From Sketch to Model

Before I started going into Fusion 360, I had a crazy idea of what I wanted to make. I wanted to create a 3D model of my motorcycle’s exhaust. Getting on the program gave me another story. Tutorials after tutorials, I just couldn’t figure it out. I ended up making a Starbucks cup with a straw that was right next to my computer.

The process was long but simple. It was a lot of deleting and starting over. Most of the time, I got one thing right and messed up the other. I hit ctrl+z and tried again. My challenge was the vocabulary used the program. I knew what actions I wanted to do, but I didn’t know specific terms. So, it ended up taking me more time to translate what each command meant. For example, I wanted to make a cylinder more like a cup where the diameter of the top circle is larger than the base circle. I didn’t know I had to use the “tamper angle” tool. I just didn’t know the specific term for it. YouTube and Google were my best friends.

I recorded my entire process of creating the 3D model. It was roughly 3 hours long, starting with an attempt to make the exhaust. I trimmed and speeded up the video, and it’s down to 44 seconds. It doesn’t show all the commands I hit, but it’s a short capture of the overall process of how I created it from scratch.