 Hey guys, Vladimir here. Three days before Christmas and here I am trying to squeeze in one more holiday design. Today we'll tackle this Christmas tree. The idea for this design came from my weekly online life class where during our show and tell session one of the students showed off this print by printable user EmbraceNext. I thought this would make for a great holiday design challenge so I assigned it to be modeled in Fusion 360. There were many great approaches to tackling this design and today I thought I would show you my method. I ended up printing it in PETG and in vase mode. Although the original design was made to be a candy dish, I decided to light it up with these little color changing LED lights. The trees are easily customizable so that you can make an entire forest with all different shapes and sizes. If you'd like to learn more about my weekly online life class or go at your own pace Fusion courses, check out my link below. Okay, let's jump right in. Alright so we'll begin the usual way by creating a sketch on the XY plane and I'm going to come in with a polygon, more specifically a circumscribe polygon and we'll start that right at the origin. I'm going to go with a hexagon here. You can go with as many sides as you want. For example, a pentagon would be a good choice here. All depends on the number of sides you want your Christmas tree to have. No wrong answer here. But I'm going to go with my hexagon and then I'm going to go ahead and enter a dimension here of 50 millimeters for my radius. Now I'm going to select this top edge here and make that horizontal by giving it a horizontal constraint. And then I'm going to again come in with another polygon. So basically create the same thing, another hexagon here. And for this dimension here I'm going to go ahead and reference that first dimension I made. You'll see it'll say D1 for dimension 1. And next I want to position it so that the center point of my polygon lines up with the center point here of my first polygon. And to do that I'll grab my coincident constraint, click on my first center point and then click on the origin here and that lines them right up. Now it looks like there's only one shape here. But if I grab this corner here, let's try it one more time and start to rotate it. The non-constrained shape will begin to rotate and now I can grab this edge here and apply a vertical constraint there. And you can see here that everything turned from blue to black. So that means everything is fully constrained. And you saw how I was quickly able to move my shapes into place there by taking advantage of my constraints. And I can't stress that enough to be able to become really comfortable with your constraints here. And that's why I created a constraints cheat sheet which I have linked below and you can download it, keep it by your side. Reference it when you need it until it becomes second nature to you and you'll find how your designs just flow so much more smoothly. Alright, let's continue. I'll click on Finish Sketch E4 Extrude. I'm going to select each one of these profiles starting with the big center profile there. If you accidentally click on something again, it deselects and you can just click on it one more time to reselect it. And I'm going to go with each one of these triangles here. You should have 13 profiles selected. And then we're going to orbit so we can grab this arrow here and just bring it up. We're going to go with the distance there of 20 millimeters. And then I'm going to give it a taper angle of 30 and that'll flare this out. Click OK and then E4 Extrude. Again, we're going to click on this top profile, drag it up. We're going to first enter a taper angle here. And we're going to go the opposite of our first taper angle which was 30 degrees. So we're going to go negative 30. And that's going to taper it inwards. And next, we're just going to take the arrow and keep bringing it up until it comes to a point. If you go too far, you'll notice it'll start disappearing. So you can get some wacky behavior happening. And then all you have to do is just kind of bring it back to a point where you get that point there. So I think I'm going to just enter 110 here and that looks like that works. And you can just try different numbers. Keep going down until you get your point. All right, basically this is the shape that we're going to work with for the rest of this model. And the rest of the steps here are going to involve scaling this and rotating it. To create a copy of this, we'll right-click, go to Move, Copy. And instead of clicking on the actual model, you can see I have all these different angles here. And the little widget will want to turn depending on which way the face is angled. I basically want it to just go straight up and down and not, you know, towards the point here. So what I'm going to do is select it by expanding my browser here, bodies, and clicking on the body there. That way, these arrows will just reflect my different axes. So X, Y, and Z. And I can click on Create, Copy here on my dialog box. And then take this and just drag it straight up. I'm just going to go straight up until it clears the first model there. Click OK. Next, I'm going to right-click, go to Move, Copy. And what I want to do here is rotate it so that you see here that these, you have sort of, I guess, the peak and the valley here. I want it so that they alternate so that the peak will not flow into another peak, but flow into a valley here so that it's got this alternating look. So what I'm going to do is place my little widget right on the bottom center point there. It'll snap right to that. And then I'm going to go to a top view and I'm going to start rotating it. And as you're rotating it, you want to look and you can see here how they begin to overlap. And it'll actually snap into place. And I can see in my case with my hexagons, it's 15 degrees. If you use a different polygon, it's going to be a different angle. So just be aware of that. But I'm going to go with 15 degrees there. Click OK. And now I'm going to move this. Actually, first we're going to scale it. So we're going to go to Modify down to Scale. Select it. I'm going with a uniform scale here. In my point, you want to be careful here. I'm going to go ahead and select it. Since everything is on the origin, I'm going to use that as my scaling point. So everything will sort of scale inwards to that. And it doesn't move out of place. I can select it here. I can just click on the O here. And that sets my origin point. As far as the scale factor, I'm going to go 80%. Those 0.8 is what you'll want to enter. So we'll do a 0.8 scale factor and click OK. And we can see a scale down a bit. I'm going to go to Move Copy or right-click, Move Copy. And then we're going to again select it. Instead of