Workflow: extruding non-planar faces

[Anonymous]

I'd like to find a way to extrude this face outward along its normals. 

Design history is turned off, and the features added have been "dissolved", to see if that helps anything. Is there a way to make this an even less parametric model? Is that even an issue? There may be a few things in the way of my understanding of how to do this, so thank you in advance for any help!

[lichtzeichenanlage]

What is your design goal? Adjust the fillet? Offset the plane? Perhaps this thread might solve your problem.

Switching of the history doesn't make any sense to me (experts might have a different opinion). Perhaps this just created your problems?

Rule of thumb: Do fillets / camfers at the very end of your design process.

[Anonymous]

Yes, I suppose it would be like offset plane, delete some faces, loft, correct any inverted normals, and stitch back together. That seems like an unnecessarily laborious way to accomplish what should be considered a regular extrusion, though, no? Is this simply a limitation of Fusion's extrude function?

Thanks for the help, I'm tryin to get the hang of it!

[lichtzeichenanlage]

I'm a beginner. I don't have experiences with other CAD systems. I don't know what you're final design should look like. 

My understand from F360 is, that chamfers and fillets are not the tools to create the design like you did in the screencast. IMHO the main pattern in F360 is create a sketch, e.g. extrude the profile, and create new sketches to manipulate the design.

[TrippyLighting]

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lichtzeichenanlage wrote:

Switching of the history doesn't make any sense to me (experts might have a different opinion). Perhaps this just created your problems?

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Not working with the timeline can be very helpful. I the Fusion 360 Team would not have stopped working on the direct modeling abilities this could be very powerful stuff. Just look at how Spaceclaim can do direct modeling but fully parametric!

[lichtzeichenanlage]

@TrippyLighting:Perhaps my post was too much black and white in my post. I had the current Fusion 360 in mind. I can imagine that direct modeling is a good thing and the videos of spaceclaim do look promising.

[laughingcreek]

 don't know if I would say it's a limitation of the extrude function.  By definition extrude only works on planner profiles, not curved surfaces.  You probably found that push/pull (offset faces) just changed the size of the fillet.  which under most circumstances is exactly what would be desired. 

Except in this case that's not what you're trying to.  Is the attached pic what you want?  In this particular case DM made or timeline mode doesn't really make a difference.  This is just an offset face, and then a loft, using the original face and the new face as profiles.  You don't have to do all that other stuff you mentioned (delete some faces, correct any inverted normals, and stitch back together.)

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much for the suggestions. I'm trying to use Fusion as a design process, not a pre-production tool. This is more of a general usage question, and the example is just something simple for demonstration. I'd hope to extrude much more complicated and faceted surfaces.

1) Below, I've tried your suggestion to offset faces and loft, but lofting each face would be exceptionally laborious for more complicated designs, and in addition, I do get reversed normals and do seem to have to stitch, and even then, the resultant body needs a boundary fill run on it. Surely I'm missing something here?

2) I would think that if it can (eventually) be done through offsetting faces and lofting and stitching, then the Extrude function should be able to automate the process in one step? Is this maybe a development oversight, or am I really misunderstanding something here?

Thanks again!

[laughingcreek]

Again, the "extrude" tool just works on planer profiles.  There's a lot of functionality built into the extrude tool, but a very important aspect of the way it functions is it takes the vector it extrudes along from the normal of the plane for the profile.

see the screen cast for the lofting I was talking about.  You do have to loft each face separately, but other than that it's straight forward.  You can directly offset thee because if a fuson interprets a surface as a fillet or chamfer, the that is who push/pull will treat it.

a note on the normal direction of a surface.  Once you stitch surfaces together into a solid, fusion will figure out which way the normal need to be.  You don't have to flip them manually first.  Fusion isn't like a mesh editing program (such as mesh mixer) where you can have an inside out body that acts like a negative space.

In cases where the edge your trying to push pull have a different geometry, push pull may do more what your thinking it should.  see next screen cast

[laughingcreek]

didn't insert screen cast-

[laughingcreek]

and another