 If you recall, this year's Christmas design was a snap apart and build your own gingerbread house model. I designed it so that you can stuff it in an envelope and give it as a gift. And a lucky person got to assemble it. This led me to explore flat pack designs a little more and I decided to try and make a model that can be folded into place. And this is what I've been working on. It's a brick cottage that I modeled with folding hinges that allow you to build it simply by folding it into place. There are two techniques I wanted to share with this video. One, how I approach the hinges that allow the walls to fold into place. And two, how I apply the brick texture. Now I'm going to try a different approach with this video. Instead of doing a step-by-step Fusion 360 tutorial, I'm going to do more of a high level approach showing you the basic design idea. And if there's anything you want me to dive deeper into, simply leave it in the comments and I'll make a more detailed video on questions I get the most. Before I dive in, let me first talk about why. Why go with a flat pack design? Well, besides me just wanting to explore this method of construction, there are actually some advantages as to why you'd want to design a model this way for 3D printing. And it started with me posting this picture on Instagram asking which one people prefer. These are both the same Fusion 360 model. Can you tell the difference? Right, they're printed in different orientations. The one on the left was printed upright and the one on the right was printed flat along the print bed. So I ran an Instagram poll and asked which one was preferred and the one on the right was the winner as most liked the texture it created versus the one on the left which someone described as having a basket-weaved look. In this case, it was the texture of the bricks on the right that won. Okay, so that's one advantage printing miles flat can give you the texture you want. Also think of like a textured build plate or a mirrored glass for a build plate and how completely different finishes you're going to get with these. Let's look at a couple more advantages of printing flat. Perfect circles. If you've tried to print holes vertically, you know what I'm talking about. It just doesn't work. Try these two prints and you'll quickly see which one was printed vertically versus the one that was printed like flat on the build plate. And finally, the last reason I'll mention is color changes. Depending on your model, you may want to print in multiple colors and if you only have one extruder, you'll have to rely on swapping filaments at designated layer heights. In order to print this model so that the trim work is a different color than the bricks, I had to orient it flat along the print bed. Alright, let's jump into Fusion 360 and I'll show you the approach I took to get the brick texture as well as the hinge mechanism. Alright, here's my design. And so you're seeing here the brick pattern that I have and you can see the hinges here where I made it so that these can fold into place. And I'll talk about those two techniques there in a minute. But first, I just want to focus on the design, show you how I approach this. So if you look under my browser here, you'll see that I designed these with components. So I organize it into separate components here. I've got the foundation and here's the roof. And you see here, the roof also has a similar hinge mechanism here where this will be folded to match the walls here. And the foundation does not have any hinge here. Once the walls are folded, they will snap right into these grooves here. And once that gets put in place and then the roof gets put on top, it actually will lock the walls together. So that's the idea there. I'm going to turn off the roof and the foundation here, turn off their visibility. And let's first talk about the sort of hinge mechanism I have going on here. I played around with some different techniques and what I found to work was actually pretty straightforward and quite simple. If you see here, all this is, is a chamfer. But there's a little bit more to it than that. So let me activate here the walls component. And then I'm going to take the timeline. You see it got narrow just to reflect the features for the wall. But I'm going to bring that down to the beginning here. Let's just look at that first sketch there. And we can see here that I simply sketch just the front and the side profile of the building. And basically I'm just going to take these two sections and repeat them. So let's, let's go on and see after that I extrude this up. And I extrude that two millimeters because next, let's see, let me move a few steps here. I've got a couple of construction planes there. And then here's the important part, the chamfer. So I applied the chamfer right here. And the important thing with this chamfer here, like I said, this is two millimeters thick. You can see that there. But when I did the chamfer, I only did that as a 1.6 millimeter chamfer. And what that did, it left me with a 0.4 millimeter edge here. That's just this straight flat edge. So you can see there if I select that, that's 0.4. And that's really what allows the hinge here because now I've got two layers of filament. Since I'm printing this at a 0.2 millimeter layer height, I've got two layers of just solid layers that work as a really good just living hinge. And I actually tested this quite a bit, just kind of folding it back and forth to see how strong this is. And it actually works really well. It takes a while before you'll actually break it. And since this is only being folded once to put it together, it's really stronger than it really needs to be. So it worked really well for the hinge, really is what I'm trying to say. All right, so now I just did the same thing with the other profile, created it, and then added a chamfer there as well. And you can see here if I just inspect this base here to this edge, that's going to give me 0.4 millimeters. OK, that's the basic idea behind the hinge there. Not really complicated, but took quite a bit of testing to get there. So I'll save you all that trouble. OK, we'll bring that timeline forward. And now let's talk about the brick pattern here and how I approach that. This is actually a really neat technique here. If I open up my data panel, you'll see I have another design here called Brick Wall Parametric. So I'm going to already have that open. Actually, I'm just going to open it here. So basically, I created here what would be the grout lines of the