Copy sketch between documents.

[HughesTooling]

If you want to import a sketch or DXF and have it easy to edit you can use Copy & Paste in the sketch. First edit the sketch you want to copy, select all the curves, right click and select copy.

In the design you you want the copy, start a new sketch or edit an existing one, left click the origin when it's selected right click and paste.

You should now have a copy in the new design.

Mark.

[michallach81]

Could you make a screencast, because I think that there's no way to copy between different documents (New Design).

[HughesTooling]

I'll do a screencast later, they don't work on my Win7 pc.

The steps to copy are.

Right click a sketch and edit, when the sketch is open select all the curves you want to copy, right click and copy.

In the document you want to paste into start a new sketch, with the sketch open left click to select the origin with the origin selected right click and select paste.

Mark.

[michallach81]

Great, I never would guess that I need to pick origin to be able to copy. Thanks!

[HughesTooling]

The odd thing is you need to select something in the destination sketch for paste to show in the menu, if there are some other entities in the destination sketch you can select any of those as well.

Mark

[HughesTooling · Accepted solution]

Here's a screencast to demonstrate.

Mark

[Anonymous]

Sometimes you have to draw a line or something in the destination sketch, and left click it to make paste available in the right click menu. https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/ideastation-request-a-feature-or/copy-and-paste-between-projects/idc-...

[Anonymous]

It looks so easy in the screencast, but it doesn't work in my design.

Any other solutions?

[Anonymous]

The enclosing thread explains a good way to copy and paste sketches between documents. However I have found there are a few more steps needed to make this a reliable procedure that produces clean, portable results.

See this tip...

[shdwlynx]

The key for me was to select the individual lines that make up the outline of the shape(s) in the sketch before right-clicking and selecting the Copy option.  Then I was able to Paste into the new drawing.

If you try to select the shapes themselves (for instance, the center of a circle rather than its border) then they will not Copy and Paste anything at all.  I consider this a bug or, at minimum, a design flaw in the software as it's completely unintuitive to have to select the outline rather than the shape itself.

[tedj1]

I find copying and pasting very problematic too.  If you just do a quick rectangular selection, copy and then (selecting the origin) paste, it'll look fine for a moment, but the instant you try to modify something, half the detail vanishes.  So I try to select every detail visually then copy, but since I find it impossible to find and select each and every constraint, dimension and other detail, what you get after pasting is a pathetic subset of the original that you copied.  The difficulty is individually selecting EVERYTHING for the copy.  Is there a way to definitively select every detail that is part of a sketch before the copy?

[tedj1]

The real problem I get from a rectangular selection before the copy is that all referenced dimensions (functions of other dimensions within the sketch) get screwed up, because the dimension IDs change during the paste, but the function references do not.  d1 may become d620 after the past, but the ref still says d1.  To solve that (though it's a cheap fix), I just change those to their hard number equivalents before the copy and paste.  Then I can go back and (with some labor) change the hard numbers back into functions of the new dimension IDs.  Not pretty, but works.  The problem is that other dimensions of other sketches in the destination already occupy the referenced dimension numbers/ID.

[HughesTooling]

One way to copy a sketch to another document would be create it in a component then copy the component to the other document. Not quite the same a coping into a sketch but would be a way of copying the whole sketch and all dimensions and constraints.

Mark

[chrisplyler]

---

@shdwlynx wrote:

The key for me was to select the individual lines that make up the outline of the shape(s) in the sketch before right-clicking and selecting the Copy option.  Then I was able to Paste into the new drawing.

If you try to select the shapes themselves (for instance, the center of a circle rather than its border) then they will not Copy and Paste anything at all.  I consider this a bug or, at minimum, a design flaw in the software as it's completely unintuitive to have to select the outline rather than the shape itself.

---

I don't think it is either a bug or a design flaw. You're talking about selecting the Profile, which is Not the same as the lines which contain it. A Profile, in F360, is not an element. It is the result of the software looking for any closed loop of elements. So it isn't something you can "copy."

