Symetrical Extrustion

[jhackney1972]

Change Fusion 360 symmetric extrusion option by distance to be the total extrustion distance rather than half.  In Autodesk Inventor if you want to extrude a sketch symmetrically about the sketch plan you enter the total extrustion distance not half of it.  Fusion 360 forces you to either type a mathmatical distance or figure it in your head.  Cut out the extra step.

Example: I sketch a rectangle and I want to extrude it symmetrically about the sketch plan by 40mm.  I should be able to type in 40mm in the distance field not have to divide by two to get 20mm on each side.  Pretty easy here but to do one that is a total of 411/64" distance, I have to type extra characters in the distance field to do the math because I am not that fast on doing this in my head.

The two applications should match anyway!

[roambotics_scott]

Agreed - it's easy enough to do d/2 but total distance would be a nice convenience

[kb9ydn]

You should be able to do either one really.  In some cases I want to extrude a given distance "d" in two directions, meaning that the final length will be "d*2".  But other times I want to end up with a total length "D" with the extrusion plane in the middle, meaning that the extrusion distance will be "D/2" in two directions.  The difference is just which distance you are concerned with.

Though I must say, it's almost trivialy easy to type "/2" after the dimension

C|

[roambotics_scott]

Definitely can't argue on the /2 🙂

[mcnurlin]

@kb9ydn I agree that is an easy option during feature creation. But later when you've been away from the design for a while the dimension that pops up will make little sense.

This is the only CAD system I've experienced that handles symmetric extrusion in this fashion.  The primary reason for using symmetry is to leave a plane in the center of the feature for downstream features.

For example if I were designing an ice chest I may start by sketching the front and extruding with symmetry. I would have very little interest in knowing what half of the depth of the ice chest was. Then when I go add the features for the handles and drain I would have a plane down the center of the ice chest to reference. Later in the design phase an adjust might need to be made to fit the ice chest in a box or to optimize the shape to fit more units into a shipping container. I can quickly see the dimension I need to work with, not half of the value. Having the plane in the center means that my design will change with my original intent and the handles and drain will remain in the center of the ice chest.

I know there are other ways create an ice chest I was just using this as an example.

[kb9ydn]

This is getting somewhat pedantic, but wanting to have the extruded sketch centered in the feature is a separate thing from how you want to specify the size of said feature, by a total distance or by an offset from the center that will be half of the total distance.  That being said; if you want to specify the dimensions by offsets from the sketch plane, you can use asymmetrical and just set both dimensions to be the same.  So if symmetrical extrusion can only use one method to specify it's size, it would make more sense to use the total distance as opposed to the offset from sketch distance.

And it would be more consistent with existing CAD programs (not that that's automatically a good reason to do something).

C|

[haughec]

This is a good suggestion.  We're currently making a number of enhancements to Extrude (improved Termination options, extrude from offset plane, more).  We'll look into this one as well.

Thank you,

Charles

[haughec]

Update: the ability to input the entire length of an extrusion is part of the Extrude enhancements already underway.  We're hopeful that this will be released in the next few months.

Thanks,

Charles