Modeling and Prototyping for Product Designers in Fusion 360

Creating a model and a prototype is an essential practice for all product designers. It allows a designer to explore if a design meets desired outcomes. It’s an opportunity to refine and test design alternatives taking a look at form, function, and materials.

In this project, you develop a concept design for athletic shoes. Following the industrial design modeling and prototyping process, you identify user needs, and develop, refine, test, and export your design to a 3D printer using Autodesk Fusion 360.

Autodesk Fusion 360 is a cloud-based CAD/CAM tool for collaborative product development. Fusion 360 enables exploration and iteration on product ideas and collaboration within a distributed product development team. It combines organic shapes modeling, mechanical design, and manufacturing in one comprehensive package.

Concepts covered in this course are

• Fusion 360 cloud-based CAD workspaces and collaboration features.
• The product and industrial design process: from identifying user needs to ideation, concept development, testing and refinement, and implementation.
• Modeling: parametric solid modeling and freeform modeling.
• Sustainable design practices: materials selection, friction, and whole systems and product lifecycle.
• Visualization: cloud based photo-realistic rendering.
• Manufacturing: exporting to an STL file for 3D printing.

Contents Overview 

In just 6 lessons and 30 minutes of step-by-step video based instruction, you will be on your way to mastering Fusion 360 while designing your own athletic shoes. No prior experience using CAD is required. This course offers project based learning for anyone who wishes to learn how to use Autodesk Fusion 360 software to create a model and prototype of their design idea. It’s not about the shoes but about learning the design process and CAD skills needed to design and visualize your own design innovations.

This course starts with a course overview summarizing the course benefits and the project design goal, creating athletic shoes. Next, the Fusion 360 introduction walks you through downloading the software and navigating the user interface and key features of the software. A quick practice exercise has you apply these skills by creating and rendering a simple shape in the software.

Using Fusion 360 sketching and modeling tools, you apply both parametric and freeform modeling techniques to create your prototype. The design process starts with importing a hand sketch to jump start the modeling process in Fusion 360. Lessons in sustainability help you establish earth-friendly design practices. Materials choices and the whole product lifecycle make a big impact on mass production and the environment.

You finish by leveraging Fusion 360 state-of-the-art cloud based rendering features to create photo-realistic renders of your design.

By the end of this course, you will have developed the Fusion 360 CAD skills needed to apply CAD in the modeling and prototyping process for product design and you will created your own athletic shoes. Give existing shoe brands a run for their money and get started today!