Surface Mastery Part 15 | Creating an Intake Vent with Surfacing

In this video we are going to tackle a question that came in about making an intake scoop/vent for an airplane. This applies to all sorts of shapes but here will need to tackle a few key things.
1. What are the limits of Fusion 360 Surface Tools.
2. What is the ideal way to plan for this geometry in Fusion.
3. What are some things to watch out for.
If you want to follow along you can download the dataset here.
a360.co/3Z3Q5vR
This can also be applied to your own surfaces.

[@TheKelceoglu]

Wonderful! Thanks!!!

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

Glad you liked it!

[@benshackson9008]

Thankyou so much for this!

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

You're welcome!

[@dormg22]

very good explanation of approach and reason thank you

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

Glad you liked it

[@a330turbinex7]

Superb!!!

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

Thanks!

[@a330turbinex7]

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign Matt... please you could make a small video with some ideas about modeling the airbus A350 or boeing 777 cockpit windows. The windows are planar and the nose fuse is kind round. Very tricky thing to do... if you want I can send you some pictures to get some idea... thanks

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

Yes please send some pics to [e-mail] and ill see what i can do.

[@a330turbinex7]

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign email sent

[@AlexYaschenko]

Hey Matt, any chance you could change the default material? It's sort of OK, but it would be a lot nicer to have a bit more contrast between the sketches and the bodies when watching the videos. Cheers!

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

I can't change the default, for video reasons, but next video when there is a body i will change the color of it. It is hard to see for sure so thanks for pointing that out!

[@gFeeley]

When surfacing can you somehow relax the mesh to get smoother transitions

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

Nope. You get what you get with surfacing in any CAD program. The input curves drive the shape. The only way you can do that is if you use freeform modeling which is a more polygon approach. The shape isn't a surface or solid until you "finish" and it gets converted.

[@mavigogun]

Some question raised but not addressed: 1) why were the points dislocated at 13:20? How might that discontinuity have been eliminated? Why did you choose not to confront the discontinuity? 2) At circa 16:25, you Projected a copy of a line segment rather than use the existing Sketch element; the contributing failure which provoked the need to disassociate the line segment from connected elements was unclear- could you elucidate? Might the failure have been avoided? Thanks for your efforts.

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

I'll do my best to try and answer. when i make these videos they aren't usually planned out. its me going through how I would approach a model and recording the process. So often times we try something, it doesn't work and we try something else. Kind of how it works in reality :) Things can break randomly and work sometimes but not others. This specific case I did end up premodeling a lot of options and there were surface issues with some standard approaches so I wanted to show some of those pain points. @13:20, i think you are referring to the loft preview? When i was using the loft tool for some reason the guide rail was selected as profile 1 which produced the original warning that the rail misses the profile. As i go around and make the selections the preview updates and its not happy when the number of edges on profile 1 don't match the number of edges on profile 2. While it can produce a surface in some cases you generally want to aim for the same number of edges. So for example 2 lines and an arc lofting to a single spline will end up with 2 seams on the surface. Curvature maps often show at those seams you get some weird things happening....The discontinuity when adding the guides at the end come up when trying to trim complex surfaces to a point. Sometimes this is because there is a very small edges segment that is hard to select. Chain selection generally works on profiles but not on guides as well for some reason. box selecting sometimes works, but as you can see there is a lot of "maybes". Stitching surfaces together will heal some of those very small sections based on tolerance settings(as we did around 14:30). So it really comes back to how much time you want to spend. I didn't carry on with it because it was just one of a few methods I was showing. @16:25 I think the reason I did that was because the original spline was in a sketch with other entities and was connected so it was harder to select. Projecting it into its own sketch made the selection easier. Some users like to put a lot of sketches into their design while others try to cram as much into a single sketch as possible. Just different approaches. Projecting should maintain a link and be no different than using the original sketch edge, with the only difference being that spline was now in its own sketch meaning it was a clear single selection rather than grabbing other chains with it. The surfacing tools in Fusion have improved a little(quality of the result) since that video was done 6 months ago, but the process is still the same. Lofting around those corners gives bad surfaces (internal tension) so I would still approach this in the same way using the patch tool. I think the error during the preview was mainly caused by that spline being selected with profile 1, and the other issue was just the warnings during the preview of the loft which always happens. If that didn't answer it or i missed what you were asking just let me know.

[@mavigogun]

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign That was a very generous address- much appreciated. I suppose the primary concern for me is the ability to avoid discontinuity when employing Sketch elements as Slicers. It may be that with Fusion's curved surface solver, close is as good as it gets (as may be the case with any geometry depending from the intersection of a surface derived from a spline).

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

@@mavigogun yeah i mean with everything there is a work around. So that discontinuity at that front edge. I could have deleted that triangular surface and done loft to a point using the short vertical edge as the loft profile and the bottom edge of the opening as a guide rail. In general its better to over build a surface and trim it how you want but that isn't always easy.

[@tonysmith7702]

Nice!.

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

Thanks!

[@superalpha]

Did I miss something? The end result doesn't have a slot or hole to vent.

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

This question came in from a user about how to make the shape of the intake/vent. I didn't make the actual hole because on the real thing it was cut by hand after the fiberglass was made and had a trim piece. You could trim the surface or cut the solid after a thicken. My suggestion would be to make it a solid first, then make a positive block for the opening and use combine to remove it from the hood.