Even if you could copy it, pasting it would result in nothing without having a closed loop of elements to paste it into. And you wouldn't need to do that anyway, because if you already had a closed loop of elements in the destination sketch, the software would show a Profile there already.

Once you think about it like that, you'll see that it's kind of a DUH thing.

Now, maybe what you mean is that you mean to say is that you wish the closed loop of elements would auto-select when you clicked on the Profile. I won't comment on whether that's a good idea or not, except to say that it does present some challenges. If you have overlapping or nested closed loops of elements, should clicking on a Profile select only the elements unique to that one, or should it select those and also the elements shared with adjacent Profiles?

[tedj1]

My Message 11 was somewhat in error.  The curves were actually there, they were just way off in la la land due to the references problem.  I would have edited the original message, if I could find a way.  Oops!  Now I see the way to edit a posted message.

[smeharg]

This example is Fusion 360 in a nutshell, the basics are out the window, theres NO continuity in workspaces, Hell they even Change the name and rearrange Menus, so even if you happened to find an answer to this specific detail you wouldn't know how to get to it as the workspace names are now changed and the menus renamed. For the love of God Why OH WHY Can't I just copy and paste from one project to another without having to find the mysterious combinations of clicks or draws or inserts or.... or..... its always something. OHHHHH but wait don't go in a different workspace because whatever worked in the one you were in, its a new fun mystery to solve in the new workspace because for some reason it's different. I know I know let's see some examples, I spend enough time screwing around looking for my problems to solve how would I get anything done if I had to make videos every time something wasnt intuitive or had some Tekken 12 Button mash combo to get it to work. Come on Copy..... paste.... It's Basic and I am starting to rethink putting much more effort In figuring out what programmer of the day decided to do "whatever" a different way.....COPY........PASTE...... I can move it from there, Don't get me started on rotating a cylindrical object, or figuring out how to get loft to do what I want by just trying random combinations until it kinda sorta worked but not really. This is every day with every new project. I just want to make my part not how to relearn the same thing 10 different ways. That's my rant take as you may.

[harrelsontrumpets]

Tell me about it. Fusion 360 developers have been screwing with the layout, functionality and inner workings since day one. I once lost around 120 hours of projects that I had designed because some smart ass programmer changed a rule that erased my entire project folder on the server. The people at 360 are unapologetic and less than helpful. I subscribe only to use a few functions, which happens maybe three times a year. The software has become useless to me thanks to a group of people who think its funny to constantly change every little thing. Unless I watch 4,000 hours of videos, then ask 259 questions about why the videos are not relevant, then submit 112 video examples showing my issues are in fact real, then waiting on 247 genius programmers to submit 354 snarky comments, I won't be able to draw a line connected to a curve that doesn't disappear on step 32.

Yeah, I'm pretty much fed up with this bs. I moved to Inventor two years ago and stopped using all Autodesk CAM options as they nearly crashed multiple machines. Now I'm running Inventor with InventorCAM (from SolidCAM) and can't get that to work half as well as my RhinoCAM system from 2008. It seems the software solutions available today not only cost too much (I have over $40k invested), but the programmers can't get out of the way of the user long enough to allow us to do our work. On one of my twin spindle lathes with live tooling, it is literally 5 times faster to write all gcode myself rather than attempt anything in Inventor or Fusion 360.

Autodesk had some great ideas, then they killed them with other great ideas that stepped on other great ideas that eventually sent great designers running back to older solutions that are faster, easier and overall prone to fewer headaches.

[uroscadez]

Yes, this works: 

Right click a sketch and edit, when the sketch is open select all the curves you want to copy, right click and copy.

In the document you want to paste into start a new sketch, with the sketch open left click to select the origin with the origin selected right click and select paste.

It is a little odd though that you cannot just copy paste the entire Sketch itself, as it would have been much more 

intuitive. I would not have figured this out if it wasn't for Mark's clever post. Thanks Mark. 

I hope Fusion will improve this in the future. 

Uros

[Anonymous]

I go thru the steps exactly, but I  don't get the paste option in the target sketch... don't understand.