topic Re: How to import hand-drawn outline in Fusion Design, Validate & Document Forum

How to import hand-drawn outline

SGoldthwaite — Thu, 13 Aug 2015 15:29:33 GMT

I have a profile drawn on a piece of paper and I want to recreate it in Fusion 360 sketch so I can make a model from it. I can scan the paper easy enough and get a pdf, tif or jpg file. I don't expect fusion to create the sketch automatically, I assume I'll need to trace the prifile when in sketch mode. But I don't know how to get the drawing in Fusion. FYI - Below is what my drawing looks like.

Re: How to import hand-drawn outline

James.Youmatz — Thu, 13 Aug 2015 15:53:15 GMT

Hi,

You can insert this drawing as a canvas. In the Insert menu you will see an option for "Attached Canvas". Click that and it will open up the Attached Canvas dialog box. Select the face you would like to attach the canvas to (it seems as if you picked an orthographic view for your image, so I would probably pick either the XY, XZ, or YZ plane as your face depending on what viewpoint you are trying to reference). Then select your image file. Also, if you want to change the size of your canvas once it is inserted into the layout, you can right click your canvas in the Browser Tree and select "Calibrate". This will then allow you to choose two points on your canvas and specify the distance inbetween those points.

Hopefully this suggestion helped you! If so, feel free to mark this answer as a solution so others can benefit from this thread as well. If you would like more clarification or this didn't work for you, let me know. I would be more than happy to help!

Thanks,

Re: How to import hand-drawn outline

SGoldthwaite — Sat, 15 Aug 2015 15:12:01 GMT

That's helpful, thanks. So I created a sketch, and selected that as the plane when inserting my image. This worked fine. The problem I'm having now is I want to trace the line out on a sketch, but when I go into edit sketch mode, my canvas disappears.

Here's a link to my file: http://a360.co/1TFPsPG

Re: How to import hand-drawn outline

Anonymous — Sat, 15 Aug 2015 17:15:33 GMT

Hi Scott, it sounds like inserting of the canvas was done after the sketch you want to edit and trace in. As you may recall on the nature of the timeline, going into a sketch in edit mode, such that major additions can be done, requires that everything created after that sketch disappears so that temporal feedback loops are not created, which could threaten the universe as we know it 😉 Fortunately insert canvas events in the timeline can be easily dragged back in time ahead of the sketch to edit without complaint from what I can tell.

Also there might be a better way but what I've done when tracing an inserted canvas is reduce the canvas opacity so that the sketch curves I'm creating are visible.

Jesse

Re: How to import hand-drawn outline

SGoldthwaite — Sun, 16 Aug 2015 11:45:04 GMT

I forgot about Fusion's features to keep the iniverse in balance. I tried moving my image in the timeline so it was before the sketch, but I couldn't get it to move, so I just created a new sketch, and now I can trace it.