From the course: Fusion 360 Essential Training

Making shapes nice - Fusion 360 Tutorial

From the course: Fusion 360 Essential Training

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Making shapes nice

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- [Instructor] If you look anywhere around you, you will notice that you don't have a whole lot of sharp edges on things that you touch. Tables, chairs, all sorts of things have what are called filets or chamfers on them to make them a little bit nicer. This is just a very simple table modeled in Fusion which is the four dash three ample file. And you notice that it has sharp edges. There's also some other things on the bottom that I will point out later. This is not necessarily a table that we would have in real life, this would be terribly sharp if it were just a perfect perfect edge. So, if you go up to Modify, and to Filet, and click on one of these top edges, you can define a filet, which when you bring it in adds a nice round edge. I'm going to make that an edge of four. You now notice that this edge right here goes up and flows into this edge right here in a tangent connection. If we filet this edge now, we can drag this down, something like that, to a two millimeter filet. If you see this filet is smaller than this one. This blends still as a nice blend here, but this has a different sort of transition from this edge to this edge which is governed by this filet. Now, we have a couple of filet commands on our timeline. If we double-click one of these and we go try to filet something else, we can't really click on it. We can always add more filets here, but with the filet that you want to edit, you can hold down the Control key and you see that that filet now disappears as you press the Control key. With the Control key pressed down, you can now add edges to the filet as much as you want. Now, when I add a four millimeter filet to this and click OK, we have a problem with our two millimeter filet that we created down there, it's no longer valid. So, I'm just going to right click and delete that. Filets make things nice to touch. You can also create a chamfer which is kind of like a filet, but you'll see what the difference is is that a chamfer is a non-tangent connection, it creates essentially a bevel, but just like we said in previous videos, you can use anything as an edge. So, you can chamfer something and then filet it later to get a cool effect like that. The last thing I want to point out is on the bottom of the table. So, these are perfectly serviceable legs, but filets not only make things nice, they make things stronger. If I were three D printing this table, this would be a weak connection point specifically in how consumer three D printers work, laying down layers of thermoplastics, this very abrupt edge would be a place where I would expect these legs to break If they were flexed at all. When I drag the filet out, and I can actually drag it quite a bit out, maybe to a four millimeter filet, you can now see that we have material between the upright and the bottom of the table, and this material right here makes this much much more strong when it is three D printed or prototyped. Let's look and see what a chamfer will do. A chamfer like this when it is on a shape like this actually adds material as well. This is actually a stronger shape than the filet for three D printing. What this means is is that this is a very defined boundary between the leg and the table of a constant thickness. This for the filet kind of tapers out a little bit and it's difficult for three D printers to get to this very nice tangent connection here, but both of them add material to make it stronger. So, just some tools that are very very popular with people, people love filets and chamfers to make your designs a little bit more nice and strong at the same time.

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