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Naming components, sketches, bodies, etc. is a best practice in Fusion 360. Without names it can be hard to find things. Without meaningful names changing parameters is more difficult.
Sadly, Fusion 360 always makes naming an extra step and an afterthought.
Some examples based on my everyday use:
When I create a new component the focus is not obvious. Because tab takes me to the component name field, I would expect that the initial focus was the internal/external radio buttons. (I will create a separate post about this.)
1. When the component dialog opens the initial focus should be the name field and when I start typing it should automatically replace the default name without any selection of the default name required. I would in fact leave the field empty and only assign the default name if the user selects okay without providing a name.
2. The name field should be at the top of the dialog. The component name is really its most important attribute.
Creating a new sketch jumps right in to choosing the sketch plane. There are two issues with this that are easily solved by opening a dialog (which can be closed by just hitting enter to accept the defaults).
1. The user must later, as an afterthought go back and use multiple actions to rename the sketch. This means that many sketches will not have descriptive names.
2. The location of the sketch is in the active component, which might not actually be where it belongs. Often times the user is frequently changing the active component, mostly to the top level, in order to see many parts of the design at once. Moving sketches, bodies and other items to a different component later can be difficult and cause problems.
The solution is very simple, when a user selects create sketch open a dialog with two fields, name and component and put the focus in the name field because that should be changed. Let the user also change the component if needed. This is synonymous to the parent field in the new component dialog.
Features/Bodies
Timeline steps/features have the ability to be given names, but it takes quite a bit of extra work to do so. However, if the features are not named examining the timeline is much harder, and renaming there after the fact is painfully slow.
A simple solution is to put a name field in the dialog for the feature being created. It could be a fillet, extrude, loft, etc. and being able to name it during creation would make it easier to choose a good name and certainly easier than going back later and doing it in the timeline.
If the feature being created is creating a new body, which is usually a choice in the dialog, then the name should be used for both the feature and for the body being created. This really saves work compared to renaming later.
If the feature is not creating a new body, then it is probably modifying a body, such as adding a fillet. In this case, if the user elects not to give it a specify name then instead of fillet36, the default name could be "<body name> fillet36" which for most features would be useful and very helpful in the timeline. Both the timeline and the parameters dialog already tie features to components and show them that way. But a component may have many bodies and hundreds of features and providing the component-body-feature connection would be a huge help.
Again, when a new body is created during some operation, the dialog box for extrude, loft, etc should have a name. In many cases the name field should also be used for the feature and show in the timeline. The user doesn't have to change it, but they have the opportunity. This would be so much easier
Solved! Go to Solution.
