Fusion 360 Product Design Extension

Fusion 360 Product Design Extension

The Product Design Extension is aimed at making the design process easier and more intuitive. This new addition to Fusion Extensions offers some very handy tools including Boss Creation, Geometric Patterns, and Plastic Rules to name a few.

The new tools are mostly focused on the manufacturing of plastic parts, and are therefore found in the “Plastic” tab available in the Design workspace, this contains the new tools, as well as some of the more familiar ones.

Plastic Rules

When designing plastic parts, we want to keep our designs within certain parameters, not only for manufacturing processes, but also for design practices. Plastic Rules allow us to use parametric modelling to configure various rules which define Material, Thickness Range, Draft Angles, Nominal Radius and Knife Edge Threshold. Once we have configured these settings, we can assign it to each part or component in our design. This makes use of the Parameters inside of Fusion, and automatically fills the values in as we design.

This will kick in as soon as you start adding features, whether they be Fillets, Shells, Drafts, etc.

Boss Creation

Using the boss tool will require having Plastic Rules configured for the parts involved. To placing a boss down, all you will need is a Sketch Point, preferably on an offset or mid-plane. Once you have chosen the sketch point, you can choose the Offset Position from the plane, Diameter of the boss and Fastener, and Direction of the Boss.

During the creation of the Boss, you have the option to create a component from the Fastener chosen. You can choose from a library of fasteners based on various standards. The configuration options include the Head Type, Drive, Length, Thread Angle, Diameter, Material and Surface Finish. Fusion will then add the fastener as a new component to your file.

Geometric Patterns

The Geometric Pattern tool allows for the creation of more complex patterns. We are given default objects that we can choose from (Sphere, Cylinder and Cube) or our own custom objects.

These can then be patterned in various distributions Square, Rectangle, Hexagon, Circular, or Radial. The Geometric Patterns allow us to control a variable called Size Limit, which sets varying sizes for each object in the pattern from the inside, out. And as with any pattern we can Join these bodies to existing ones, Cut them or create new bodies.

This opens the ability to create some visually striking, and very practical patterns with a few simple options.

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