Using an attached canvas - Fusion 360 Tutorial

- If you work in an environment with industrial designers, you understand that hand sketches are still a critical part of the design development process. 3D modeling is a wonderful thing, but it's great to be able to capture the designers intent, right from the get go. Using attached canvases inside of Fusion 360, we can take digital versions of those hand sketches and leverage them to help develop the design. I'll start the attach canvas tool, and then, select Insert from my computer, to browse for digital versions of these hand sketches. I'll open one and attach it to a plane. Zooming in a little closer, we can see the image has been brought in. We also have the manipulator that we'll be seeing a lot in this course, or I can move the image or scale it. In this case, I want to be careful to select the corner and drag it scale that will scale equally in both directions. I'm just going to rough this in. But let's take a moment to look at the dialog. The Canvas opacity allows me to turn up or turn down the level of opacity, for the image in the canvas, I can choose to display the canvas through the model. So as I'm developing the 3D model, I can still see this reference through it. Here are your specific scaling functions, including the ability to scale X and Y equally from the dialog. And you also have tools for flipping both in the dialog and on the screen. If the image comes in with the incorrect orientation for the way you want to develop the model. For now, I'll just say okay, and I'll see a canvases folder has been added to the browser. But very powerful tool, for really leveraging the work of the designer, is the ability to make that image, the precise size that you need, or at least very close. If I right click and select Calibrate. I can select two points on the image and tell Fusion 360, what distance should be between those points, to scale the image up to that size. Now I can come back and edit the canvas again, I'll turn on my origin planes. And then I'll move it up, so that the bottom of my canvas is aligned, with the XZ plane of my part, you see how it's jumping a little bit too much. One of the options under the Gid and Snaps fly out is to disable incremental move. The increments that this affects, will be more fine as you zoom in, but there are times where you can't zoom in effectively enough, so disabling it can be the better choice. I'll align the sketch as close as I can and we'll say okay. Now I have a properly scaled sketch in the correct position. You can bring in as many attached canvases as you want. For example, there's also a side view. I'll attach this to another plane, scale it as well. And this time, we can just simply rough it into place. It's possible the artist did a phenomenal job of getting everything the exact right size. But more often than not, multiple views in a hand sketch, don't quite scale properly so using calibrate can lose some of its effectiveness for these views. Make a few adjustments. And after a couple of moments, (chuckles) we should have it, pretty well there. All right, that's going to be good enough to help guide my work and get me started. Now that I have these canvases in place, I can always turn them off individually or turn off all canvases at once. Now, we're ready to start creating 3D geometry.