Easter Egg Features

[Anonymous]

Is the plan to stick with having hidden features (import mesh, sculpt environment, etc.), that do not appear until a certain action has already happened? This has been very confusing so far for me. 

[James.Youmatz · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous,

Welcome to the Fusion 360 Community!

So this really confused me as well when I first started using Fusion 360. The big difference here is those features depend on what kind of modeling you are doing. By default, for most users, the parametric timeline is turned on. This means that you have history within your model and each move and command you perform on your model is tracked. It is really useful for creating driven models.

On the flip side, we also have a Direct Modeling environment (timeline turned off) in which you will see the Insert Mesh dialog. The sculpt environment by default is a Direct Modeling environment as T-Spline manipulation does not capture design history. If there is any confusion - think of this mode as editing a ball of clay. You are constantly pushing and pulling it to new shapes and there is no need to track every little change you make. You form your clay ball here, and then when you finish the sculpture (assuming there aren't any errors) it converts into a tangible body or surface where the timeline is applied again. 

To get those features such as Insert Mesh without going into the Sculpt Environment every time, you can do a couple of things. The first is just to turn off your design history all together and create your model with Direct Modeling. This has its pros and cons and if you don't want your entire project to be in Direct Modeling, this step probably isn't the best. To turn the Design History on and off, right-click the top-level model name in the browser tree. You will now see an option to turn on/off Design History. The second method (and probably best if you plan on having some parametric design), is to go into the Create menu and select "Create Base Feature". This creates one feature in your timeline with no history attached to it. Now you should see "Insert Mesh" and once done you can Finish Base Feature to go back into parametric mode. 

Let me know if this answered your question or if you still have any. If so, please do not hesitate to ask. Otherwise, please feel free to mark this answer as a solution, that way, others can benefit from this thread as well!

Thanks,