By Mathew Hutton
Configuring Mouse controls:
Like anyone else, you might find the thought of switching to other software packages a little daunting. It can be extremely frustrating and difficult sometimes to get to grips with how to control the software and become familiar with the operations. Even something as simple as panning and rotating a model. In this blog, you’ll hopefully find some useful tips if you’re new to Fusion 360, which will help you to overcome some new user related issues.
The first thing you’ll probably notice when switching to Fusion, is that the mouse controls for panning, zooming and rotating the model may be different to what you are used to. Fusion requires the Shift key along with the mouse scroll wheel to rotate the model.
This behaviour catches a lot of new users out and can be a bit of an annoyance to adopt a new behaviour for mouse controls, particularly if you are used to other software controls. The default behaviour for using just the mouse scroll wheel button performs the pan function, so you may find yourself accidentally panning the model a few hundred times before training yourself to adopt the new systems controls for rotating a model.
However, you’ll be glad to know that there are some configurable options within Fusion’s preferences menu, that allow you to specify a different behaviour. First, you need to navigate to the preferences menu which you’ll find by clicking on the profile icon in the top right corner of the screen.
This should then open the preferences dialog which will look like the image below:
You can then select a new behaviour for the mouse controls which will use the same controls as an alternative software that you may be familiar with from the dropdown menu. Once you have configured the options for the preferred mouse controls, you can then click the Apply button, followed by the OK button to exit this dialog.
Configuring visual settings:
Now that you have configured your mouse settings, you may find that the visual appearance of the model environment may not be to your taste. Again, within Fusion, there are some configurable options to help you customise the appearances of the environment and visual settings for the model to suit your preferences.
You’ll find these settings along the bottom ribbon options, see below image:
Inside this menu, you’ll find lots of different options for controlling the visual settings that will impact the visual effects on the model, the environment and other configurable effects such as Ground Shadow, Ground Reflection etc.
As well as these settings, there is also the options for toggling the layout grid visibility, see below image:
Configure Document Settings:
Have you ever uploaded a model into Fusion and found that all the dimensions are set to a different unit of measurement to what you are comfortable with? I have often heard of stories where people have resorted to using a calculator to convert the units of measurement manually to modify components.
Well, you’ll be glad to know there is a quick fix to save you all that trouble. As you can see in the image below, the document is currently set to ‘Inches’ and so the measurement data is presented in that format. If I want to work in millimetres, I can simply change the document settings which you’ll find in the top left corner of the screen.
Simply expand the document settings folder and click on the edit symbol. This opens a dialog where you can redefine the document units of measurement to the preferred setting. Once applied, you can then carry on as you would normally, and all the functions will present dimensions in the selected unit of measurement.
Enable Cloud Libraries:
With Fusion 360 being cloud-based software, there is the assumption that the cloud libraries are available by default. However, this is not the case, and there is an option in the preferences menu that you need to enable to allow you to access these to save libraries on the cloud.
First you need to navigate to the preferences menu, you’ll find this by clicking on the profile icon in the top right corner of the screen.
Then if you click on the ‘Manufacture’ menu in the left side column, you’ll then see there is the check box option to enable cloud libraries. Once activating this option, you’ll need to click the ‘Apply’ button, and then the ‘OK’ button to exit this dialog.
You will now see that the cloud library option appears in the applicable libraries such as tool library, templates library etc.