Creating shells to make puzzle

[harrison.friedes]

I've began teaching myself Fusion/ I'm trying to create and 3D print a 4-inch puzzle for decoration separating the pieces by color group:

I traced the image in Illustrator since there seem to be too many unique arcs to manage properly in Fusion 360.

Imported over to Fusion (svg) and made sure all my desired lines were connecting.

I want the base of the puzzle to be made out of black material. So I copied the sketch and put it on a parallel offset plane 4mm below the original sketch and then extruded the black areas 8mm towards the original plane.

My plan was to extrude out each puzzle segment by 4mm towards the base-plane and turn each one into a 0.5mm shell to create the "puzzle piece holders", and print the object as one solid (black) base.

Then I would have created the puzzle pieces to fit into the puzzle holders.

I'm running in to a lot of problems creating these shells and am having trouble figuring out what is going wrong.

Some puzzle segments won't extrude at all, and some will extrude fine but connect to other puzzle pieces when I try to create them into a shell. Some, more than I expected, won't create a shell at all. Probably because of the small corners.

I don't mind starting over if anyone knows a simpler way for me to go about this. Basically I want to create a black base that the color pieces can snap into. To simplify it I want to make any connecting colors into one piece .

Any advice appreciated. I could have gone wrong at any point from Illustrator to extruding but I tried to be as careful as I could and check my work.

[TrippyLighting]

The purpose of CAD is rally accuracy and precision. Whether this is because you're original imported geometry was already imprecise when you created it or if it got altered during the export/import process is hard to determine.

It is advised very often not to create these simple things in another vector graphics application but  with the sketch tools in Fusion 360, It might be cumbersome and slower do do so but provided you make use of constraints it will have a much higher chance of success.

What I see in your design does not look like proper sketch and it is no surprise that the sketch engine does not recognize certain profiles for extrusion.

[TheCADWhisperer]

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@harrison.friedes wrote: 

I traced the image in Illustrator since there seem to be too many unique arcs to manage properly in Fusion 360...

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Your import was rubbish - so I would go back to sketching in Fusion.

You do not (and should not) need to sketch all of the geometry in one sketch.

Think of each piece boundary as a "layer".

You can create each sketch for each piece layering them by Project Geometry common boundary edge from previous sketch. I have a general rule of 7-10 entities per sketch. (Not a hard and fast rule set in concrete, just a guide.)

Following that procedure - I don't see how it could possibly take any longer to trace the image in Fusion than it does in any other program? Does the other program (incorrectly) find the edges for you?

I see about 30 minutes of work.