 Can you tell what this is? I'll let you think about it as I explain. Recently I've been playing with flat pack designs. These are normally reserved for 2D machines such as laser cutters or CNC routers but I wanted to try something here with 3D printing. I know 3D printing flatback models may sound like a misuse of technology but humor me for a minute. You see all these cool patterns? I didn't design these. These are all infill patterns. I basically sent these shapes to the slicer as solid bodies and then assigned different infill patterns to them. And that is what I wanted to experiment with. Creating flat pack designs with cool interior infill patterns. And since Christmas is just a week away I decided to apply this technique to an ornament. You simply have to model your slots and tabs in the right place and you quickly have a Christmas bobble. You can play around with all sorts of infill patterns which if you didn't know there's an entire world of patterns outside rectilinear and hexagons. In this video I'll show how I went about designing the shapes in Fusion 360 and how I prepared the models and the slicer to print with the different patterns. One interesting aspect of this is that you don't have to print all your models with the same infill pattern. You can vary the infill pattern for each individual body on your build plate. I'll show all this in today's tutorial. Before we jump in I just want to highlight my weekly Fusion 360 live class. This is my weekly class where students get live help with their designs. We meet weekly over zoom at 1 p.m. eastern time. Students are able to submit their questions to me ahead of time and I help them get unstuck with their designs and show the approach I would take. All the classes get recorded so that if you can't make it live you can still access the videos and download them. I'm currently running a Christmas promotion where you can enroll for half off. Click the link below for more info. Okay let's jump into Fusion 360 and look at the approach I took in making these flat pack Christmas ornament designs. All right we'll begin by creating a sketch on the X Y plane. I'm going to come in with a center circle. So C for circle we're going to go with 75 millimeters. Then I'm going to start with a rectangle here. So I'm just going to kind of create a two-point rectangle. There are four rectangle. As far as the width here I'm going to go with three millimeters and a height. I'm going to go ahead and click to place it and I'm going to reference the diameter of the circle here. I'm going to say take that and divide it by two and so that gives me 37.5 and that way that height of this rectangle is always linked to this diameter. All right now to position it I'm going to use my midpoint constraint and select the top edge of my rectangle and click on the center of my circle. And there we have it and we should see it should go right to the bottom or the perimeter of that circle. All right let's create a horizontal slot here. Just going to first create it and then let's add the dimensions. I'm going to go with the same sort of thickness there three millimeters. Now for the length of this rectangle I'm also going to reference my circle here. So click that 75 diameter. I'm going to take that and divide it by four. Okay and that gives me my slot. All right now I want to position this. So let's use a constraint here to position. I want the center or that midpoint of that rectangle here to be aligned with my origin. So here I'm going to grab my vertical constraint there and that horizontal slash vertical. Hold shift and grab and you'll see you'll get that little triangle and I'm going to reference that to the center here or the origin and it's going to bring it right down. Okay so that's locked in place. I could only move it left to right and I wanted to mention it. Here's something actually accidentally discovered and you can dimension off the midpoint as well. So D for dimension and if I hold shift and do that same trick where I hover near the middle and get that little triangle showing me the midpoint I'm going to click on that and then click on the center here my origin and you can see that it takes that dimension right to the midpoint. So that's useful to know and I just kind of stumbled that it was kind of one of those things I said I wonder if this will work and it actually did. Now here I'm going for this dimension I'm also going to reference that center or that diameter there and I'm going to say this is going to be that distance divided by four to enter. There we go so you'll see here 18.75 and fx showing it's a function of this diameter you can always see what that is by just double clicking on it. Next we'll mirror this rectangle here to the other side so to do that I'll draw a line L for a line right off the origin straight up I'm gonna take that line select it hit x to make it a construction line and then let me hit escape to deselect it go to create down to mirror I'm gonna get my mirror dialog box here I'm going to double click to select my rectangle and then I'm going to click on my mirror line selection here and choose that line I just made and then click okay and you'll see it's now married to this side. Okay that takes care of the first section for now and let's go ahead and create the other one. So instead of redrawing everything I'm going to copy and move this over I'm going to select my sketch here right click go to move slash copy and here I'm going to click on create copy I'm going to take this and just drag it straight across I'm going to enter a dimension here of 100 millimeters and before I do anything else I'm going to zoom in a bit I'm going to click on this button here that says set pivot and then click on the center there and then go back and click the check mark. All right that's going to set my pivot for rotating this because I want to rotate it 180 degrees so I'm going to take this now and rotate it up I'm just going to type in 180 and hit enter. Okay now you'll notice that I copied and moved this over so everything is blue so it's not constrained so kind of taking some shortcuts here I could dimension everything off the origin but I'm just going to leave this as is so we can kind of move a little quicker through this. Okay now we have to make a few changes here to this section and one of the things we'll need to do is put a midline here through the section of this opening and extend the rest out to the end. So let's go ahead and do that I'm going to hit L for line find that midpoint there and just draw a line