Take an in-depth look at how to manipulate forms using the Fusion software, focusing on the creation of scooter handlebar grips. Learn how to explore the form tools in a 'playground' environment before integrating your creations into a larger design project.
Key Insights
- The Fusion software allows users to experiment with form tools in a new, untitled document before integrating the forms into a larger project. This 'playground' approach allows for increased freedom and creativity.
- Forms can be manipulated in various ways in Fusion, including scaling in all directions, moving based on any plane, and rotating in any given plane.
- It's crucial to avoid crossing the form over itself in Fusion as this results in an error. Users should practice manipulating forms in the 'playground' setting to avoid potential disruption during the larger project.
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.
Our scooter is in really good shape and we only have two more components left to model. Those are the grips that go on the handlebars. Before we model directly in our scooter here, we're going to go ahead and create a new file.
Kind of a playground we can play around with the form tools in Fusion. So go up to the top and go File, New Design. That will open up an untitled tab in Fusion.
Think of it like a playground where there's no right answers. We're going to explore the form tools in Fusion. After exploring the form tools, we will go back and create our grips in our scooter file.
So for now, we're right here in our untitled document. Let's go ahead and click the Create Form button. The basic form we can create is called a box.
It's a purple box. We'll click on that and we need to place it on a plane. For now, let's place it on the ground plane.
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So click on the ground plane, then click one time in the middle, pull our cursor away until we've created a square. No worries about the dimensions. We'll click again and voila, a box appears.
Now we have a couple of options for our box. We can see it's set to length faces are two. Let's up that to three and go ahead and click OK.
So there is a box. Now the primary method for manipulating forms in Fusion is found by right-clicking and selecting Edit Form. Now in the Edit Form tool, we can select either faces, points, which would be a vertice, or an edge.
There's also kind of a hidden selection. If we double-click an edge, it will select an entire ring. All right, so I'm going to hit Cancel on that.
Let's do it together. We'll right-click, Edit Form. Let's pick one of the faces on the top.
And this Edit Form tool is kind of a do-everything tool. Let's start from the center and work our way out. The first option we get is kind of a scale all right in the center.
We click that dot, move right and left, up or down. It scales all directions. Then from there, we have these white squares, and they will move based on a plane.
So try a couple of those. You can move based on any plane with these white squares. Out from there are these white bars, and they are scale bars.
They will scale in the direction we click. So that's the right one. There's one on the top.
We can scale up and down. What's really cool are these scale corners. They're rounded bars.
We can grab those and scale in two directions at once. Pretty cool, right? Now on the outside of everything, we have these dots, and they let us rotate. We can rotate in any given plane.
So try rotating back and forth, rotate. Now last but not least, we have a Move tool, and those are the arrows. We can move along any axis with these given arrows.
But let's go ahead and break our little form here. Let's grab the top arrow and drag it down, down, keep going down until it crosses. Did you see that? The form crosses on itself.
And let's go ahead and say OK. We've broken it, but I want to see what that does. We click OK, click into nothing, so nothing's selected.
We'll notice our shape has pulled across itself. Let's click Finish Form. It's kind of like the sketch button.
Click that, and we'll get an error. It's all messed up because it crossed over itself. That's OK.
It's good to learn that now, that fusion forms need to not cross over themselves, or we get an error. That can be really frustrating if you're modeling along, and then get this error. So let's go ahead and click Return.
Now we've kind of messed up this file. Let's go ahead and click the X on Untitled, and click Don't Save.
