Fusion 360 can SLICE better than most slicers!

Hey folks, Technivores here. Today we are going to go over the slicing capabilities of Fusion 360. There's a lot here to look at, and a couple minor adjustments you'll have to make from a normal slicer to use this software in order to go straight from design to print, but it is fairly straightforward and I'll show you how to do it right now. Alright all my Technivores out there, welcome to Fusion 360. As you can see we are in the design space. This is the designated space when you open up a new design and it is blank right now. Now I'm going to quickly create a design that we're going to be using for a couple of videos here. It is going to be super simple. Just a circle that I'm going to turn into a cylinder. But we are going to extrude this real quick. You can use any model for this process with this slicer. I'm choosing this simple one for reasons that I will explain to you shortly. We are going to make it a little larger than necessary on purpose. And this is it. This is my basic model. You can call it a puck if you like. But now we are ready to move on to the next step. So basically we are going to go over here and change our workspace. Right now we are in the design workspace. And we are going to select manufacturer. This is where we are going to find the stuff that we need to 3D print that. It is going to be up here and it is going to be under additives. So go ahead and click that. And now you are going to need to set up your machine. This is pretty straight forward. I do have one set up ready to go down there. So we are going to make another one but we are going to end up deleting this. Basically it is going to give you options for the machine, the operation type, things like that. We are going to select additive for the operation type to simplify the things that we know we need to enter. And we are going to select our machine. Now I am using the Ender 3 which is already showing up right here. If you can't see this go ahead and click the additive button and it will filter in the samples here. It will filter out the ones that are additive manufacturing ones. And you can find all sorts of them in here. I am using Crealty Ender 3 Pro. Select it. And this one is working really well for me. So basically that knows a lot of my dimensions. It is going to put in the build plate and things like that. It does have some settings over here that need to be changed. You can see it says that it is using PLA 2.85. Let's adjust some of the print settings. Let's go ahead and to start select this PLA 1.75. Because that is what we are going to be using. And we will grab that. And it is going to give us a base layer height of 0.2. And it is FFF technology. Now this is the body that we are going to be working on. So we are going to go ahead and hit OK now. And here we have the basic print settings. And in here you can edit your settings for pretty much everything from the basic settings which include layer height, extrusion width and things like that. Your infill pattern. To the extruder itself. This is where you will set your temperature. Your bed temperature. Your extruder temperature. As well as the exact filament diameter. A lot of these things are going to be set by selecting that 1.75mm PLA we selected. But they can be altered here. And layer number of parameters too. Layer extrusion width multiplier. There are a lot of settings here. Infill. You can select a lot of options here. Although selecting the actual infill pattern seems to be in the basic section only. Skirt and brim sections. You can see number of skirt and brim loops. And distance. This is at 0. We are actually going to leave it at 0 because I like the brims. They keep things from lifting up and corners from popping off. We are going to go ahead and leave that. However we don't need a raft. We will leave these settings alone. It is nice to know they are there because I do use them sometimes. And a quick look at the support settings. The overhang angle which is determined by our machine. The Ender 3 is set to 67. And there is bridging and cooling systems as well. Verbose. Okay. So we are ready to go with this. And we are getting this error here that says toolpath is out of date. Which means I need to recalculate. And now it has added my setup. As you can see there is no toolpath. So the way to correct that problem is to simply go to actions simulate toolpath. Now this is just going to give us an idea of the toolpath. It is going to give us a simulation. It is not actually going to generate that toolpath we need just yet. Calculate over here. And you will get this nice representation in green lines down here of the toolpath that we can then play through and see the different layers. So let's go ahead and check that out. It is basically showing us how it is going to print. It is putting down a brim. And printing upward layer by layer. And you can see the infill that it is using there as well is just a standard regular grid infill. So go ahead and pause that there. It now has a toolpath. But in order to actually finish this process we need to make sure of a couple other things. So we are going to check the infill and go up to FFF infill. Up here you can see the density and a couple of those options we were talking about. Now