 Hey guys, Vladimir here. I was browsing Epilogue site for some Christmas design ideas and I came across this snowflake project page. And they really got some really neat snowflake designs here. And I especially like this sort of geometric shape one. And I thought, well, this would be a great design tackle infusion. And it would make for an excellent little design challenge. Now, obviously this is made for laser cutting, but no reason why you can't 3D print this as well. So I went ahead and designed this snowflake and here it is. And I'm going to show you my approach to designing it. But I thought, well, why don't we turn this into a little design challenge. So why don't you go ahead and tackle it, pause the video, give it a shot and then come back and compare your approach with mine. Now, there isn't one correct way to design anything, but there are more efficient ways than others. And in this video, you're going to see it's going to be jam packed with constraints. You know how I'm always talking about constraints and how you want to be very comfortable with them and incorporating them into your design because it'll make your workflow way more efficient and just flow so much better. And that's why I have my free constraints cheat sheet, which is a downloadable PDF that describes each of these constraints and what they do. So click the link below to get that and print it out or save it to your desktop and reference it as you need it. All right. If you're up for a challenge, pause this video, go ahead and tackle this design and then click play and we'll compare results. All right. I'll begin by creating a sketch on the XY plane R for rectangle. And then I'm going to click on the center rectangle tool here in my sketch palette. We'll do a 20 by 20 millimeter rectangle. And we're going to create a couple more of those. So I'll just right click, repeat center rectangle again, 20 by 20. Now with this one, I'm going to take the center and rotate it. Now do that by double clicking on the center here, taking the little rotation widget here. I'll type 45 degrees. And now I have this rotated rectangle, but you can see it is not constrained at all. So I can move it around. I could even rotate it. So what we'll do first is I'll go ahead and constrain it vertically by grabbing my vertical constraint here, clicking on here. I'll do, you know, I'll do the center and then the origin. And that will lock it there, but I can still rotate it and I can still move it up and down. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this, oops, let me, you can see how it acts a little crazy there. Let's grab our vertical constraint there and we'll constrain this center construction line there and that's going to lock it in place so it doesn't rotate anymore. Then our final constraint there will be a dimension from the origin to the center here. Whoops. Let's do that one more time. Make sure we click on that origin, click on the center, and I'm going to make that 36 millimeters. All right, we're going to go with another center rectangle. So offer a rectangle, choose my center rectangle there and I go ahead and pretty much rinse and repeat here. So 20 millimeters on both sides there and click the center, turn the widget there 45 degrees and let's go ahead and constrain this vertical line. And then what I'm going to do is grab my coincident constraint and coincident this center point with this top corner there. And then just the sort of a V shape coming from the top here. In many ways I could do that. I'm going to approach it by just drawing it out over here. Notice I get that perpendicular constraint right there and so if you don't get it you can always just add that and it's the exact same constraint as this guy right there. So let's add it and I want to take these two lines and make them equal together. So I'll grab my equal constraint and select both of them. Now you can see they grow and shrink together. And I want this to be so that this angle here or if I draw a vertical line that it'll be 45 degrees on each side. So the way I'm going to approach that is I'll just draw a line across these and then make that line a construction line and then I'm going to go ahead and make that line horizontal. So now that this will be perfectly horizontal I'm going to move this over here and what I'm going to do is constrain this point to my origin. So I'll grab my vertical constraint and grab both of those points there and now it gets lined up and then finally I'll just add a dimension from the center here. I'm going to make this I believe I went with 56 millimeters perfect. One thing I forgot to do is actually put a let me undo that put a dimension on this line here. Now remember I made that equal to this line here as well so once I change this dimension both should update. All right and then finally I'll just draw a line attaching the midpoint of this rectangle to the point right there and there we go. That takes care of sort of that first arm there and now I'm going to draw just another branch coming this way. I'll start that off by drawing a line from this corner. Notice I get that parallel constraint that goes right in. Fusion decides that probably makes sense that that's what I'm looking for so it will add that in. Another way I can handle that is let's say I purposely say don't make it parallel is I can grab my collinear constraint it'll actually do the exact same thing if I say I want this to be collinear with this line here. So whether they're collinear or parallel in this case it's the same thing. All right so now I'm going to grab another center rectangle here and again 20 by 20. I want to make this point here coincident to this point here so I'll grab my coincident constraint and click on both of those and it'll add them right in. Forgot to add a dimension on this line here I want that to be 20 millimeters. All right just a couple more lines to add here I'll take a line from my midpoint here to the midpoint of that line and again from that midpoint to this one and there we have it. So that's everything I need for this snowflake finish sketch E4 extrude I'm going to go with my thin extrude and then I'm just going to click on these lines here I'm going to avoid that center rectangle and I'm going to grab every other line that's here this one as well you should have seven selected. I'm going to go with the wall thickness of three millimeters distance of three while location I'm going to change that from side one you can see how it's kind of arranged here so I'm going to go center and that will place my extrusion right on the center of my lines and click okay and then next I'm going to take these bodies and I'm going to do a circular pattern so go pattern circular pattern choose both of these bodies my axis here is going to be my z axis right there I'm going to want four of those and there we have it click okay and finally I can bring in that center rectangle E4 extrude here grab my thin extrude give it the same thickness three millimeters distance of three and side I'm going to change that or while location I'll change that to sensor my operation is going to be joined and click okay and there is my snowflake how did you do and I'm just realizing I forgot one little branch that's supposed to go right here so good thing Fusion 360 is parametric meaning you don't have to worry about breaking your design when you need to go back and make a change and they actually make it super easy to do so so the way I can approach this is I can simply go to my timeline here double click to open up that first sketch you can also right click and then click edit and here you can see in my sketch I'm going to draw two lines so L for a line I'm just going to grab a line going vertically and then grab a line going horizontally here and I don't have to worry about making the dimensions for each one because I'm going to simply grab my equal constraint here and click on both of these lines it'll make them equal now I just put the dimension on one of them so 15 millimeters and there you go they're both 15 and I also want this line to be in the middle of this line here this point to be in the middle so what I can do is grab my midpoint constraint which is this little triangle here so this allows me to show you one more constraint I'm going to click on my point there between where those two lines come together and I'll click on this line here and it's going to throw it right in the middle and you see that little triangle constraint there all right finish my sketch and we don't see anything yet that's because we have to include it in this extrusion here so in my timeline I'm going to double click that second extrude bring my sketch into view and I'm simply going to select the line there and you can see it threw it in and if I simply click okay it will go ahead and apply it out to the next step there which is that circular pattern and you can see that all of these arms have it so super easy way to make changes gotta love that capability of Fusion 360 okay now I'm finished for real all right I hope you enjoyed this tutorial if you have any questions or thoughts on my approach I'll leave it in the comments below if you enjoy my content and want to support me creating more of these then consider becoming a patreon I have a link below I've also got some excellent Fusion 360 courses links are below as well oh and don't forget that constraints cheat sheet all right guys I'll see you in a few