Nesting Help - Force same Thickness

[jimmyjames213]

Any way to force items of different thicknesses to use the same sheet thickness? For example i have parts ranging from .125 to 1in and want them to land on a 1/8in sheet........ I have lots of 2d files from over the years when thickness wasnt important (2d plasma).....yet it's becoming a show stopper for nesting. Any advice on how to easily convert them to a standard thickness or better yet tell nesting to ignore material and model thickness? 

Thanks for the help

[javiar]

@jimmyjames213 ,

Unfortunately, we do not allow thickness overrides today during nesting. It is ideal to have your design always be the single source of truth. If the thicknesses are inconsistent, you can update them in the model to avoid confusion in the future about why components got nested with incorrect material thicknesses.

However, I completely appreciate that it is not realistic to have these ideal scenarios all the time. For example, when manufacturing multiple one-off designs from your customers, you probably care less about updating their model thicknesses to correct these minor variations. Plasma cut parts are a great example where such overrides can be very helpful. We would need to consider potential impact with sheet metal flat patterns where thickness is critical piece of its bend properties. And also for woodworking parts that could have pockets/dados/grooves and other 3D features.

Several users have requested this control and we are currently weighing the pros and cons. We will keep you posted as we make more progress on this. Thanks for your input.

Regards,

[jimmyjames213]

I understand that the design should be the source of truth and I agree. I have been updating these models so that they are all the same thickness. I was doing uniform scaling before, now using non uniform for x and y.  My workflow involves designing an item (usually exploded text "words/sayings") then scaling them to multiple sizes to have a small/med/large version.
This has resulted in two weird bugs. 
1. it selects the wrong face for nesting so it tries to nest on the "thin side" of a sheet metal part so my "thicknesses" are 20+ inches instead of .125........weird..... everything is in the xy plane and even the preview in the "component source"  view also shows the "front face" correctly...... no amount of rotating will fix it. So however that is being calculated is breaking things. It does seem to work ok for me on rectangle items.....but not on exploded text. 
and
2. However when scaling items I get a rounding error somewhere despite having everything extruded to .125 and using "non uniform" scaling (for x and y...leaving z alone)  this is reaulting in values of .125 if i "measure" it but alues of .1250001 when I load up to nest. So using the model for the "source of truth" sounds great in theory but unless you guys want to track down every possible rounding error in fusion (good luck) I suggest another way of handling this.

let me know if you need files, I also dont mind screen sharing and walking you through my workflow. (I'm a software PM in my "day job"). 

[JennayOakHill]

Had a similar issue recently and found a slightly cumbersome work around.

Export profile to DXF and open the file in Inkscape, then save as SVG and import back to Fusion.

It would be nice if fusion allowed us to choose the face when something is wrong.

[MattWynn]

@jimmyjames213   You can now override nest material in component sources to force items of different thicknesses to use the same sheet thickness.

@JennayOakHill you can use nest preparation to pick the face to orient a component for nesting, see video Fusion 360 Help | Nesting and Fabrication extension | Preparing for nesting | Autodesk and documentation Fusion 360 Help | Select types to nest: individual items | Autodesk .

[JennayOakHill]

Ahhhh, that helps. Thanks mate.