Lab 1 Reflection – Making a die in fusion 360

Sam
Mon, 19 Sep 2022 01:05:00 +0000
Lab Assignment, Week 1, 3D modeling, fusion360

I have no experience with 3D modelling, so learning Fusion 360 was a bit daunting a first. Just controlling the camera was a struggle, let alone actually modeling. Since a die is a simplistic object, I wanted to make sure that I included a lot of details. One of the challenges I set for myself was to bevel the edges of my die. It is impossible to have a die with perfectly flat edges so I wanted to make my die more realistic. A bevel is a slope that falls between the horizontal and vertical faces of an object. While beveling the edges of the die makes for a cool effect, I was struggling to manually add in the beveled corners. However, what I discovered is that Fusion 360 has a built-in option for curving edges that looks better than beveling. Using the Fillet function helped make my die look a lot cleaner.

Fig 1. bottom view of the die without curved edges

Fig 2. bottom view of the die with curved edges

One problem that gave me a lot of trouble was texturing the faces of my die. The default steel texture might look good on a water bottle or fridge, but I don’t think it is appropriate for a die. I wanted the traditional black and white die faces. While I was able to navigate the interface and find the appearance function, I initially could not figure out how to implement the new textures. Apparently, all you need to do is drag and drop the texture you want.

The last step I took was rendering my object in higher quality. I highly recommend this, it looks especially good if you are using a metal texture. In the top left corner of the fusion 360 you can find a menu called “Design”. Clicking on this will open a drop-down menu where you can switch to the rendering view. Then click on the Teapot to generate a realistic render of your object. I am not sure how fusion 360 operates but rendering is typically GPU intensive. So, If you have a large object with many faces, it might take your computer a long time to finish rendering.

Fig 3. Render menu selection

From what I’ve learned, fusion 360 seems like a versatile tool for 3D modeling. I can see its utility as a tool for preservation (like we discussed in class). I am really looking forward to using it again.

Fig 4. front view of the die rendered at a higher quality