In today’s video, we’re going to start a series on using Autodesk Fusion 360 for woodworking applications. This first video will introduce you to the basics of navigating inside of Fusion 360, as well as how to get started creating models.

FULL FUSION 360 BEGINNER TUTORIAL PLAYLIST (More videos will be added)

You’re going to have a bar at the top of the page that’s going to contain your options for creating, opening, and saving files.
Below that, you have a toolbar that contains all of your different modeling tools. There are a couple different tabs in here for solid, surface, sheet metal, etc – for the most part, you’re going to use the solid tools for woodworking. To activate these tools, you’d click on one of them, and then Fusion 360 will give you more information about how to use them.
The browser is almost like an outline of your model – that’s where you’re going to be able to manage the different parts and pieces of things in your model. Different bodies and components, when you create them, are all going to show up in this list. You can turn things on and off by clicking the little eye next to an item. This is also where you can manage the units in your model (document settings).
On the right hand side, there’s a navigation cube – you can use this to navigate around your model. You can both click and drag, as well as click on the individual faces to orient your view. The little house icon is your home icon and can take you back to your default view if your camera ever gets spun around.
You can also use your mouse and keyboard to navigate.
At the bottom of the page, you have a toolbar for adjusting the way things look inside your model, as well as another toolbar at the very bottom that’s going to basically contain a timeline of all the changes you’ve made. This will get really important in the future when we decide to make changes, as you can actually go back into this timeline and change things.
Now you have a pretty good idea of where everything is located – now let’s start talking about how to create objects in Fusion 360. In general, when we create objects in Fusion 360, we usually start by creating some kind of a 2-dimensional profile. This is going to be called a sketch. From there, we’ll take this 2D profile and extrude it into 2 dimensions.
To add a sketch, there’s a little button that says “Add Sketch.” By the way – for all of these different tools, if you let your mouse rest over them for a little while, they’ll pop up a little window describing what they do.
When you click on “Add Sketch,” you’re going to notice that some little yellow boxes pop up in your modeling workspace. This is because we need to tell Fusion 360 which axis we want to draw along. In this case, we want to select the little box between the red and green axes. (An axis is basically one of these lines that act as a guide to help us see what direction we’re creating things in a 3D space)
Notice that when we click on this, it orients our camera directly above the modeling space, and also gives us a different set of tools for modeling. These tools are all designed to help us create 2D objects that we will later use to create 3D shapes. Let’s draw a rectangle. One thing you’re going to notice is that when you activate this tool, it’s going to snap your mouse button to the various grid points – this is Fusion 360 trying to help us by inferring that we want to click in a certain place.
You can also type in dimensions to lock your 2D tools to certain lengths, so if you want this to be a 6” tall object, you can type in a height of 6”.
Notice that this 2D sketch, when we create it, has a light blue fill inside of it. This is Fusion 360 indicating to us that this is a closed in sketch, which we can then use to extrude to a 3D shape.
For now, let’s finish our sketch. Simply click the “Finish Sketch” button to finish your sketch and accept your shape. Now we’re back in 3D modeling mode, and we want to use the “create” tools to create a 3D shape from our 2D profile. In this case, we want to do this by using the “extrude” tool, which basically adds depth to a 2D shape.
When we activate this tool, it’s going to ask us to select a face, then dictate a length to extrude. You can set this length by clicking and dragging the little arrow, or by typing in a length.
This creates a 3D shape from our profile.
You can also use sketches and extrusions to remove material. For example, let’s say we wanted to create a little slot in the face of this object – we could draw another sketch, this time on the end face of this object, then extrude that the other direction. Notice that this time, Fusion 360 automatically sets our “interaction” to “cut mode.” This is because it sees that we drew a shape that intersects with another shape, and it assumed that this means we want to remove material from that shape.
This would also work if we wanted to add a hole or bevel an edge.