topic Re: Cannot draft "some" surfaces but others work fine in Fusion Design, Validate & Document Forum

Cannot draft "some" surfaces but others work fine

rzlotnik — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 17:19:25 GMT

Hello everyone. I am finalizing a design for kicking off injection mold tooling and I have a few faces that just refuse to draft, even though the rest work fine! I cannot figure it out no matter how much I try.

Here are the surfaces that will not draft (including their error that do not offer much information to help). I am attaching the file.

Re: Cannot draft "some" surfaces but others work fine

TrippyLighting — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 17:44:35 GMT

@rzlotnik wrote:

I am finalizing a design for kicking off injection mold tooling

If you run a Modify->Compute All,

you'll find that there are 19 warnings in the timeline of this model.

If you click on the yellow warning triangle, it will show all the missing references that cause these warnings.

I would recommend to start this from scratch. Then model from the beginning with the proper draft angles applied and not trat it as an afterthought.

The timeline should only be 1/2 or 1/3 of what it is now.

Re: Cannot draft "some" surfaces but others work fine

rzlotnik — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 17:50:42 GMT

Thanks for the quick reply. The irony is that this was all just done as a fresh design from scratch and I've been drudging through it for the last 2 weeks without stopping! I have only used Fusion for the last 2 weeks so it's been like drinking from a firehose and I was so anxious to get to the finish line now. The 2nd irony is that when I tried exactly what you said about doing draft angles first, I actually started that way but caused me worse nightmares because any time I needed to make any face modifications, the drafts messed everything up on any touching surfaces.

This file is a separated part of the main file where I have a top and bottom case housing. I tried to split them to make the file smaller but I see on your screenshot that it is referencing the case top.

The idea of starting from scratch again and wasting 2 solid weeks of non-stop sleepless nights is not the direction I want to go when I need to simply make 3 walls draft. There must be another way!

Re: Cannot draft "some" surfaces but others work fine

jeff_strater — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 18:57:48 GMT

well, the easy way to get rid of all the errors is to convert to Direct Modeling. But, just be aware of what that means: Your ability to edit the design is compromised. If the design is nearly where you want it, and you won't need to go back and edit sketches, features, etc. then this can be an easy way to get there.

As for draft, draft is not magic. There will be some geometries that just will not draft sometimes. Here is one workaround for one of the faces that sometimes works. I cannot guarantee that it will work for others, especially non-planar faces...

The basic idea is to create a copy of the face, manually draft it, then use Replace Face to bring the modified face back into the solid.

(view in My Videos)

Re: Cannot draft "some" surfaces but others work fine

jeff_strater — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 19:00:12 GMT

also: restarting a design from scratch, as @TrippyLighting suggested, can be a good exercise all on its own. I've found many times that the resulting design is MUCH cleaner, and always easier to do. I usually find that re-doing the design takes half the time or less, than the original design. Not saying you should do that in this case, but it is a good learning experience, IMO.

Re: Cannot draft "some" surfaces but others work fine

rzlotnik — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 19:26:39 GMT

Thanks for the feedback. I do in fact want to restart it from scratch eventually as a learning guide. Short history is that I already had a fully vetted design that I had made in Sketchup (don't yell at me. 🙂 ) This is my first time going into a production environment for injection molded design and the company that quoted my design used STEP files that I had converted in FreeCad and they did not mention about any manufacturability problems until AFTER we kicked them off. I was not aware of all the design differences for injection molding so the entire project is on hold while I had to redo the design from scratch in Fusion360 and without prior experience, and watching about a month's worth of online training in a week and then tackling it but jumping into the ocean of sharks, here is where I have landed. I honestly have not quite caught on the whole history and connection to the sketches and I have no problem trying your good idea to go to direct modeling. I will watch that video and hope it can help me. Thanks for your time and patience with a newbie! 🙂

Re: Cannot draft "some" surfaces but others work fine

jhackney1972 — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 22:22:28 GMT

The process I propose is the same as @jeff_strater suggested but with a method to keep the new body, created for the Draft operation, in place. It makes the process much easier. You will see in the video I had to play around with the Pull Direction Face but you will get it. Basically select the face on the line between the new body and the existing body. Your model is attached.

(view in My Videos)

Re: Cannot draft "some" surfaces but others work fine

g-andresen — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 21:44:35 GMT

Hi,

@rzlotnik wrote:

The idea of starting from scratch again and wasting 2 solid weeks of non-stop sleepless nights is not the direction I want to go when I need to simply make 3 walls draft. There must be another way!

I wonder if, given your (limited) experience with Fusion, you consider suggestions from experienced users to be unacceptable.
The time you spent creating a buggy version in no way supports this argument.

Günther

Re: Cannot draft "some" surfaces but others work fine

rzlotnik — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 21:54:09 GMT

That absolutely does work! Wonderful and thank you so very much for the detailed video. I learned a lot from it.

Re: Cannot draft "some" surfaces but others work fine

TrippyLighting — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 22:37:47 GMT

There is a lot more wrong with the model than just the inability to draft!

The video will still need to process for another 30 minutes in the high rez version:

Re: Cannot draft "some" surfaces but others work fine

rzlotnik — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 01:53:49 GMT

@TrippyLighting , That was a most informative and excellent educational tutorial that taught me a lot about cleaning things up. I was aware of most of those problems, however I was not aware of selecting multiple surfaces to delete together so that is likely why I was unable to deal with most of those. Thank you so much for spending your valuable time to help educate a new learner. This is an overwhelming process for someone new and you have really helped me! Instead of downloading your fixed version, I did it myself in parallel. It's better to learn by doing it yourself. 🙂

BTW, what software are you using for recording your screen and voice together to make that video?

Re: Cannot draft "some" surfaces but others work fine

TrippyLighting — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 09:40:31 GMT

@rzlotnik wrote:

BTW, what software are you using for recording your screen and voice together to make that video?

I use OBS Studio. It is free and creates high-quality videos. As far as I know, it does not have any editing abilities.

I don't usually edit these videos, but that can be achieved easily with the free version of DaVinci Resolve.

Re: Cannot draft "some" surfaces but others work fine

rzlotnik — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 15:35:55 GMT

Thanks. I will look into that. Very useful!