Adventures in CAD Modeling
Over the last week, I have been playing around with Fusion 360 for CAD modeling. I decided to make a car, as that is what I had been doodling anyway, and thought it would be a good intermediate project. In retrospect, I should have started with something a lot more simple. But I just went for it, and learned a lot on the way.
To start, I grabbed a 2D sideview sketch of the car I wanted to design. In this case, it was the Nissan GT-R that I went for after doing a couple of other attempts that went wrong. More on that in a minute.
The next step was to get the canvas to the right size; I made the canvas 200 mm to start. I then started using the Fit Point Spline along the outside of the sketch from the outside of the front wheel to the outside of the back wheel, leaving the underside incomplete. Once I had a decent Spline sketching, I then added two cylinders for where the wheels would go. After doing some initial shaping for the outside of the body, I deleted the bottom part of the cylinders that overlapped with the surface passed the ‘z’ axis. I adjusted the cylinder shapes to be parallel with the rest of the body. From there, I just used the bridge tool to start to patch together my surfaces.
Mind you, this is all for one half of the car. Once I completed the patchwork of body, my form was complete. From there, all I had to do was to use the Mirror function to duplicate the sides.
After the body of the car was complete, I just added wheels and face where the rims would be. I then jumped over to the Render and added some color to the car. I added the blue for the body, carbon fiber for the front grill, and made the car have one long window for the top.
This was my 3rd or 4th iteration of a car, and the only one where I was able to actual produce a working Form. All the other ones (I know now) failed because of overlapping planes. This was maddening, and I did not know what I was doing wrong, and tried for hours to remove any problem points or planes that could have been overlapping to cause this issue.
I also tried using the Repair Bodies tool to no avail. After hours of not being successful and trial and error, I ended up giving up and trying again. My final attempt was a bit different because of two things: I used less surface planes in the initial extrude (less possibilities of overlapping errors I figured), and I also made sure to no create any shape like the cylinders overlap in my initial creation. I just bridged the surfaced areas after creation, and that seemed to have solved the problem!
I am really excited about the possibilities with CAD technologies, and am hoping that I can continue with Fusion 360 because it was a pretty intuitive program. Excited to think about this program for real life applications and further into 3D printing functional pieces or art.
