusion a ton of fun? Let's explore it one more time before we create our grips. So once again, go to File, New Design. This will give us a blank untitled design.
Now the forms can be tough to control. They are a lot more loosey-goosey than everything we've done so far. So far we create specific sketches with dimensions, hard edges, and everything is measurable.
Forms are a lot more fluid, but we can start with a sketch. Let's go ahead and go to our Create Sketch tool. We'll click the front face here and now we'll create a center diameter circle.
We'll click one time in the center, move our cursor away, and this time we will create a specific diameter. Let's type in 100. Enter.
So 100. Let's go back to our home view and click the Finish Sketch button and go back to Create Form. We're in that form tool area of Fusion.
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Now one of the Create options is Extrude. So let's pull down Create and we'll look for Extrude. I'll click that and now we can select this profile and it extrudes it right away.
Now the cool thing about this is it is a specific diameter that matches my sketch and it's a specific distance. Let's type in 150. So 150.
And we'll adjust the front faces to 4 and click OK. Now we know something about this form. It has a certain diameter and a certain length, but it's really easy to mess that up with the modified tools we have in Form.
But we can leave certain things alone and we'll know that they are a specific dimension. Let's go ahead and right click and say Edit Form and let's double click the ring in the middle and let's expand it by clicking that little bar on the outside that lets us scale in that plane. Let's go ahead and scale it out.
Not too much, but we'll scale a certain amount and click OK. Now that scale is just kind of a free form. We don't know exactly where it went to, but we do know that this edge here is still 100 millimeters.
So is that edge and the length is the same. So even though the free form tools in Fusion let us manipulate and create all these exciting shapes, there is some level of control that we have over dimensions. That's it.
Let's go ahead and close this untitled document and click Don't Save.
