Fusion 360 FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS

[I_B_Jones]

Hello.
I like Fusion 360 (F360). I've some experience with other CAD tools, but am relatively new to Fusion 360.
But I find the tutorials/help/documentation seriously lacking in explaining some of F360's fundamental structural concepts, so
In the context of FUSION 360 please will someone explain to me:

1. What is meant by the terms:
a) Project (I assume it is its normal meaning - e.g. a cohesive, managed body of work).
b) Design (I assume this is "the Fusion 360 design" for a Component, probably consisting of Parameters, Planes, Sketches, Bodies, (sub-)Components, Joints etc., Drawings (??), ...)
c) Document - what in F360 terms is this?
d) File - what in F360 terms is this?
e) Drawing - I've not used this F360 function yet, but I assume its a configured drawing of some aspect of a Design, c.f. a set of Plans, cross-Sections, etc.

2. What does Activate (a Component) do, and what are its advantages, disadvantages?
So far I understand that:
- There is always exactly One Component 'Active', but another can be Activated instead at any point.
- Newly created Sketches, Bodies/Components are created in the currently Active Componenet.
- It's a real pain when you forget to change the Active Component and things happen in the "wrong" context. Correcting that can be tricky.

And I suspect Activate could be automatic and invisible to the User. Indeed, I suspect it's really a complete red herring and that what really counts is the dependencies between objects (Parameters, Sketches, actions (like Extrude, etc.), Bodies, Components, Joints, etc.).

Like other Community Forum postings, I find the Fusion 360 Tutorials etc. good on specifics (e.g. Sketching), but poor on explaining the fundamental concepts and the wider context around articles. They seem to assume the reader already knows Fusion 360 well!! Which rather defeats their purpose.

[TrippyLighting]

Good questions! 

First of all as you most likely already know Fusion 360 keeps all of it's data in the cloud.

A "Project" in Fusion 360 terms is basically a Folder that contains al the files pertaining to one or more designs. These don't necessarily have to be all Fusion 360 native files but can be basically any format that A360 can store.

"Design" refers mostly to a Fusion 360 native 3D model. that can either be a single component or an assembly of several components. Fusion 360 as opposed to most other CAD systems does not make a distinction between an assembly file or a component file

"Document" and "File" in Fusion 360 are the same as in the rest of the IT world.

A drawing a 2D representation of a #D model. This is nmostly uset to convet information for manufaturing and comntains information that is hard to capture in a 3D model file. That includes dimensional tolerances, geometric toleances, surface roughnesses etc.

Sometimes and unfortunately the terms Drawing and (3D)  Model are used interchangeably here on teh forum.

Correct, you can only have one component or (sub-assembly) active. A sub-assembly is a collection of components in a larger assembly. Not sure that is a good explanation. Imagine the data structure of a larger assembly like a tree structure, where the leaves are the components. 

Also correct is that sketches and everytig els you creat - with very few exceptions - is created in the active component. The difference between a body and a component gets many people new to Fusion 360 necomers to CAD and experienced pros alike. It did me in as well, but I had build some time for failing into my learning expectations.

I agree that is is currently very cumbersome and often impossible without majotr rework to re-locate items that were unintentionally created in the wrong structure because one forgot to activate the component. There ia not isadvantage to always activating the comonent you want to edit. there are many disadvantages in not doing that.

I wish for better tool to manage the timeline as it can be a bear to deal with sometimes.

The timeline and in particular how to fix problems is one area that is utterly underrepresented in teh documentation.

Since the last update Activae" is automatic for newly created components. A very welcome change IMHO.

When you edit existing sketches and features you don;t need to actvate the component these are located in. However, if you want to add a feature e.g. with the tools in the "modify" menu you better activate the component. I do have to say hat this becomes second nature quickly.

I am not sure "Activate" can be fully automatic, because depending on what you design and how you want your model to function it can make sense to not put a sketch into a particlar component but in the upper level structure. If you use the sketch to locate (assemble, join) components, to sketch poins/entities, then it makes more sense to not put it in a specific component.

Now, after reading these question and you post in the other thread I can understand the source of your frustration!

Many people prefer to dive right in and do stuff, rather than to at least start with a little theory and trying to understand some underlying abstract concepts. That's more the audienc these tutorials are geared towards.

I personally would also like it much better if for example the difference between a Component and a Body would at least have been referenced briefly right in the first sketching tutorial!