Learning Fusion Part 2 [Origins]

For ever part you can add origins, which act as landmarks on the model. Common places to put origins are in the center of different gears, wheels or sprockets or in the middle of holes in a c-channel. There are good and bad things that come along with this process.

First, the origins are really helpful with putting parts together (like really helpful). All you have to do is simply select two origins and create a joint (we will cover this later). The software automatically rearranges the parts such that they are touching in the exact spots where you placed the origins (no adjusting needed on your part). This makes putting together parts way faster than in real life, provided you are decent at navigating the interface.

The bad news is that origins are not imported with parts, and must be placed individually and manually (please note that origins should never be placed by "eyeballing" the center of the area, but rather by selecting faces and shifting the origin by a calculated number...It is extremely important that it is placed exactly!). This can become quite boring and time consuming, but is necessary to easily put together parts. Additionally, origins must be placed on either side of a hole as each face touches something different.

Placing origins are a little difficult the first few times, but it becomes sort of mindless after awhile. I should also mention that if you are using a wheel, there are multiple part to it (inserts, body, rubber outside etc.), so before you add origins you should create a rigid group of all of them. Do this by selecting all the parts and right clicking and ridged group.

Use the "joint origin" tool to add in origins.

If you are placing an origin at the center of a wheel, you need to hit the insert origin tool, then click the circumference of the wheel. Automatically, there will be a suggestion (an x) in the center of the wheel. Clicking that will add an origin. Make sure you add it to back side as well!

For the square shaped holes of the c-channel its a bit more difficult, as they do not have a landmark for the middle. Instead you must measure each side of the square (using the measure tool), however this only measure the straight part of the hole.

The measure tool.

So after we select the origin tool, we must first hit the plane we want our origin to reside on (the plane of the c-channel) and then hit the landmark for the center of the arcs of the corners.

Click the center of the arc that makes up the corner. Make sure to shift the origin by half the side length so it is at the center of the hole.

Then using the shift functions on the tools you can shift the x and y axis 1/2 of the distance you measured.