Ozel 3D Printing with Fusion 360

Design for additive manufacturing, and level up your simulation and print preparation skills
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80323-702-2
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 438 Seiten

As 3D printing gains traction, the demand for CAD experts in manufacturing grows. If you're a fan of Autodesk Fusion and crave hands-on experience with automated modeling, generative design, and the full potential of additive manufacturing, this book is your guide to elevating your design and 3D printing skills.
In this book, you'll learn how to open CAD or Mesh files in Fusion and expertly repair, edit, and prepare them for 3D printing. You'll unlock the secrets of effective print preparation, learning about print settings, support structures, and part orientation. This book also highlights Fusion's diverse preferences designed specifically for additive manufacturing.
Subsequent chapters will guide you in choosing the right part orientation and position, as well as creating suitable support structures based on your chosen printing technology. You'll simulate the printing process to detect and remedy common print failures associated with the metal powder bed fusion process. Finally, you'll leverage templates and scripts to automate routine tasks around print preparation.
By the end of this 3D printing book, you'll be armed with the knowledge and skills necessary to harness the power of Fusion for additive manufacturing, meeting the growing demand with confidence.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ozel, Sualp

Fachgebiete

• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik EDV & Informatik Allgemein

Leseproben

1

Opening, Inspecting, and Repairing CAD and Mesh files

Welcome to this book, . Fusion is a great tool to create and edit designs using parametric or direct modeling methods. With the addition of automated modeling, generative design, and topology optimization technologies, Fusion users now have a plethora of methods to design for additive manufacturing. This book will provide the necessary steps for you to manufacture your designs with Fusion, using common 3D-printing technologies such as fused filament fabrication, stereolithography, selective laser sintering, binder jetting, and metal powder bed fusion. You will also get valuable tips and tricks on how to set up Fusion, which will allow you to get the most out of the software for your 3D-printing needs.

Fusion is a cloud-based 3D modeling, Computer Aided Design (CAD), Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM), computer aided engineering (CAE), and Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design software platform for professional product design and manufacturing (https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/overview).

It is available for both Windows and macOS, with simplified applications available for both Android and iOS. Fusion 360’s initial release dates back to 2013, which is around the same time that 3D printing became mainstream. During the 2010s, the maker community quickly adopted Fusion 360 for designing and manufacturing.

When manufacturing designs using 3D printing, mesh (STL) files were the only file types that early 3D printing slicer software would accept as input. As the maker community created and shared their designs publicly using STL files on web pages such as thingiverse.com, the number of 3D printable designs increased exponentially. Unfortunately, the STL file format has many problems and limitations. To fix those problems, the 3D printing community needed reliable and easy-to-use software.

Fusion always included functionality around working with both CAD and mesh files, making it a great tool for 3D printing. However, Fusion 360’s mesh functionality was offered as a technology preview and needed to be turned on within Fusion 360’s preferences. Autodesk – the parent company of Fusion 360 – releases new updates for Fusion 360 regularly. With the July 2021 update of Fusion 360, Autodesk made significant changes to the mesh workflows, by graduating the mesh workspace from being a part of a tech preview to being a part of Fusion's Design workspace.

Today, you can use Fusion to open, inspect, and repair mesh files that you can download from numerous third-party sources.

In this chapter, we will start by looking at the various ways we can bring CAD/mesh data into Fusion by introducing you to Fusion Team and the Fusion user interface. We will go over how to create projects and folders to better organize our data. Next, we will show numerous methods to insert mesh files such as STL, OBJ, and 3MF into Fusion. We will end the chapter by inspecting the mesh data we insert into Fusion for potential defects and repairing those defects automatically and manually.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Opening and uploading workflows for CAD models and mesh files
• Inserting Mesh workflows for STL, OBJ, and 3MF files
• Inspecting Mesh bodies and repairing them

By the end of this chapter, you will have learned how to open models created using other tools in Fusion. You will have learned how to insert mesh files into Fusion. You will also know how to inspect and repair mesh files using automatic and manual methods.

