Mirroring and Re-positioning Planes

[Anonymous]

Hi guys! I am making glass bed corner brackets to hold the glass in place on my 3D Printers. Two need to be made one way, then two more need to be made to mirror the other two for left and right. I cannot figure out how to mirror something without the mirrored body being attached to the original on some plane. I do not normally store left and right bodies in the same file, so I want everything to be separate. I am sure there is a way, but I haven't found it.

Also, when copying a body, say 5 inches from the other one, then deleting the first one, how do you get the program to understand that the center of the universe is now 5 inches away from where it was before? Annoying when free rotating it around that its center is 5 inches from where I would like it to be. My solution was to move the body I ended up with to an approximate 5 inches, but doing that, its just a guess.

Thanks again!

[etfrench]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Hi guys! I am making glass bed corner brackets to hold the glass in place on my 3D Printers. Two need to be made one way, then two more need to be made to mirror the other two for left and right. I cannot figure out how to mirror something without the mirrored body being attached to the original on some plane. I do not normally store left and right bodies in the same file, so I want everything to be separate. I am sure there is a way, but I haven't found it.

Also, when copying a body, say 5 inches from the other one, then deleting the first one, how do you get the program to understand that the center of the universe is now 5 inches away from where it was before? Annoying when free rotating it around that its center is 5 inches from where I would like it to be. My solution was to move the body I ended up with to an approximate 5 inches, but doing that, its just a guess.

Thanks again!

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I guess the first question is why do you want everything separate?  Do you actually need mirror images or would a circular pattern (4 parts) work better?

It's also not a good Fusion 360 practice to delete objects.  When moving objects, it's best to use joints and second best is to use the align tool.

See Rule #1 for a good Fusion 360 workflow.

[davebYYPCU]

no file, picture or scast.

Few things come to mind, modelling as built saves a heap of grief, 

Draw the simulation of the printers bed,

World Origin in the centre of the bed, 

would one bracket not not fit all four corners?

Make your bracket, use bed Origin planes to mirror.

Make a bracket, save as stl, then user slicer to mirror.

For your questions, 

place a construction plane at the required distance from the object and use it for the mirror.

Save separate, use Save As. 

You can't move the file Origin, only bodies or components, and sounds like Rule 1, could fix that, not totally sure what you mean either.

Start to Move the object, a dimension window gives you the distance highlighted in blue, type in the required distance.

Might help....

[Anonymous]

no file, no screencast.. because these are generic questions.

You have a left hand and you have a right hand. You want the right hand file to be separate from the left hand file so you can present them separately. Having both of them in the same file means a whole passle of problems that the end user just doesn't need to be exposed to. One item, one file.

Would one bracket work on all corners? NO.

Adding the print bed into the mix would help me how in the pursuit of the idea above? I like it though. Hadn't thought of doing it that way, primarily because of the generic question of:

HOW DO YOU SEPARATE THESE THINGS INTO SEPARATE FILES? I am relatively new to this program so trying to figure out how to copy from one file to another. Even if that works, I still need to Mirror. Use the slicer to Mirror? No. I have this awesome program called Fusion 360. It has a mirror function, but it is not ready for prime time. It needs the ability to mirror items XX distance from the original. It does not have that capability that I can find, that's why I was asking about it. As far as I can tell, you can mirror but they will be together on at least one plane with no choice in the matter.

So, I went about it.. right hand mirror to left hand, then delete right hand. Now you are left with Lefty. Righty is saved in a separate file. Lefty however has a problem. It is not on the center of the world plane. Its over to the side which means it behaves differently than Righty. Hard for the end user to understand why Righty and Lefty are not acting the same Plane wise.

I am sure there is something I am missing. This isn't a Fusion 360 problem unless the mirror function really doesn't have the ability to separate the two items by some distance. ANY distance. And then there is the world plane issue. I want to be able to pick any pixel on the map and choose THAT as the new center of the universe (primarily because of the lefty/righty thing above). 

If that doesn't explain this problem, I will provide the files for sure. I want to understand this and what to do about it. Thanks again!

[etfrench]

Separating the left and right side into different files is OK if you're in Direct Modeling mode.  It is not a good way do it parametrically (Timeline mode).   In Timeline mode it's usually best to keep all of your objects and sketches.  Try using Rule #1, it will make it much easier to work on larger complex models.

As to the how of separating items into separate files, just copy the item into a new file and save the file. 

The mirror tool will work with any offset you desire including the center of your 'righty'.  The only requirement is if there isn't a plane at the midpoint of the mirror, then you have to create one.