Brushed Metal 3d Texture?
There is no easy way to do this. It is going to be somewhat painful and the model will be slow, because of the huge amount of geometry that trying to model something so intricate will produce. However, if you are patient, you can probably do this with a pattern. Don't attempt to do this with sketch pattern, no matter what you do. Create a small patch of the pattern that can be repeated in solid, then repeat it using Rectangular Pattern (from the Solid tools). Use Face Pattern type, if possible. Even then, it may take quite a while to compute. And, IMO, you should try to use as big of a texture as you can - the finer you try to make it, the slower it will be.
You might be better off to model the basic shape in Fusion, then use something like Blender to add this texture (I am not familiar with Blender, so this is just a wild guess that it will have tools for this type of texturing), and use that for 3D printing.
Jeff Strater
Engineering Director
I don't think that is possible. The only way I know how to get real 3D textures into Fusion 360 is through Blender and (quad)meshes. However, a brushed metal texture is so fine that it would likely create an extremely dense mesh that would be too large to be converted into a T-Spline.
You are better off exporting your design as a mesh and applying that texture in Blender or Meshmixer.
I personally would probably use Blender and a displacement texture.
Most renders use bump, or normal maps to fool the eye into believing there is actual 3D geometry.
Only a displacement map can actually displace geometry and create a real 3D texture.
For a brushed metal texture you likely need a lot of geometry. Millions of polygons!
This tutorial is several years old and Blender's UI has changed, but the general concept still works.