straight down making sure that's vertical and do the same thing on this side. All right and now I want to extend this all the way out to the end so I can draw a line here just have it go out make sure it's straight but an easier way to do that is use your extend tool so modify extend and if you hover near the edge you want it to extend it'll actually extend that line we'll do the same thing to this side and it'll extend it to the next sketch entity. All right T for trim and we're going to trim this back edge here and this line in the middle and we'll also trim this part here leaving that opening. Now when you trim you'll notice all sorts of errors that you're breaking constraints and usually I don't do this but I'm going to say it's okay for now so we're just going to go ahead and ignore those errors right now and just finish what we need to do here. So let's go ahead and trim this outer part this section and there we go. Okay so if I measure this edge here I want to make sure they're both the same size so I'll click on inspect and from here to here 18.72 let's do the same thing here inspect so make sure 18.72 okay so they're both the same that's good when you click it you should get this sort of profile like this. All right now we're going to make a third section a final section we'll need so we're going to do the same thing where we copy this right click move copy create an or click on create copy and then I'm going to take this arrow here and up and down move it straight down and now I'll just type in the distance here negative 100 and I'll click okay no need to rotate this one. Okay the changes I'll need to make with this one include taking a line straight across here and modifying this section here and it'll all make sense in a bit when you see how everything comes together so let's do that I'm going to go and grab my extend tool again so modify down to extend I'm just going to extend that to the edge here the same thing with this guy I'm just going all the way across and here I can even extend these T for trim I'm going to trim the top of this and now I'm going to grab a line from the middle here and do the same idea where I'm going to split this in half do it to both sides and I need a line here to separate this slot so let me just draw a line going across and I'm going to dimension this line from the top here in this distance I'm again going to reference this from the diameter here so click on that I'll take that diameter and divide it by four and make sure that this distance goes right up to that line here going across and here what we want to do is keep only one set of these tabs here so these two sections end up being tabs that fit into the slots here so we need to keep one set of them in here we can actually use this and just print it twice because if you think about the other one it's just going to be sort of a flip the other side like I said this all make more sense when you put it together but what we need to know here is we're just going to keep the left side and then we can flip it the other way and it'll be the right side so T for trim going to trim these edges here just keeping just that left same thing here gonna trim this so then when I select it you'll see that it's the left tab there that stays all right now I want this whole thing to select as one body so I'll go ahead and trim here or one profile I should say and now I get this sort of section here with the tabs on the left side all right one final thing I'm going to do is just put a top here to this section of the ornament here and to do that I'll create a rectangle here so R for rectangle let's say four by 15 and then I'm going to create another one let's make this one seven by 10 and here I'll use my midpoint constraint here to constraint the bottom edge to the top edge of this rectangle and let's come in with a circle here I'll do a three millimeter circle and I want this circle lined up to the center of this vertical line in this horizontal line so I'll grab my horizontal slash vertical constraint click on that midpoint hold shift find the midpoint of this line and do the same thing again finding the midpoint of the top line okay now that I have that I'm going to double click to select this entire thing actually let's just do this to highlight it all and I'm going to move it here and now I want to constrain it so that the center here is aligned with the center of my circle so let's grab our horizontal slash vertical constraint I'm going to click on that center circle and then click on my center here of the big circle and now you'll notice I can only move it up and down it's constrained and I'm just going to eyeball it here just so that it overlaps this circle here normally I would dimension this but I'm not too worried this is more of a loose design here I just want to get the idea going all right I'm going to leave it at that and then finish sketch and now we get to extrude everything so here I'm going to extrude everything three millimeters e for extrude select this profile and here here these two rectangles and let me select the rest let's go to the one on the right we just need to click on that profile and on the bottom we're going to click this bottom section here and let's go ahead and do a three millimeter extrude and click okay okay let's untoggle sketch and I'm going to zoom in and just give these edges here a little bit of a fillet f for fillet one two three and four we'll do one millimeter fillet there and we'll click okay okay and you should end up with something like this the idea here is this slide here on the bottom we'll slide through here and then we're going to print two of these which are going to come in on each side but before we send this to the slicer we're going to have to make sure that this will fit so we're going to give it a little bit of a clearance and to do that we're going to go to modify down to offset face and I'll go ahead and select each of these faces here so top and bottom left and right and I'm going to select each one of these faces and then give them an offset and I could do it all in one go I'm using my 3d connection mouse here to make these selections so I'm moving it with my left hand here and make the selections with my mouse on the right which normally allows for just sort of a very smooth experience when you're orbiting however it doesn't seem to be behaving as it used to be used to be a lot smoother and it just feels like a little jittery a little bit clunky and I think that has to do or after there was some type of software update it just never worked