Fully Defined Splines in Fusion 360 Sketch

How to fully define splines in Fusion 360. This allows the padlock on your sketches as well as having all of the sketch lines black.
You need to define the length of the control arm, the angle of the control arm relative to another sketch line as well as where the control point is in space.

[@sjkba]

Nice video. I love that you go straight to the point!

[@WhatMakeArt]

Glad it helped 👍

[@jahtibacollins9454]

That was amazing, I learned something in 2 minutes that was really useful.

[@WhatMakeArt]

Glad it helped 👍

[@jayhorowitz8154]

Thank you for taking the time to make this video. I now have a direction to go in with constraining splines. Very much appreciated!

[@WhatMakeArt]

Yes, explaines can be tricky, sometimes on simple models. I don't worry about fully constraining the splines but if it's mission-critical then this is how you do it Also years control point splines and you only have to constrain it into directions since they don't have handles

[@ecwskier4500]

Chose this video because it was short and high quality

[@WhatMakeArt]

Glad it helped 👍

[@LarryjB53]

You didn't define the spline point depth in the narration though it shows up in the drawing.

[@WhatMakeArt]

Can you elaborate on where in the video you are looking for more explanation? If it is missing, I'll add it to the list of videos to update

[@jackburton9214]

Great job, thanks!

[@WhatMakeArt]

Glad it helped 👍

[@brucegregg5942]

Thank you!

[@WhatMakeArt]

Glad it helped to fully constrain splines in Fusion 360 👍

[@diggraph]

Just what I was looking for. Thanks. It seems that fully defining a spline with even only a few control points is very messy.

[@WhatMakeArt]

Yes it's best to define the spline with as few control points as needed to get your curve

[@diggraph]

@@WhatMakeArt I also discovered in another video that you can right click on the spline and chose the Fix/Unfix option to automatically fully define it

[@WhatMakeArt]

Great thanks for the tip That's very helpful

[@simonrestrepo3231]

Thanks, really useful

[@WhatMakeArt]

You're welcome

[@Justin-fb7ni]

after i define the handles, i go to define the angle the way you show, but I don't get a degree angle and keep getting distance edit: nevermind I just figured it out but don't remember how edit2: I had a sketch fillet that was messing up my spline. I ended up putting the fillet after I revolved

[@WhatMakeArt]

Glad you figured it out, there's lots of different ways to solve the same situation

[@oneBoredFish]

Is there no command or button to just automatically constrain a spline like this as-is wherever it happens to be? This process is fine and well on small spline but I regularly have to trace logos for my 3D printing business and some of the splines can have hundreds of points. It is not feasible to do this process you have shown in a reasonable amount of time with that many points. I am aware of the fix/unfix option but this is not helpful when the spline needs to be scaled for creating the prints in multiple sizes. Splines do not like scaling correctly if they are not fully defined, I'm searching for a way to do exactly what you've shown here but more quickly.

[@WhatMakeArt]

I do not know of a quicker way to display splines in Fusion 360 If I was 3D printing logos I would import them as DXF or a SVG and then move and scale that around. You can make DXFs in Illustrator or Inlscape perfectly to scale at multiple sizes and then insert them into Fusion 360

[@oneBoredFish]

@@WhatMakeArt This is a good tip and I do sometimes try this method also. Sometimes the artwork I receive is poor quality JPG and I use GIMP to create clean PNG then import to Inkscape to trace bitmap and save as SVG. The real drawback here is how it breaks curves down into small straight line segments. If you have a large quantity of curves this can result in thousands of individual smaller line segments and I have had it hang for 10 - 20 minutes or even just crash when trying to offset or scale that many line segments. Retracing it as a spline from a canvas never gives me that same problem But I do have a big issue when trying to scale them.

[@WhatMakeArt]

Yes, if you need nice curvature then splines are the way to go, unfortunately, to scale them you need to have them locked down Have you tried extruding a body from a spline and then scaling that, and then projecting a new sketch from the scales body? You might even be able to project the splines into a new sketch and then scale that sketch or it's output

[@marchache]

Found your video for the exact purpose of needing to scale splines. I'm modeling miniature furniture based on real dimensions (divided by a scale factor parameter) and needed splines for the handle cutout on the drawer (IKEA Alex unit). Interestingly when I scaled everything down the curves weren't as smooth so I removed the scale factor from some of the handles dimensions. Some had to stay scaled which was weird.

[@WhatMakeArt]

That is weird, they were probably just visually more rough, glad you figured out a solution