selecting it here, we're going to select it right here on our browser there. It's going to be Body 2. And I'm going to orbit it so I can see the bottom here. Because basically what I want to do is take this arrow and just drag it straight down until this bottom face disappears. And you can see that it'll begin to disappear. Careful because you don't want this overhang there. So you want to kind of bring it all the way down until it kind of swallows it up there. That looks good. Doesn't need to be an exact number there just until that bottom disappears. And we're good there. We're going to do that process one more time. So right-click, Move Copy. We're going to go ahead and select Body 2. Click on Create Copy on our dialog box here. And then drag this arrow up so that it clears our model there. Actually it doesn't really have to clear. I just need to drag it up a bit. Click OK. And then we're going to go to Modify, Scale. We'll click on Body 3. We'll scale this to be, I'm going to go with 0.7 here. So I'm kind of doing it up. So I'm scaling and then rotating. It doesn't matter which order. You can rotate then scale or scale then rotate. But we're going to do 0.7, Scale, Factor, Uniform. Let's reselect that point. I'm just to make sure that I didn't select some kind of random point. I'm going to go to my Expand Origin here and click the O. And that looks good. Click OK. Right-click, Move Copy. And then we're going to go ahead and click on Body 3 there. Same idea. This time it's actually too far down. So I'm going to move it up a bit and again move it back down so that that bottom face there just disappears. Oh wait, we still have to rotate it. So let's actually rotate it before we move it anymore because we can move it down but then we'll have to readjust it. So let's do this. Let's right-click, Move Copy. So that's kind of the problem there. Now I don't have that center. I can't see the center there and I can untaggle Body 2 or Body 3, actually Body 1 there. So I can see that center point and I'll bring them back. All right. Now I'm going to go to a top view here. And I'm just going to rotate this. I know it's 15 degrees so I'll do the 15 degrees again. Click OK. And then again we're going to go to right-click, Move Copy. And then I'm going to grab it from here. And we're just going to take this arrow here, move it straight down. Be careful you grab the right arrow and not, you know, the X or the Y arrow. You want the Z up and down there. And I'm going to move this down until that bottom face disappears. Click OK. And there we have it. That's our tree there. And so basically all we need to do now is combine this into one body because we just have these three different bodies right now. So we'll go to Modify, Combine. I'm just going to select all three and make sure my operation is Joint. Click OK. And now you can see all these bodies collapsed into one body there. All right. Basically that's all you need here. I can send this exported to my 3D printer and print it in vase mode. I did create a hole in the bottom here for these little tea lights to fit in here, which I think is a nice touch. So to do that, we'll create a sketch on this bottom face there. And I measured my tea lights to compare calipers. And the ones I'm using were 37 millimeters. So I can just click a 37 millimeter diameter circle there and then take that sketch and just extrude it up. So I'm just going to go up 5 millimeters here, negative 5. Since I'm printing in vase mode, it's just basically, it doesn't really matter that distance. But if you do want to print this solid, you would go up the distance of the tea light you're using. So I'll show you what this looks like in the slicer. Utilities, make 3D prints, select it here. I'm going to go with my Prusa slicer there and it's going to bring it right up. And all I want to do is just make sure my print settings are set to spiral vase mode here under layers and perimeters. So back to my platter here, if I slice that. What's going on? I've got too many models here. I forgot to let's send it one more time because I'm not sure which was the right one. So if you have a model, they'll just throw it on top. All right, I'm going to go ahead and slice it and then you can see there. It's got my hole there. You can increase the number of layers here that you want on the bottom there. So in this case, I think I have it set to, yeah, set to 12 layers. But normally, I forget. It's like three, maybe three or four. What's the default? If I click on this little arrow, it'll tell me, yeah, four layers is the default. And then you can slice that. So it is, if you want sort of a heavier bottom, especially when you're doing vase mode, it may be a good idea to increase that. And then that way when you slice it, you can have more number of layers on the bottom there if you want more of a solid bottom. But that's basically it. And then you can take this. If I go back to Fusion, you can make different versions of this. So what I did is let's say I want to create like a tall skinny tree and then a shorter tree. I took my timeline here back before I did the hole there. And you can quickly just make more copies of this. So create a copy here. And I'll kind of bring this out. And then I can do a scale of the whole thing. So back to my solid environment there, modify scale. And let's say this time I can do a non-uniform scale and x and y. So let's say do like 1.3. That'll make it bigger. But let's say I want tall and skinnier. So maybe those 0.8 and y 0.9 and z. Actually, you want x and y to be the same. Sorry, x and y to be the same. And in z, you want that. Let's say if you wanted it a little bit bigger, we could do like 1.2. And you have sort of a taller skinnier tree. And then if I bring the timeline forward, that's only going to make the circle. It doesn't apply here. But what I can do is create another circle there. I would just draw two lines here just to make sure they go straight across. Find that intersection point. So x, x. Let's make them construction line. And then I'll do 37 millimeters as a circle. And let's bring that in one more time. And then I will just, so you just have to put in your hole after. Because if you scale, you don't want to scale that hole. The hole needs to be constant there because the size of the tea light is not changing. But that's a quick way. You can sort of just come scale, make different sizes, and then send them to your slicer and 3D print a bunch of them. Let me know if you found this tutorial helpful or if you have any questions on my approach. If you enjoy my content, then consider becoming a Patreon supporter. I've included my link below. If you'd like to finally master Fusion 360 to create your own designs, then check out my online courses, also linked below. Alright guys, I will see you in a few.