 We have a laser cutter in our maker space and I wanted to come up with a project-based workshop that has a better title than our usual intro to the laser cutter workshop. Something that can appeal to people who have no idea what a laser cutter is. The project also needs to meet a few requirements that I set. It needs to incorporate more than one material so that I can teach how to change laser settings between materials. It needs to include both vector cutting and raster engraving and it needs to be small enough and quick enough to allow a class of six to each make their own within an hour and a half workshop and with only one laser cutter. Here's the project I came up with. It's a small planter stand and works great for a spring themed workshop. I designed it in Fusion 360 and then exported each part as its own DXF file that I then sent to the laser cutter. We have a full spectrum muse at the maker space that comes with its own laser control and design software called Retina and Grave. I was able to load my DXF file into Retina and Grave, set the proper speed and power settings and let the laser do its magic. The table legs were cut out of three millimeter Baltic birch plywood. Baltic birch seems to be my go-to material when laser cutting. Let me know if you have a favorite material in the comments. I used three millimeter thick acrylic for the tabletop and for this part we'll be vector cutting the acrylic and also engraving an image. The image is just a PNG file imported into Retina and Grave. After engraving on the acrylic it comes out a bit cloudy but simply wiping the material with a damp paper towel cleans it right up. Assembly is as simple as it gets. Simply slide the two leg pieces together and place the tabletop and it's good to go. I also tried swapping materials by laser cutting the legs on acrylic and engraving the wood. I'm speeding up the video for the cutting and engraving but here's what the actual engraving speed is of the full spectrum muse. With the setting set to about 50% speed for engraving and here's the actual cutting speed for three millimeter birch plywood where the speed is set to 35%. The acrylic comes with a paper backing that you simply peel off after lasering. I ended up making two complete sets one fully out of Baltic birch and one out of acrylic. This leaves me with a few different configurations I can go with which do you prefer? We've got the acrylic top with wooden base, wooden top with acrylic base, all wood and all acrylic. Oh and I also 3D printed a set. This one is actually a 3D printed base with a white acrylic top and here are a couple pictures showing the stand with an actual plant on it. All right let's jump into Fusion 360 and I'll show my approach to creating this model. I've uploaded the Fusion 360 design file for this model to my Patreon page and also uploaded the full step-by-step design tutorial on how I tackle this model. So if you want access to any of those or simply want to support my channel and more tutorials like this, check out the link below on becoming a Patreon supporter. So for this tutorial here, this video, what I want to do is just quickly do a walkthrough of my basic design approach and I'll talk about how I created the lattice work here. So let's start by taking my timeline here and I'm just going to drag it all the way back and we'll start at the beginning where I started by first creating a sketch here. You can see my sketch layout and then I extruded each of these profiles separately and you'll see I'll have an inner and an outer profile there and the reason for that would be a little clear in a second but next I created a sketch of one sort of diamond feature here and then I extruded that sketch through to give me that first hole and I took that one feature and I patterned it and you can see here so the strategy here was to go ahead and pattern the hole rather than the individual slats there and because I had extruded this as two separate bodies it allowed me to only apply that pattern to that inner body and now I can come in and combine the two bodies here into one so the next feature on my timeline is a combine which combine them into one body. Okay and then the next thing I did actually need this hole here to be solid because I'm going to put make two copies of this and make a slit on the top and a slit on the bottom of one so that these can slide together so you'll see I did an extrude there and covered that hole there and then I made a copy and then a sketch on the top of the left one and then extrude to punch that through and then the same thing on the right except I did it on the bottom there and then I did a move operation and a rotate to get these two align and then let's see I did a sketch on top here to make my table and then I applied these appearances to give it the luxe that you see here with the wood bottom and glass top so that was my basic design approach the full step-by-step tutorial is about 20 minutes long so let me just highlight a couple things here and I want to talk about in this video I'm going to select let's see the rest of these features here in the timeline I'm just going to delete those and then we're going to come here at this part where I just have these two bodies and let's see let me untangle the top there and I'm going to create a sketch on this top surface because I want to show you how I approach that lattice work there so basically I'm going to project this outline here and in that way I can untangle bodies and I just have this outline here I'm going to draw a line from midpoint to midpoint take that make it a construction line one thing I want to talk about is how I approach that diamond shape here and so I could have come in with a rectangle so let's say like a two-point rectangle or even better a center rectangle and I'll create that six by six and what I want to do is get this lined up to the center here and then rotate it so it has a diamond shape now if I come in with a let's say a midpoint constraint would make sense here select the midpoint of that center rectangle and then click on this line it brings it right in learning what each of these constraints do and how to use them will make you a way more efficient designer I recommend downloading my free constraints cheat sheet which I've linked below notice now though it's black so it's fully constrained it turned from blue to black and I can't rotate it because it's fully constrained I can't do anything to it