I am on the Experience Design team for Fusion 360, and I would like to share an update about a new feature we have been working on. It adds new capabilities in the versatile set of Sheet Metal commands of Fusion 360.
Currently, the primary way of creating Sheet Metal parts in Fusion 360 is by creating flanges, which requires you to pull the edges off of a sheet and set parameters to get it to desired shape. With this new command - Bend, you will be able to easily bend the existing material along a sketch line. It will be a great aid for those who need to bring in an existing flat pattern in formats like DXF and create sheet metal components out of it.
Following animation gives a sneak peek into the easy workflow for Bend:
As you can see above, we have taken extra care to make the experience as simple as possible. For example, the bend side - i.e. which side of the bend line will be bent v/s which will remain stationary - is determined automatically depending on where the user clicks on the body. The side where you click remains fixed and the other side bends.
As soon as a face is picked, the selection automatically moves to next item and Fusion waits for the bend line to be clicked. This means that once you have a sheet metal body and bend lines ready, it will take only four clicks to create a bend.
Another cool thing about this command is how smart it is. The bend lines need not precisely touch the edges of the face. Our developers have worked hard to make it smart enough that even if the bend line is partially covering the face, it understand whether to bend it or not. This is particularly useful in DXF imports where coordinate precision is not guaranteed.
Additional options are provided for direction (up or down) and angle. Bend also takes care of creating necessary bend reliefs, which you can disable if necessary. Override mechanisms will let you alter certain properties of sheet metal rules.
We are super excited to see what our customers do with this. Do you think this will be a good addition to Sheet Metal features in Fusion 360? What improvements should we make in upcoming updates? Please feel free to share your comments and ideas, with any feedback once you have played with it.
Bend comes out soon in the March 2019 update of Fusion 360.
Cheers!
