Community
Fusion Design, Validate & Document
Stuck on a workflow? Have a tricky question about a Fusion (formerly Fusion 360) feature? Share your project, tips and tricks, ask questions, and get advice from the community.
cancel
Showing results for 
Show  only  | Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Is a 3D Sketch possible in Fusion?

8 REPLIES 8
SOLVED
Reply
Message 1 of 9
TheCADWhisperer
2237 Views, 8 Replies

Is a 3D Sketch possible in Fusion?

I need to select these two edges of a surface as guide rails for a Loft.

I cannot select them.

Is there a way to project them into a 3D Sketch in Fusion?

 

3D Sketch.PNG

8 REPLIES 8
Message 2 of 9

Hi,

 

Thanks for posting this one. I think the issue here might be that these edges are part of a connected ring. Currently we don’t have the ability to select part of a chain inside of the solid Loft tool, which unfortunately means you have to ‘break apart’ these edges in order to select them individually as loft rails. 

 

Two workarounds that might work for your example:

- Edit that sketch, and change the straight lines at either end of the loop into construction geometry (select, then right-click, and choose Normal/Construction). Once separated from each other, the two rails should be individually selectable.

- Create a new sketch on the same plane as that one, and use the Project tool (Sketch menu > Project / Include > Project) to project just those two curves. This should give you individually selectable copies of them.

 

In answer to your question: Fusion 360 supports 3D sketching inside any 2D sketch. To do this, you need to enable the option ‘Allow 3D sketching of lines and splines’ inside of Preferences > General > Fusion Design. You should now be able to snap sketch geometry to points in 3D, and drag existing 2D geometry off from the sketch plane with the Move tool. However, Fusion doesn’t commonly distinguish between 2D and 3D sketch geometry (only for special cases where 3D geometry isn’t supported), so I’m not sure this is the root cause of this problem.

 

Hope this helps, and get in touch if this doesn’t solve the issue for you,

 

Many thanks,

Jake



Jake Fowler
Principal Experience Designer
Fusion 360
Autodesk

Message 3 of 9
jakefowler
in reply to: jakefowler

And should just mention: we're actually working on updating the interface for the Loft command at the moment, and we've already taken this limitation into account in the redesign, so a workaround shouldn't be necessary once we've made this update.



Jake Fowler
Principal Experience Designer
Fusion 360
Autodesk

Message 4 of 9


@jakefowler wrote:

Hi,

- Create a new sketch on the same plane as that one, and use the Project tool (Sketch menu > Project / Include > Project) to project just those two curves.

 Jake


I should have attached the file.  That  image is not of a planar sketch - it is a non-planar surface body that I am trying to select two edges of as guide rails.

 

The edges are 3D curves.

 

In the attached file turn off the Visibility of surface bodies 1 and 2 (this is another frustration - they keep turning back on anytime a save is done).

Message 5 of 9

Ah sorry, my bad, I misinterpreted that surface as a sketch profile! Thanks very much for sharing the model.

 

In this case, I think you've hit a limitation that body edges can't be used as inputs for a solid loft. This seems like a reasonable request, so I'll see if it's possible for us to include this in the redesign work we do for Loft.

 

For now, you can copy these edges into a sketch using the Include 3D Geometry tool. I think you'll need to enable the preference setting I mentioned earlier. Then start a new sketch in your model (on any plane - it doesn't matter), or just edit an existing sketch, and start the Include 3D Geometry tool (Sketch > Project / Include menu):

 

2014-06-16_2003.png

 

Click the two surface edges you want to use as rails, and they will be copied into your sketch as 3D curves. Now you should be able to use them as rails.

 

If you're still having trouble, let us know!

 

Thanks,

Jake



Jake Fowler
Principal Experience Designer
Fusion 360
Autodesk

Message 6 of 9

I was able to get the 3D guide curve rails for the loft.

 

Vacuum.PNG

Message 7 of 9

Awesome work! And a great use of Loft. I'm interested to find out, how did you model the domed back end of the model? Those types of shapes aren't always easy, but it looks like you managed to control the surface very well, and get a great transition into the handle.

 

And just an FYI: in addition to the usability improvements I mentioned, we're also working on making Loft parametric-compatible, which should hopefully be ready in the pretty near future.

 

Thanks for sharing this!

Jake



Jake Fowler
Principal Experience Designer
Fusion 360
Autodesk

Message 8 of 9


@jakefowler wrote:

.... I'm interested to find out, how did you model the domed back end of the model? ....

 

Jake


I Lofted to Point with Tangency weight and Tangency to first loft.

For some reason I still get an error when trying to Embed a Screenrecorder on the HTML tab.

 

https://screencast.autodesk.com/Main/Details/0a69107e-e693-4142-9ef7-6db15beb9de3

Message 9 of 9

Awesome, many thanks for sharing the recording here!

 

Will follow up on the Screencast embedding issue.

 

Jake



Jake Fowler
Principal Experience Designer
Fusion 360
Autodesk

Can't find what you're looking for? Ask the community or share your knowledge.

Post to forums  

Autodesk Design & Make Report