Technical requirements

Most of the topics covered in this book apply to all licensing levels (personal/hobby, start-up, educational, and commercial) of Fusion. However, the book will also cover advanced functionality not available to personal/hobby use licenses. Such advanced functionality will be identified as , and as appropriate.

Fusion has the following system-specific requirements:

• Apple® macOS:
  • macOS 13 Ventura – version 2.0.15289 or newer
  • macOS 12 Monterey
  • macOS 11 Big Sur
• Microsoft Windows:
  • Windows 11
  • Windows 10 (64-bit) – version 1809 or newer
• CPU, memory, and disk space requirements:
  • x86-based 64-bit processor (for example, Intel Core i and AMD Ryzen series), 4 cores, and 1.7 GHz or greater; 32-bit is not supported. Apple silicon processors require Rosetta 2.
  • 4 GB of RAM and 8.5 GB of storage.

Important note

A detailed list of system requirements can be found here: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/fusion-360/learn-explore/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/System-requirements-for-Autodesk-Fusion-360.html.

The lesson files for this chapter can be found here: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/3D-Printing-with-Fusion-360.

Opening and Uploading workflows for CAD models and Mesh files

Fusion is a cloud-connected CAD/CAM/CAE and PCB design tool. You can create new designs or open designs created in other tools that are saved as CAD or mesh files. In this section, we will cover all the ways you can open models created by other software in Fusion so that we can start getting them ready for 3D printing.

As Fusion is cloud-connected software, it has cloud storage and data-sharing capabilities built in. As a Fusion user, you automatically get access to a cloud-connected data storage and management tool called Fusion Team. This tool also allows you to administer your team of Fusion users by giving you tools for permissions, version control, markup, and comments. According to an Autodesk Knowledge Network article, Fusion users automatically get unlimited storage for Fusion data and 500 GB of data storage for non-Fusion documents. That is a generous amount of storage to tackle any project.

Important note

For more information on how cloud data storage works, you can refer to this article at https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/fusion-360/learn-explore/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/How-big-is-the-cloud-storage-for-Fusion.html.

After creating an Autodesk account and gaining access to Fusion, regardless of your licensing level, you can log in to your Fusion Team account (https://myhub.autodesk360.com/) and start your Fusion data management journey.

If you are an individual user, you don’t have to worry about changing teams. However, if you work for an organization with multiple Fusion users, your organization may have multiple teams already set up. For example, each user may have their own team. You can switch the active team by selecting the profile icon in the top-right corner of the screen, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 1.1 – My FUSION TEAM view with an OWNED BY ME filter applied

shows my Fusion TEAM view on a Google Chrome browser with the OWNED BY ME filter applied to the list of projects. If I were part of an organization with multiple teams, I would select the Profile icon in the top-right corner and change my active team to participate in a project stored in another team’s hub. also shows that, by default, we have two items that are owned by me – Assets and My First Project.

In , you can see that by selecting My First Project and expanding Project Details, we can edit the project name and image and manage members who can contribute to and view the contents of this project:

Figure 1.2 – You can rename projects on the Project Details screen

Once the project has a name we approve (in , I renamed the project 3D printing), we can take a look at various methods we have available to upload designs and other documents to Fusion Team and Fusion.

The first option we have to upload our designs and documents to Fusion Team is within the created project itself. As shown in , we are in a project named 3D printing, and we can select the blue Upload button to see the various options we have to upload things, such as File, Folder, Assembly, and From Dropbox. If we select File...

Über Autor(innen)

Ozel Sualp :

Sualp Ozel is a Professional Engineer and a senior product manager at Autodesk Inc. Sualp has 15 years of experience in planning road-maps based on market requirements to deliver timely enhancements to existing products and go to market with new offerings while meeting the market expected quality requirements. Since 2016, he has been managing Autodesk's Additive Manufacturing Software portfolio including Fusion, Netfabb, Netfabb Local Simulation and Within Medical. Sualp is also an adjunct instructor at Carnegie Mellon University since 2014, teaching the Introduction to CAD and CAE tools course within the Mechanical Engineering department.