the same again so if anyone knows how to get that smooth motion back let me know because I kind of miss the smoothness I used to have with it all right now that I've got all those selections made here looks like there's 23 I'm just kind of making sure I didn't miss any edges here or I should say any faces I'm going to go ahead and enter a distance of negative 0.2 millimeters I'm going to go with that you may have to experiment if this ends up being a little too tight or a little too loose you know you may have to change that up a bit between probably between like 0.1 and 0.3 and to see what gives you the best fit but I'm going to go with negative 0.2 click okay so just to confirm if I select this top edge here it's showing 19.15 and if I take my timeline here and I move it back one position back before the offset you can see that that goes back to 18.75 so verify that that made that just a little bit bigger which will allow these tabs to go ahead and fit okay I just realized I made a mistake but rather than editing the video and rerecording let's just go ahead and fix it here you see this slot here on the bottom that should be the other way that's going the wrong direction so let's go back to our sketch here and I'll use my extend tool here again modify extend I'm going to extend this back up and I I shouldn't have cut the top I should have cut the bottom here so t for trim I'm going to trim the bottom section and so when I do extrude it I want it to look like this all right let's finish that sketch okay I didn't quite update correctly so let's go back and edit that extrude feature we're going to remake that selection here so if I hold command or control and deselect this portion here and then select this one instead and click okay that'll fix that part of it so that's the way the extrusion should look and also I want to make sure that the offset was applied to this section here so this is 3.4 millimeters wide and that looks correct so let me check this one should be three but for remember we made these three so the offset would have made it bigger and you can also double check by clicking on the offset feature on the timeline and you should see these highlighted so that shows that that is correct okay to 3d print this I'm going to right click here on the top of my browser go to save as mesh and as long as all the body visibilities here are on each of these will be sent now I'm going to print this on my x1 carbon so you can see here my application is the bamboo studio slicer click okay and fusion will automatically open up my bamboo slicer and bring these models in all right so here's where the cool part happens so I've got these here as all solid bodies but I don't want to print them as solid bodies I want to increase the number of shells and then I want to have it be just infill shown and get these really cool effects showing just the infill and we can play around with all the different infill patterns okay so here what I'm going to do is we're going to go to strength I'm going to crease the number of wall loops and let's do I'll say maybe like six wall loops here and now I'm going to go to the infill option here and I'm going to pick some of these fun ones here at the bottom you can experiment with all these let's say for example there's Archimedean cords here we're going to need to do one more thing here so top shells we're going to bring that down to zero bottom shells go down to zero we increase our wall loops which is our perimeters bamboo just calls it wall loops here some slicers will refer to as perimeters or outer shell now we can go ahead and click on slice plate and you'll see there that you've got you know an increased number of perimeters there the default of two it'll just be kind of a little too flimsy so you want to increase that and then you get these cool patterns now this already kind of looks Christmassy and you can try all different ones here just by coming back and changing this so another cool one is this octagram spiral we'll go ahead and slice plate and you can see that as well now here's something also you can do that's pretty neat I'm going to go back to my prepare tab here and we're going to change here where it says process we're going to go from global to objects we're going to come up here and click the o here the split to objects now you can see we have three different objects here and I can select these individually and give them a different infill settings so go back to go to strength now I've got this one selected here and so let's say we'll leave that one as the octagram let's octagram spiral let's click on the second one here and we'll make that one the Archimedean chords and then we'll click on the third one here and let's make that one the Hilbert curve here and we can also change the infill setting so the sparse infill here some of these will look better with higher or lower infill settings and that's something you can play with so let's slice this and they should each three have different infills which is really neat so you can see here I've got this guy here the spiral over here and this Hilbert curve there actually we'll need one more of this part right here so let's go back to prepare almost forgot to do that and here I'm just going to click control or command c and command v to paste it let's arrange these that arrange option just puts them a little bit tighter let's slice again and if we want to make this one a separate infill pattern might as well I'm going to go back to selecting it here again I'm under objects instead of global and we'll just make that one how about a good old-fashioned honeycomb there slice that all right there we have it okay now I'll go ahead and print this now I'm not sure if I actually prefer these all the same infill pattern or mixing and matching but you know just something you can play around with and see what you like the best I'm gonna hit print plate here and send this to my bamboo okay I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and learned something along the way if you have any questions leave it in the comments below also check out the links below to some of the resources I have available I am currently running a Christmas promotion on my fusion 360 weekly live class check the link below to take advantage of it you can also find links to my online courses as well as my free fusion 360 constraints cheat sheet if you simply like to support me and the time it takes to put these videos together consider becoming a patreon member link below all right guys I will see you in the next one