Work flow for bodies instead of sketches

[bENYWUZD]

Hi all,

I'm a beginner at CAD and a very new beginner to Fusion.

I've gotten the hang of applying constraints to my sketches to (usually) get the results that I want. For example, I wanted to create a shell of a dumbbell. So I created a sketch with three different adjacent rectangles and extruded them to different heights, then created more boxes inside in the sketch and used them to make cuts to hollow out the dumbbell.

But! Then I discovered the options to create bodies/shapes. Seems like a much faster approach to create a few boxes and then apply the shell option to hollow them out. I can manually drag them where I want, but I'm wondering if there are equivalents to the sketch constraints for bodies. E.g. if I want to lock the middle boxes midpoint to the outer two boxes midpoints. Or force the outer two boxes to be equal.

Is there a way to use sketch-type constraints on bodies? If not, is there a recommended workflow to achieve similar results?

[davebYYPCU · Accepted solution]

You have found the power of Fusion at an early stage, 

your workflow in the first paragraph is fairly standard.

Adding Components and Joints to that workflow will cover just about all modelling tasks in Fusion.

Your paragraph two, yep too good to be true, 

you have answered your own question, making box, cylinders etc, without keeping your sketch, is known as primitives, 

you end up with the body, but the originating sketch, (hidden by Fusion, I think, can be edited to change original sizes, might be wrong, as I just don't use them often)

but can't have additional information included.

You can align / move these bodies, and likely combine them, with snap points.

Constraing bodies - well you will need components and joints, or other assembly tools.

Comes down to the model itself, and choosing the better set of tools to get it done, 

Might help....

[bENYWUZD]

Thanks, Dave.

I'll keep the problem as open in case someone does know how to get to the
sketches of primitives. In the meanwhile, it's not too bad to extrude
sketches then apply the shell.

[TrippyLighting]

My strong recommendation is NOT to us the primitives in Fusion 360 as they are rather dysfunctional and I personally am wondering why they are still around in that state in a parametric CAD software. The limitations these have might not be apparent at first, but once you have used them in a more complex design that thy show their limitations it's too late and you'l have to start over.

[HughesTooling]

I think the primitives are there so new users can create something to look at quickly and get them hooked, you soon find they're not that useful though. The only way I've found to build something with primitives and not have everything come apart when you edit one is to make each one in a new component and use a joint to assemble. Although it's doable it's easier to use sketches if you want more then boxes.

Mark