Getting Started With Fusion 360

Installation: 

Fusion 360 is an Autodesk 3D design product that can be installed for free. It is compatible with Microsoft Windows and MacOS computers. To install Fusion 360, navigate the Autodesk website to products, Fusion 360, free trial, and chose the "Fusion 360 for personal, hobby use". From there, you will have to enter some account information and then you should be all set to install it. 

Designing in Fusion 360:

When you first open Fusion 360, you need to start a new project and folder within the project. From there you can start designing and as long as you save your work to your folder, it will be there the next time you log in. The design screen may be overwhelming because there are many different tools and displays appearing. Many of the tools have very specific purposes and as you become more experienced, exploring the capabilities of each tool can help you work more efficiently, however, only a few tools are required for designing. The two most essential tools are Sketch and Extrude. They are the first two tools under the "Solid" tab in the top right (shown below).

Sketching:

When you click the sketch tool, there should be three orange squares showing, which is the origin and the three coordinate planes (shown below).

Whichever plane you click will become the sketch plane, but once you already have a design in progress, you can create sketches on surfaces of your design, or even on an offset plane (which can be created under the construct tool). On the origin, if you hit the bottom plane, you will automatically be given a top down view (although you can still maneuver with the view cube in the top right). Choosing the right sketch plane is important because you can only sketch on one plane at a time, however, the same result can be achieved from any plane by simply rotating the extruded bodies. Once you click on a plane, sketch mode will be activated, creating a new tab at the top of the screen along with the "Solid, "Surface","Sheet Material", and "Tools" tabs. Although you can change tabs, a sketch remains unfinished until the "Finish Sketch" button is clicked. Any time tools are being used, there will be a pop-up tab for each tool, waiting for the user to confirm or cancer an action, such as finishing a sketch or extruding a sketch. In sketch mode, there is a tool array that includes lines, rectangles, circles, mirror sketch, and much more. These basic line tools are the fundamental tools for sketching. To actually make a sketch, you simply plot the points, using lines, or circles. It is important to note that only closed shapes are extrudable. When using the sketch tool, you can use the tab key to lock in the dimensions of certain features like the length of a line and the angle of the line. With these tools, you should be able to create any 2D shape (example shown below).

A single sketch doesn't have to be connected and lines can overlap, like in the example. Once you are done with the sketch, you can click the "Finish Sketch" button in the pop-up menu for sketch (On the right side of the picture above). Once you finish your sketch, it is ready to be extruded.

Extrusion: 

Extrusion is what turns 2D sketches into 3D objects. Sketches or flat faces can be extruded (so if you extrude something once and it is still a flat surface, it can be extruded again without the use of a sketch). To extrude, click the "Extrude" button next to the sketch button. A pop-up tab for the extrude menu will show up on the right side of your screen. From there , you click all the faces you want to extrude. In a single extrusion, only faces starting at the same height can be extruded and they cannot be extruded at different angles or lengths in a single extrusion act. To extrude things to different heights or at different angles, the extrusion tool must be used multiple times. Once the selected faces for extrusion are selected, you can enter the length of the extrusion or drag the face with the arrow that appears. Shown below are two 20 mm extrusions that are identical except for the extrusion angle (one is extruded at a 45 degree angle, so that it expands outwards. Extrusions with negative angles compress inwards instead of expanding).

When a sketch is extruded, it disappears. This can be frustrating especially when extruding the sketch one piece at a time to different heights. To make the sketch show again, open the sketches dropdown and click the eye button next to the sketch you want to show. The same principle applies to showing and hiding bodies in the design which can be useful when trying to sketch on a large design. Shown below in the top left, the drop-downs for sketches and bodies are open, and the sketch is in show mode (the eye next to the name of the sketch/body is shaded). 

The left side of the screen is the organization section of the display, which will be discussed shortly. The extrude pop-up (shown below) has multiple important features. 

    The "Type" of extrusion is thick or thin (thin being the outline with the center hollow, and thick being a solid body). I always use a thick extrusion, knowing that printed designs will be hollowed out by the Dremel software anyways.    

    Profiles are the objects being extruded and the start is where you want to start extruding from (which is almost always the profile plane, or level of the sketch or body). 

    Direction is useful because it allows for symmetrical extrusions. 

    Extent type lets you extrude to a certain object or just a certain distance (an example of extrusion to an object would be filling in the gap between two bodies, while distance would just be a set number. Usually distance is fine, even when filling in a gap). The distance option is where you could type in the length of the extrusion, but usually dragging the arrow gives you a better idea of the size you want.

    The taper angle is the angle of the extrusion. Positive angles make the extrusion expand like the picture from earlier, while negative angles make the extrusion thinner and thinner. If the negative extrusion angle is significant, the extruded body will stop and will not further extrude.

     Finally the operation type decides what the extruded material will be classified as. Join means it will be connected to whatever body it was being extruded from (if the extrusion was off the face of a body). Cut is similar to "hole" objects in Tinkercad. It is an extrusion of negative space that cuts a preexisting body. I'm actually unsure what intersect does, but maybe it connects two bodies if the extruded object touches both. New Body starts a new body and New Component creates a new component. The main difference between a body and component is that a component is that a body is just material, while a component is its own part of the whole design. A component has its own origin plane and can contain bodies within it. Now you know the basics of extrusion.

Exporting:

To export your design, you can select everything in the file by clicking the file name at the head of the organizational hierarchy on the left side of the screen. Right clicking on it should bring up a bunch of options, including "Save As STL". Once you save it as an STL, you can upload it to a printing software. If you only want to save specific parts of the project then you may save specific bodies or a component comprised of multiple bodies as an STL file. 

Other useful tools and tips:

All the tools have their uses and theres is still a ton of stuff that I never use (or know how to use), but here are some tools that I do use often: The "Fillet" tool is a modifying tool that lets you round edges. A rectangle (shown below) can be changed into something more circular. 

Similar to extrusion, you chose which parts you want to fillet, however, fillet uses lines, not faces. 

Some other self explanatory tools are the "hole" tool (which lets you insert a hole into a body), the align tool (which lets you align bodies or components to each other and the scale tool (which lets you alter the size of a body or component, either maintaining an X,Y, Z size ratio, or only altering one dimension specifically). One of the most important tips is the "s" shortcut tab. If you click "s", a search bar will show up and you can search for more obscure tools like align and scale which are under the modify dropdown. It's a nice shortcut. A final noteworthy concern is the different types of material. There is solid, sheet material and surface. Solid works with solid, filled objects, while surface is more like the "thin extrude" where more hollow shapes are created. Sheet material is a whole other concept. My understanding is that it has something to do with metal and 3D printing with metallic materials. I've been in solid mode for the entire time.

The end:

Hopefully this gave a basic understanding of how to get started. With some practice, Fusion 360 is easy to navigate and can be a useful tool for creating complex designs. I highly recommend it.