One sketch into multiple parts of different lengths and orientations?

[RandScullard]

I'm new to Fusion 360, and parametric modeling in general (although I have a few years' experience with SketchUp). As my first project, I'm trying to model a piece of furniture built from various standard boards and moldings. I figured I would just create a sketch for each unique board and molding profile and then use these sketches to create a bunch of bodies of different lengths, representing my cut pieces of wood. Then, if I changed my mind about a profile, I could edit the sketch and have all the bodies update (while preserving their lengths).

The best I've come up with is to put the sketch on the ground plane (not touching the rest of the model), create multiple extrusions (manually entering the length of each), and use move/rotate to get each extrusion into place. I verified that I can change the sketch and the profiles of the extrusions change, so this does work, but it seems very manual.

I guess I was expecting to establish a set of 3D constraints along the lines of "this piece of molding has this profile and is the same length as the space between these two boards, and sits in the corner formed by these other two boards" and have Fusion automatically enforce these constraints as the design evolves. Is there actually a way to do this or am I dreaming?

[TrippyLighting · Accepted solution]

If you use the same profile many times in your design  that's one way to approach this. After you have extruded bodies, these need to be converted into Components.

Then  you can use the joints in the Assemble menu to constrain the parts in 3D space.

Here is the part from the learning resources that explains the difference between components an bodies.

[RandScullard]

Excellent, thanks for the link. I've also started messing around with the Parameters window and I can see now how you can dynamically link the dimensions of one part to those of another. I'm getting there...