Fusion 360 Tutorials The Basics 3 Split Body, Circular Pattern, Pattern on Spline

Welcome back to another 3D printing tutorial for Fusion 360. I am Technivrus and you are in the right place if you are trying to learn how to make your own models to 3D print. Today we are going to be taking a look at a couple of different things. Namely we are going to be going back first to one of our previous models from a couple videos ago. As you can see this is the model that I made and right now it is pretty large. It holds, let's see, 12 bottles of paint and I actually have 14 on my counter right now so it obviously doesn't hold all of my paint. So I need another one of these but I don't need a whole one, I think I'm just going to print a half of one. I couldn't print one with any more slots because this pretty much takes up the whole build area of the printer that I have here. I could have used a larger printer, which I do have, but for demonstration sake this is actually going to work out pretty well. So our first step is to go in here and we want to, let's see where our planes are, we are going to make an offset plane and we are going to put it halfway through our model here. So if you click on, let me show you how to do this properly. So what I did was I went to construct an offset plane. There are a bunch of different construction things down here, we'll get into those one by one as we go. First one we are going to use is an offset plane and it is exactly what it sounds like. So I can select a planer surface or a flat face and then I can make a plane that is offset from that plane. The nice thing about that is I can sketch on that and then extrude from that as well. We are going to use it for a different purpose today though. I'm going to go to my top view because I want to make sure that this is somewhat symmetrical. Not down the middle here but the same gap on both sides and that looks fairly good. So I'm going to go ahead and leave my plane here. We are actually going to use this plane to split this model and the way that we do that is to go to modify and then we are going to use this split body. Not split face, we want to split the whole body. So the body to split is this guy right here, simple. The splitting tool, that is going to be our plane. So we select our offset plane and you can see we get this circular cut right here and basically that is telling us that it is going to saw this in half. So let's do it. Let's hit okay. There we have our cut line and we now have two different bodies. Body one and body two. Now we can take them separately and we can move them. We can rearrange them. We can go ahead and take, let's hit okay on that. We can take this and just turn it off and since it is not active in our scene, if I were to just send this to my printer, I would get just this piece right here if I were to export the STL and that's cool, that will work. Another way to ensure that I get just this piece right here is to use the method we talked about in the last video where you go to tools, make and then you are basically going to select that body and that will work as well. That is pretty simple. I like the split object tool. I'm not going to save this because I'm not actually going to print it. I don't really need, I'm going to print another one because I'll just buy more paint to put in those other slots. But we are going to, let's go back, undo, undo, there we go. So that is the offset plane tool and it is very handy for a lot of things such as our split body method. It's very, very nice to be able to just move that plane to wherever you want and then slice something in half. It works really well for breaking down larger models if you happen to need to make it smaller to fit on the printer without actually reducing the size. And since that was somewhat short and sweet, we are going to do another little tip and trick add on here I think. We'll go to new design and I think we will also look at a couple more of the pattern tools because they're pretty cool. So first we will look at the circular pattern tool. We're going to need to make a sketch and I'm not actually making anything in particular here. I just want to show you this. So we're not actually going to print this item, but I will show you anyway how to do this. So in order to use the circular pattern tool, you need a central point. The central point of this circle is what I'm going to use to make my circular pattern and I'm actually not going to use both of these shapes, I'm going to use just the center part right here. So what we're going to do is go to create here and we're going to find our circular pattern and it's telling us the objects to select and it's going to make us, in this case since we're still in the sketch, select them both. So we're going to cancel that real quick. We're going to hit finish sketch. We're going to grab this piece right here because that's what I want. We're going to extrude it, hit okay, then we are going to use the circular pattern tool here. But in order to do that, since we used our sketch, we don't have our center point anymore. We need one more sketch, we need to put a center point, well actually let's put it right here because I want to show you how to make it square as well. So there's our center point, finish sketch. Now we go to create, pattern, circular pattern, it's going to let us select faces. We're going to highlight this guy and if I drag it and select, it will highlight the whole thing which is great. And then our next thing we need to do is select the axis. You can use a line. You can actually, I believe, use the points here as well, yeah that will work. So we didn't really need that circle but if you want to place it somewhere particular, this is great because as you can see, if I select the circle, it will put it around it. And then it gives you this little menu here where you can select a number and if you select four, it will put them square, it arranges them equally spaced no matter what number you select. So if you select five, you get a nice little star shape and pretty much you can just go up from there. So at a certain point, your models are going to intersect with each other and that is okay, it will put them together and make this interesting ring-like shape here. So that is the circular pattern. So we're going to cancel, we're not going to use the circular pattern. Let's go back in and edit this sketch real quick because we're going to use something else. So I'm going to delete this circle entirely and I'm going to create a spline. Now the shape of the spline does not matter, I'm doing this strictly for demonstration sake. We're going to finish that sketch as well and then we're going to go to create, pattern. This time we're going to click pattern on path. We're going to select our faces. I guess it will allow us to select an object too. So let's select, I hate when I do that, okay five faces selected. Now we need to select our path. We're going to use this one. So we're making three, these are the parameters we're using. Right now it's changing my distance parameter. Let's do 15 of these and let's do them 20 millimeters apart. Maybe we can either make them follow the path direction or make them be the same direction. We need to make this the whole length of the path and you can see it kind of spaces them randomly because it is following the path. I didn't mean to hit enter there. If you accidentally close something, you can go down here to your timeline and this is our path pattern here. You can go to edit feature, bring that back up and let's see here if we can make this look any better. Let's try identical again. That is going to follow the spline exactly. We can make it come out both by clicking symmetric. We're going to go back to one direction and we're going to see how many it takes to get all the way to the end of our pattern here. Let's try doubling the length and we've gotten back around that curve. So we're going to need to do, okay, so there you see we have pretty much exactly our shape here. Now it did go one, two, three, four, five, quite a few past it, but you can kind of back them down the shape, down the spline here by dragging on a part of it. So what could this be useful for? Well, there are a lot of different things that you can do with this tool. It is nice to know that it's there. If you were to say make, let's say a helmet and you wanted to put studs or rivets around the outside of it, this would be a good way to do that in a particular pattern. You just simply draw in 3D and we'll get into 3D sketches soon. You simply draw in 3D a spline and then extrude the piece that you want to duplicate and basically use this to put it all along that path, however you want it to be. So it's great for a lot of different things. Pretty simple tool. As you can see, nothing to print from this video, so pretty straightforward. We will be back with another Fusion 360 tutorial coming up. I think in the next one, we're going to take a look at the create form option, which allows you to do some basic sculpting and modeling similar to Blender or some more organic modeling programs like that. So it's a very nice feature. I personally don't know all of the shortcuts and stuff for the create form. I haven't played with it too much, but there are some cool things in there that I know you can do and I'd like to show that to you as well. So stay tuned for the next video. Don't forget to leave a like on this video. As always, subscribe, subscribe, subscribe, and again, I will put a link to our Discord channel down below. Come along, join the discussion. Feel free to send me a private message. I try to respond to everybody in a timely manner. It does get a little bit overwhelming sometimes, but rest assured, I'll get back to you eventually if you have any questions or if I don't answer you, odds are it's because I'm getting that question a lot and you'll probably see a video about it soon. Thanks for stopping by, guys. As always, I am Technivorous and I'll see you in the next one. That's going to be it, guys. Thanks for stopping by. If you'd like to become a Technivore, don't forget to hit that subscribe button down below and YouTube's suggesting a video for you right here and there's a playlist right here that's just 3D printing stuff. Also, if you'd like to see your name up top with the rest of my Patreon supporters, head over to www.patreon.com slash Technivorous. 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