we are going to try most of these out. Rectilinear is pretty basic. That is the one we just saw. So for our first print we are going to do a simple one that we have seen in a few other places and do the honeycomb. And the last thing we need to do in order to generate our file is right click on the additive toolpath here and click post process. When you do that this menu will pop up. And you can see here that I have already set mine. Now what you need to do is click this and go to additive. And if you don't come back with anything it means you don't have the post processing script. So what you need to do is click on this here. And here you can see we have the post processing library for Fusion 360. And this is a website that you will be taken to when you click that little link I showed you. And what you want to do is navigate to this box that says any type and we are going to select additive. And it is going to be the first one that pops up that we are going to use. It is a generic FFF machine. Unless you have either a Prusa or an Ultimaker. There is one for Anet 3D FFF machines. I will be trying that out on ET4. But for right now there was no Crealty specific. So I went with the generic FFF machine and this is working really well. Basically just download it to a location so that you know where it is. If you want to know where to download that to. That is going to be this path that I am showing you right here. And the folder it is going to save that to is right here. You are welcome to change it to another folder but it may just be easier to copy and paste this to your download location or you can actually open this up through here. And when it is open go ahead and drag it drop it from whatever folder it downloaded to. That way it is in the folder it is looking for automatically. And then when you select additive you will have to close this and then reopen it by clicking post process again. When you select additive this option will be here. So this is going to ask for a program name or number. It did make me use a number. It wouldn't let me put in a name. But it did work pretty well. So we are going to click post now. And it is giving us an option to change the name and save it as a type here. I want to go to a different folder. And as you can see that is pretty generic. Let's do puck. And you can see it has given me this file here with some information in it. It has a lot of things including the version of Fusion 360 used to slice it. But more importantly it has the name of your printer that you have entered and the material used, the diameter and things like that. Now these can all be adjusted through settings. And they are not really that important. What is important is the actual gcode here which is going to print your file. So we can go ahead and close this. And what I want to point you to is this. Now this is my puck gcode file. I am going to go ahead and grab this and drag and drop it onto my micro SD card. From which point we can pop it into the printer and print. So there you have it. I will show you this print real quick. As you can see here it is going down amazingly well. I do have a couple other prints I can show you and I will pop those on here in just a moment. But for right now look at the beauty of this honeycomb infill. This is pure bliss. I am really enjoying playing around with this slicer. I haven't had any issues with it so far. In fact the generic profile I am using for my Ender 3 Pro has carried over pretty well to both the ET4 and the T-Pro. So they are both working really well alongside this printer and I am really really happy with these results. Alright guys I got my coaster here. As you can see it has beautiful infill. Now I didn't let this model finish up because I wanted that infill exposed for the next video and for visual purposes in my coasters. But I did do a little test model before this. This is just a little design I knocked up in Fusion 360 and as you can see it turned out pretty flawlessly. Now this is the bottom surface. It came out amazing and the sides as well. This is a PETG and then you have the top surface here. It is very very decent. Now I think I will add one more shell in my settings here because I think that will smooth this out even more and I am used to running with 3 or 4 and this is only running 2. The reason I tend to run a couple more is because my infill density is generally set between 10 and 15 instead of at that standard 20%. This is a really nice model. I don't quite know what it is. Obviously you can see I haven't done all the clean up on it yet. That is basically the gist of it for slicing and printing with this. As you can see from this other design I have here if you would like to see the other infill settings you will have to watch out for the next video but so far I am really really enjoying the slicing capabilities of Fusion 360. As always this channel is brought to you by these fine Patreon supporters. If you would like to support the channel on Patreon head over to www.patreon.com www.patreon.com That is going to be it for this video. As always I am Technivorous and thanks for watching. Don't forget to check out our main channel page where we do a free giveaway for our subscribers every month. 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