Working on a 3D design project today and got to explore some more of Fusion360's design features!
I was tasked with re-creating a vehicle only product images provided by a third-party source. I have no access to technical drawings and wouldn't even know how to use them properly to re-create the car's 3D model.
I started this project a couple of weeks ago and had mostly finished the model; however, there were some small design changes my boss wanted me to make machining it easier. One was to make the top cab half of the vehicle parallel from the bottom base to the roof, to contour the whole top piece with a single swarf toolpath.
The whole upper cab consisted of a 3D surface and was tapered from top to bottom, so conventional "block" modeling wouldn't work in this scenario. I ended up using a loft toolpath and drew two reference sketches to pull the model from. This created exactly what I was looking for, and I had vertical lines connecting the two surfaces.
One of the problems I ran into, though, was making small edits to these 3D surfaces, like the top roof of the cab, which had a crowned shape from one end to the other. I was brought into the whole 3D design world primarily using what I call the "block modeling" method; the basic idea is you start with a sketch, pull it into a 3D model, from there, I either add or subtract from the design until I get my desired shape.
I started looking more into the different design capabilities of Fusion360 and found that the surface modeling would work really well for my purpose! The surface design method creates flat planes, intersects with one another, and then trim and stitch what you have leftover to create a solid model. Compared to the solid modeling method, you can only create solid objects and aren't able to remove faces.