topic Re: Emboss projecting in irregular ways in Fusion Support Forum

Emboss projecting in irregular ways

Andrew_Nielsen — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 09:36:09 GMT

I'm having trouble with emboss not producing regular shapes despite the sketch being square, regular, and squarely aligned to the target surface. The target surface is perfectly spherical (I sliced the sides to help highlight the issue, though this will occur regardless). The resultant emboss is always skewed and asymmetric. I require the shape to be perfectly regular.

Exaggerating the length of the projection geometry highlights the issue. It also occurs with less significantly wrapped projections, though it's less visible.

Any thoughts on what's going on / how to fix it?

Re: Emboss projecting in irregular ways

jhackney1972 — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 09:51:14 GMT

You will need to attach your model so the Forum users can take a look at you specific model situation. Open it, select the File menu, the Export and save to your hard drive. Use the attachment option of a reply post to share.

Re: Emboss projecting in irregular ways

Andrew_Nielsen — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 10:25:57 GMT

In this example, the plane of the sketch was created with a single-point+tangent method, though the same behaviour exists with offset planes from the origin.

Re: Emboss projecting in irregular ways

jhackney1972 — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 11:12:37 GMT

The effect you are seeing is due to the fact the surface you are trying to Emboss to is a compound angle. The design you are trying to achieve may be able to be created using Surfaces. I will attempt it when time allows.

Re: Emboss projecting in irregular ways

jhackney1972 — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 12:06:24 GMT

I did a quick illustration model, using the same size sphere, but not the complete sketch shape you had just to show the process I believe you will have to use. The Sweep profile can be anything you desire. Take the timeline apart and you will understand the basic process. Model attached.

Re: Emboss projecting in irregular ways

TrippyLighting — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 15:03:58 GMT

Depending on what exact results you are looking for, this can be a lot simpler:

Re: Emboss projecting in irregular ways

Andrew_Nielsen — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 02:46:06 GMT

Thanks for looking into this, John and Peter. Both of you have ended up with essentially a face split and preset sweep shape solution. While the canned shapes appear to work, custom profiles consistently fail. For whatever reason, the geometry won't subtract correctly.

I've tried different methods to subtract the resultant sweep, and they all result in the glitched body which appears solid.

John, I like your contour flange approach. I guess you saw how it doesn't quite produce the geometry that I'm after, but I will remember that method for the future.

I think it should be considered a problem if two very reasonable approaches to producing the desired geometry result in buggy behaviour.

I'm reluctantly thinking that I might have to peruse the surface modelling approach.

Re: Emboss projecting in irregular ways

Andrew_Nielsen — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 02:46:43 GMT

Re: Emboss projecting in irregular ways

Andrew_Nielsen — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 09:43:40 GMT

Update: I've found that exporting the version that "won't cut properly" from the image above to STEP, and then reimporting it results in a shape that renders correctly (not a good workflow). This suggests that it theoretically could work and is possibly just a rendering glitch that needs attention. Oddly, exporting to STL doesn't produce the correct shape.

Ultimately I've ended up surface modelling the form I need based on offset surface split shapes. Not great, but allowed me to achieve the desired geometry. Thank you John (@jhackney1972) and Peter (@TrippyLighting) for putting me on the path.

Re: Emboss projecting in irregular ways

99_elite_seekers — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 17:03:09 GMT

I know this is an old thread, but I came here looking for answers to this exact problem while trying to emboss a sketch onto a cylindrical surface for a 3-d print. The square sketch lines come out all crooked on the surface:

@Andrew_Nielsen , did you ever figure out a proper solution? In your export/import work-around, are you performing the export & import prior to any embossing, then performing the emboss operations on the imported file?

Thanks

Re: Emboss projecting in irregular ways

TheCADWhisperer — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 21:04:07 GMT

@99_elite_seekers

Can you File>Export your *.f3d file to your local drive and then Attach it here to a Reply?

Re: Emboss projecting in irregular ways

99_elite_seekers — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 01:57:52 GMT

Yep, attached. To be clear, I'm unlikely to actually print this as is, so I'm largely unconcerned about its printability... I use this general design as my personal "benchy" to learn new modeling tools, as it incorporates a wide variety of operations, so I'm using it to learn Fusion's features.

Re: Emboss projecting in irregular ways

Andrew_Nielsen — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 04:20:30 GMT

With my inport/export method, I performed the operation with resluting buggy results, then exported that buggy shape to step. When reimporting the shape, it then rendered correctly (but obviously loses it's design history).

As noted, my solution was firstly to learn surface modelling which I got quite good at, then to switch to Solidworks.

Re: Emboss projecting in irregular ways

TheCADWhisperer — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 04:23:46 GMT

@99_elite_seekers wrote:
... to learn new modeling tools, as it incorporates a wide variety of operations, so I'm using it to learn Fusion's features.

@99_elite_seekers

You are building a house of cards on a foundation of quicksand.

Your first sketch is not fully defined.

Your axis of revolution is not horizontal.

Re: Emboss projecting in irregular ways

99_elite_seekers — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:00:02 GMT

Thanks so much! It would be my very first object created in Fusion that I screwed up 😅

I fixed that by adding constraints and went through every subsequent step of the history to correct resulting errors and double checked the constraints of all sketches (BTW, is there a way to detect under-constrained sketches?) and re-aligned the tangent sketch plane.

Unfortunately, there still seems to be something wrong 🫤 I'm sure it's something I've done... this is my first attempt at using Fusion.