After my boss saw my work with the model truck I designed up last week; he gave me another project that stumped him for some time. I have to re-create has got a very organic shape to it with only two faces that actually require specific dimensions. One face is at an odd angle, which is where he ran into the greatest difficulties.
With Fusion360, a feature allows you to import images directly into your project, which is perfect for drawing up already existing items. Because of this, I could take images of each face of the part using my phone, then uploading them directly into my workspace as canvases. From there, I can scale the image to the desired size by editing the imported drawing and defining two points to set the proper size.
I played around with a few different features to see what would work best but kept coming up with the same problem, and that was one of generating the 3D body. My initial thought was to use the loft toolpath using the two defined faces as starting points and connecting them via rails, which would outline the right shape. However, the rail guidelines didn't work, and I would only end up with a lofted part that connected the two faces using straight faces.
I briefly tried using the generative design section of Fusion360 to create the organic shape but abandoned the idea after some testing and found it was more for stress components and not generating the type of body I wanted.
By accident, I stumbled upon a feature in the loft toolpath that allows you to set how far each face should keep its pattern. I illustrated a quick example of comparing the two lofting methods. The drawing on the right shows the straight angled loft toolpath with no user interaction, and the example on the left shows you can move the faces forward or backward to hold that shape for a defined distance before morphing into the other face. Using this method, I was able to get a very close match to the part in a few moments, versus trying to draw it out manually.
All in all, if I had the project again from scratch, it would only take me about 10-15 minutes to have it all modeled up and ready to go!