Fusion
No, the coil and I think the cube and sphere are not parametric and will not update with the model. What you can do instead is use a surface sweep with a twist angle instead of the coil and it will update.
Coil is one of the Primitives in Fusion 360. All Primitives lack a profile sketch so they are hard to redefine. @wmhazzard suggestion to use a Surface Sweep is your best bet, fully redefinable and can be used quickly to create a coil of any cross-section. In the short Screencast I show what I mean.
John Hackney, Retired
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@chris.eganY2EK3 wrote:
If the surface sweep tool has a rotation feature, why can't that be made to work with the solid version? Having to sweep a surface to generate a new path to then sweep a solid through seems like quite the convoluted workaround.
The Solid Sweep tool does have a Twist Angle option but that will distort the profile. With a Surface Sweep you are only developing the sweep path for Solid Sweep tool to apply the profile. This method does not distort the sweep profile. Below is a solid sweep of a circle with a twist angle. Notice the distorsion.
John Hackney, Retired
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@wmhazzard wrote:
No, the coil and I think the cube and sphere are not parametric and will not update with the model ...
That is only partially true. The primitives in Fusion 360 are semi parametric and that can make them dangerous to use.
The implementations of at least some of the primitives actually use the sketch engine and sketches. My "favorite" primitive is the box primitive.
When you start it you are asked to select a plane to sketch on and once selects you can start sketching a rectangle.
The dimension fields actually allow to reference a user parameter, if you've defined one:
Lets say you use the same user parameter for both dimensions of this sketch:
and then hit the enter key or right-click with the mouse, you are presented with a box with 5 arrows for resizing, and a UI panel to enter dimensions.
There are a few things to note here:
- A box has 6 sides, not five, right ?
- The UI panel only has three fields, but we have 5 arrows ...
- The fields for length and width have a dimension of 50 mm. That is the value of the user parameter I defined, but not the expression. So those two fields to NOT reference the user parameter anymore and if the user does not notice this, a change to the user parameter will not result in a dimensional change of the box. We can of course edit these fields and replace the value with a user parameter. Then the box will be parametric.
Of course, that leaves one question unanswered: What direction will the box grow/shrink in when we do change these user parameters. Theoretically we can define dimensional changes in 6 directions, however, that is hard to control with only three fields. - Length, width and height refer to the "upright" orientation of an object or more to what the human definition of "upright" is. Some CAD systems come out of the box with Y-up. So there height refers to the Y axis ? If a Fusion 360 user does not use Z-up does that mean height there refers to Y-up ?
No, because length width and height are fixed to X,Y and Z. That is also how these axis should be labeled.
IMHO a serious update to all of the primitives in Fusion 360 is long overdue, so they are actually become useful beyond me "having a field day" with the box primitive.