that's because the rectangle tool comes with these constraints here you see this horizontal constraints among all the other constraints you see all these little white symbols so if you want to rotate it you have to select this delete it now you can take this and you can see it turn blue and begin to rotate it so just I thought that was a useful tip there you can bring in a sketch you know and it comes in with built-in constraints but you can always delete them and then make the changes you need in that case I can simply grab my vertical constraint and constrain that with this point here and in the top of my construction line there and that'll get it to be the orientation that I want another approach I could take there let me just undo here to delete everything is instead of coming in with a two-point rectangle I decided to come in with my polygon tool so create polygon circumscribe polygon here and I'm going to go with the you have to give it a radius so instead of the dimension of six I'm going to go with a radius of three and then I'll tab over and give it four sides which basically gives me a square with the polygon tool it automatically tells it that each side has to be the same so that's kind of built in with the definition but I don't have those constraints there those horizontal constraints so what I can do is grab my midpoint constraint here again click on the center and then click on this line lines it right up and then I can simply go right to rotating this and again applying that vertical constraint between that point and the top of my line and there we go so I just wanted to show that approach there and then I came in finished that sketch brought in that body here that middle body took of this and then extruded it through distance all click okay and now I wanted to create the pattern and I'll show you this as well so to create that pattern I actually have to set the direction that I wanted to go so at any time you have a pattern that you don't necessarily want it to go you know in the x and y direction you have your own directions you can actually put those right into the sketch so let's go back to that sketch actually I'm going to open that back up rotate it and to set the direction here all I have to do is I'm just going to put a couple lines one line going this way and you know it could be any angle that you want I'm going to align it right to the center of this line or that midpoint you can see I get that triangle constraint there I'm going to take both of these lines make them construction lines finish that sketch and now I have this direction that I can tell it that I wanted to pattern with so if I bring in that body now I can go to create pattern rectangular pattern the type is features I'm going to select it on my timeline here it's basically going to select the extrude feature and then you'll see here it says direction I'm going to select it and I'm just going to choose these two lines and now you can see if I start moving these arrows it'll pattern it right with the direction of that line and then so what I did here is I kind of played around with the spacing and I decided eight millimeters looks pretty good for spacing and you've got one top section one bottom section here so each of those will control the different arrows here my distance type is set to spacing and one other thing I need to do is change the direction type from one direction to symmetric and I'm going to change that with both of these so now all I have to do is increase the quantity so I'm going to increase this quantity up here on this blue arrow direction and I just needed to completely cover this entire body here and one more will take care of it so you can see that's 14 you can see the rest of these they're out in space that's just because this needs to be a symmetric pattern so I don't really need to worry about those I just want to make sure that the right here covers my body completely and I'll do the same thing with the other side I'll just completely cover my body here and just need to finish it up right here on the left and it's going to be another 14 so now all I have to do is click okay here and you can see compute option is set to optimize most of these will work I think if I choose identical you may get or maybe it was adjust yeah it'll give you a little warning so if you ever get that warning just change it to a different compute option here optimize works fine and click okay and then it's like it'll take that pattern and apply it to that entire body and now all I have to do is bring in my other body and then combine them so nice thing with that is you have this original shape here and you can create that pattern and you know you've got that you don't have to come in to try to like make these cuts exactly how you want them just create this shape with your sketch extrude it apply the pattern to it and now I can just combine these so modify combine select these two bodies and operation is joined click okay and there we have it so okay I didn't want to go through the entire design here but I thought that this was you know a great lesson here just kind of highlight show how I approach this lattice work here so I'll end it there if you have any questions let's go back here to this completed model any questions on anything else on this approach leave it in the comments below happy to come back and answer these and if you do want to see the full step by step tutorial check out the link to my patreon page the nice thing also with having the fusion 360 file is you can just come in and change this up just open any feature in the timeline and tweak the design okay link to that below and also I've got some fusion 360 courses on my website I'll leave that link below as well whether you're looking to just go through my quick start guide which is just a quick efficient approach teaching you just exactly what you need to quickly get up and create your own models or you want to dive deeper check out the link below to my website where you can sign up for my online courses all right guys I hope you enjoyed this video this was a model like I said in the beginning that I wanted to make to apply towards my laser certification classes that we run in our maker space and so it'll be a quick model to have our members make something that's useful and you know looks really nice and also at the same time learn how to use the laser cutter all right I'll be back in a few with another video take care