Further thoughts on Fusion 360

From a previous thread;

"I've tried Fusion 360 but gave up when I couldn't work out how to put a line of a given size into a specific area!,"

I've been pointed in the direction of Lars Christensen regarding learning how to use Fusion 360 and must admit that his videos are a real eyeopener!

Having watched

**LINK**

I've reloaded Fusion 360 and will learn to use it as per Lars tutorials.

Brian

Brian, another good tutorial series on Youtube is by Paul McWhorter. He takes you through several simple projects, covering the basics.

Chuck

Many thanks Chuck, I'll take a look.

Brian

plus 1 for las Christensen learnt a lot from his videos and a member from this forum who came and spent an afternoon with me and time on line helping me dont use as much as i should its great if you have cnc machines

i use e machine shop to draw and cambam for my programs

Geoff

Yes when i was starting fusion, i followed lars videos too. Coming from solidworks, i found some of the ways of fusion odd.

I have watched both paul and lars and learnt a lot from them but paul had only learned the basics of fusion himself not long before making the video series( also made a good arduino series as well ) and as much as i love watching lars he does get a little excited and can drift off topic a little . Someone mentioned the youtube videos made by Brad Tallis from Autodesk on another forum i frequent and i found his tutorials a little easier to understand .

They're good, but not really for beginners. He covers a lot of material in 75minutes, which would probably be better in shorter chunks.

Does anyone else here prefer a book to video tutorials? I find that watching video tutorials is a very slow way of learing. By the end of the video I forget the earlier parts. To follow one I have to have the video on my laptop next to the computer running Fusion. I then watch part of the tutorial, stop the video and try to replicate it on the live program, sometimes having to rewind the video and try again. Then I go on to the next part.

Following a tutorial in a book I can go at my own pace and also experiment with alternative methods as I go. It then seems to sink in better.

Russell

I got a 3D printer last November so I had to learn a 3D CAD program to make any decent use of it. I had been reasonably proficient on an ancient copy of Rhino but that stopped working under Windows 10 and the upgrade price was quite steep for my pocket.

So I chose to go with Fusion 360 after looking at a few others and the learning process has been close to head banging. The video tutorials on Youtube have been a help and certainly give a good overview of what is achievable with the program. But when I actually got down to drawing up my own designs I found the videos of quite limited use since if I wanted an answer to a specific problem, trawling through hundreds of videos to find an answer was impractical. So I found that typing the problem into Google and looking through the answers became my main method of learning - the Autodesk Fusion 360 support blog usually came up with an answer. Or I just thrashed around in the program itself to see if I could hit on a solution.

I now feel I'm getting somewhere but it took several weeks of banging my head against a wall until I started getting results. One thing I am finding out is that its parametric rules can provide some peculiarites in 2D sketching which I've never found in 2D CAD programs so I'm having to find ways around them. But I'm getting there.

Jim.

Edited By Jim Guthrie on 02/02/2019 11:28:37

Edited By Jim Guthrie on 02/02/2019 11:29:02

The first tutorials I looked at were from the early days of a series called Fusion Fridays by NYC CNC ***LINK***. The later ones started concentrating on CNC. I also recommend the LIVELARS series, as already suggested.

I then found an excellent source from Autodesk Community Philippines entitled Fusion 360 Monthly Challenge. Each challenge takes the form of a relatively simple bite-sized model that requires the use of one or more interesting and useful techniques. The video series are the solutions, which are presented in a very full and easy to understand manner, with each action described and justified. Although it appears that you should register and take the monthly challenge, that is not necessary. Just watch whichever ones are of interest. ***LINK***

Thanks for the links.

I got this book :- Autodesk Fusion 360 Black Book by Gaurav Verma and Samar Malik. Its print on demand in black and white or colour. Various versions and sources. Make sure you get the second edition. Best value is single volume version. Also found in two volumes which cost pretty much twice as much! AbeBooks was cheapest for me.

If you are signed up to Scribd its worth a look to see what you are getting.

Blurb says its a tutorial by experienced teachers. Nope, not a tutorial. In the real world it a pretty crap book. Production values are poor. Most of the pages on mine have skewed text and the black and white screen shot illustrations less than plain. Probably worth shelling out the extra for the colour version. If you saw it in a bookshop you'd have to be pretty desperate to buy it.

But if you are looking for a book on Fusion you are already pretty desperate by definition.

Think of it as the missing manual with naming of names and just about enough description of functions to fill in the gaps or act as aide memoir after a video tutorials. Some of the writing seems almost English as a third language too which doesn't help. Would have been much, much better if they had given up on the purely theoretical tutorial organisation and made it a pure missing reference manual style. Then it might have been close to the help files with Vectorworks, i.e. not good but fightable through when needed. (Having both the last version of the manual that came with Vectorworks Mechanical and the help files derived from it in the later versions I know just how much better dead tree format is for this sort of thing!)

The faults are unsurprising really as the blurb implies the authors are experts in just about every mainstream and near mainstream CAD program. Usual experts at being experts rather than knowing what they are talking about. But it is what it is and appears to have everything covered.

To be continued

Clive.

Continued with chatting about video tutorials.

My issues with on screen tutorials are:-

1) You need two screens. One to work on and one to follow along.

​2) You have to work at their pace, very difficult to stop, re-wind and go through "that bit" again. Rant mode On :- Will someone please write an app to download tutorials with an effective step back X minutes / seconds button control not a pathetic slider. Sliders are hard enough with a track ball. How mouse pushers manage I don't know. Rant Off.

3) Never a really clear path of where you are going and how to get there. At least in education things are usually aimed at some sort of exam. Might learn things you never need (All together now "Calculus was a waste of time, never used it in 50 years" but at least its structured and hangs together. Tutorials tend to be "lets do this interesting part today."

4) Presenters style has to mesh with your style. Its very hard for presenter working on their own without audience feedback or producer scrutiny to get the tone right. When working in "lets do this interesting part today" mode its very hard to spot bits missed out that folk who haven't done a vital earlier one.

5) There are about six different starting points for folk of different skill sets and experience levels. Grumpy Ole Guy wot has been machining for mumble mumble years (me!) needs a very different approach to bright eyed bushy tailed 15 year old doing design and technology classes. In particular folk like me see everything 3D as built up from 2D views but Fusion is, of necessity as the future is CNC, arranged the opposite way. Make a 3D object, can produce 2D views if you insist.

6) Experienced old farts tend to want to fly a supersonic jet almost before they can walk! So easy to forget how far you have come from drawing a box in MacDraw (or your equivalent) an how difficult that was but how wonderful the result seemed.

I'm not a teacher. Never could be one as I don't have classroom management skills but I have been an instructor. And a good one too! So I know just how hard this sort of thing is once you hit the coalface. I also know just how easy it is to muck things up good and proper with the wrong approach for the audience. Bin there, dunnitt, got the tee shirt, wrote the book and resolved to do better in future.

As always my issues are mine. Your mileage will differ.

​This years plan is to try and set proper lesson schedule. Trying to pick it up as and when hasn't worked.

Clive