brick texture. And the way I approach that, if I jump into this design, you'll see that I just created three rectangles here, positioned them as how I want them to be patterned and give them dimensions. And then when I did an extrusion here, the important thing here is I did a thin extrude. And that allowed me to just extrude the outline and not the profile. So you can see there here are my settings. I did a center thin extrude. And after that, I came in with a rectangular pattern. And with the rectangular pattern, I just tell you how many I wanted to make. And it's going to go ahead and create that pattern for me. Now, you can see here that this is completely parametric. If you look at my values here, they're all equations, basically, that are referenced in my user parameters. And so let me go into that. And I'll show you how that works. I'll open up my user parameters here. And you can see I've got the top two parameters are for height and width. So let's say let's go with a short wall, so let's do a width of, let's say 80. I could just go ahead and enter that right here. And then a wall height of 10. So let me go ahead and type that in. And then watch my model here. Go ahead and click OK. And you can see that it automatically updates. Now, one thing you'll notice, I got a little warning here and I got a bunch of bodies here instead of just one single body. So you will have to go back to this combined feature after you make a change. And this is only if you're adding body. So if you're going from a smaller number to a bigger number, you'll just have to remake that selection. So I'll X these out, select the first body, select the second body, and then the last body, holding shift there. And then I'll click OK. And operation is a join. And then that'll go ahead and combine them all back into one. Now, when you go the other way around, let's say we go smaller. So let's say we have this in size from 80 to 40. You'll see that the wall gets now narrower. And I still have one body. So it doesn't, of course, it's not going to add any more bodies. However, you'll still get a warning here. And in that case, all you have to do is just open up that combined feature and just click OK. And it'll recalculate it. And it'll get rid of that warning. So OK, that's the way I approach this design. Now, since I have that design here as a separate model, what I did is I brought that in here as a component. So let me show you how I did that. I went into my walls component there. And you can see there I have this component within there called brick wall parameter. And to do that, basically, I just right-click on the separate design and said Insert into Current Design. So that brought that in. And then what I did was I, let me bring that up here, I moved it into place, so aligned it so that it aligned to the top of my wall there. I left a little portion on the bottom here that's going to slide into the foundation. But then, let's see, if we go into this combined feature here, you'll see that I basically did a Boolean operation. I took that wall pattern, the brick wall pattern, and cut that away from my solid wall here. And you can see how that looks there. Operation is cut. And that's what left me with the brick pattern. And that's basically how that worked. And the neat thing here is I now have this pattern here. So let's untaggle this. I have this brick wall pattern. It's its own design. So whenever I wanted to bring it into a different design, I could just go back in there. And I can say, OK, I'm using it maybe for a different building. Maybe I just want a small section of the wall. I can come into my user parameters, give it whatever wall height or width that I want, click OK. I just need to click on Save. And once I click on Save, it'll save this design. And if I want to push that through to my new design where I linked it, you'll see you'll get this yellow flag here. It tells you the component that you're referencing is out of date. You just click on it. And then it'll be the exact same wall size here that you created. And it'll bring that into this design. So it really becomes sort of this shelved component that you can bring in to your other designs. And you only have to create it once. And since you're creating it parametrically, it's really quick to just change the size of it. And then you can use it in all other different designs. So I really like that approach here. I like the fact that I can reuse it and that I'm easily able to change it. So yeah, those were the two main things I wanted to show with this video. Happy to dive deeper into any one of those or any other questions you have here that you want me to explain a little more. I can come in with a more in-depth tutorial, sort of my regular step-by-step approaches that I do. Just let me know in the comments what it is you want me to dive deeper into. One last thing I'll point out, you can see here these are all different heights. And that's to allow the color changes. So I printed this first section here. So that would be this 1.6 millimeters to just below where the bricks start. That was gray because I wanted the gray sort of grout line to show. And then the bricks, you'll notice, those are 0.4 millimeters. And I had a brick, sort of this reddish brick color that I printed that. And then the window trim here, those are also 0.4 millimeters, while the distance between the top of the bricks and those are 0.4. And so that gave me another elevation change there that I could go ahead and just printed these in white. So those gave me the three colors that I wanted here and allowed me to make those color changes. Yeah, so I think that's mainly what I wanted to cover here. Again, any questions, let me know. And I'm going to throw this model, the actual Fusion 360 model. So it'll come with actually both of these designs, the brick cottage and the parametric wall there. So if you want to actually jump in, play around with those, maybe make your own tweaks, you can do that. So if you're interested in getting that or interested in supporting my channel, check out my link to my Patreon page and you'll have those available, as well as access to all my other Fusion 360 files that I've uploaded. All right, guys, I'm going to end it here. And of course, if you're looking to learn how to use Fusion 360 to create your own models, make sure to check out my quick start course. I have a link below. And also I have a link to my free Fusion 360 constraint cheat sheet, which you'll find very valuable. Have a great week and I'll see you in a few.