Fusion 360 for Makers: Design Your Own Digital Models for 3D Printing and CNC Fabrication

by Lydia Sloan Cline

Learn how to use Autodesk Fusion 360 to digitally model your own original projects for a 3D printer or a CNC device. Fusion 360 software lets you design, analyze, and print your ideas. Free to students and small businesses alike, it offers solid, surface, organic, direct, and parametric modeling capabilities.

Fusion 360 for Makers is written for beginners to 3D modeling software by an experienced teacher. It will get you up and running quickly with the goal of creating models for 3D printing and CNC fabrication.

Inside Fusion 360 for Makers , you'll

Genres: Nonfiction, Engineering

498 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 11, 2018

Reviews

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent introduction to Fusion 360, I skimmed the book looking for useful features of which I found several. One nice feature for people making 2 part molds is the draft feature, it cants the vertical surfaces slightly so you can easily extract pieces from a mold. It's also available on Safari so you can easily search it and other books on this topic.

[Povilas Balzaravičius · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is good resource for beginners but can be easily covered with few hours of videos too. There are plenty of those on Youtube or Autodesk sites.

I'm pretty fresh Fusion 360 user and already have constructed few things with Fusion and my 3D printer (one was extruder mount for the printer). I was quite familiar with sketches, extruding those and performing boolean operations on components. I've grabbed this book to understand what other features are available on the tool and when to use those. Now I'm glad I know what is body or component, when and how to use Sculpt mode, how to generate gears and slice model for laser cutter. I really liked chapters dedicated to examples (though some are very basic). There are multiple ways how the same part can be designed - exploring other's examples allows you to find those ways.

Basically it is short introduction into basics revealing multiple features of Fusion 360. If you already constructed 1 or 2 parts with Fusion - 1/3 of book can be skipped.

[Bryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very complete but not a great beginners guide. It gets bogged down in the first chapter. The material is all there, but it’s a jumble. It’s a good reference once you have some idea what you’re doing, but not for an absolute beginner. The best way by far to learn Fusion 360 is to watch some of the excellent videos on YouTube. I found Lara Christensen and Paul McWhorter suited me best.

There’s at least one error in it. She says you need Windows to use Fusion 360. It works just fine on a Mac - probably better than Windows, but I’m biased.

[John Wargo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Giving up, this book is worthless. 109 pages before you get to to a tutorial and that tutorial is missing steps. I tried 15 times and couldn't get the instructions to work. Nothing on the book's Errata page about this. The author tries way, way to hard to explain every possible option in this complicated program and simply fails. Cover to cover give me tutorials and teach me how to use features through them. What a waste of time. I read more than 100 pages and accomplished very little.

[Norbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Libro útil para iniciarse con Fusion 360, sin entrar a saco en todas las opciones que tiene. Enfocado para Makers aunque se deja muchas cosas que también serían útiles para este colectivo.

Atentos que estoy escribiendo un libro sobre Fusion360 en castellano que cubrirá bastante más!!

[Frank D. Hiatt]

Great introduction to using Fusion 360.

Very well written. The explanations are understandable and very clear.
I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in using Fusion 360.

[TheTeapot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good overview of some basic techniques across Fusion using follow-along examples. Not everything was relevant and the level of detail often missed the mark so this text probably works best as a reference material rather than an instruction manual.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good for beginners, but lacks any explanation on sheet metal and simulation functionalities.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gear resource for makers.

[Timmy Jacobs · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd recommend the Fusion 360 Black Book (or called something to that effect), over this one. Not bad, but it's a bit My First Book-type. Which is generally how I feel about most Make books.

[Johnoy Albert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good

It is a little more dense than you expect , but it is well worth the extra time it takes to internalize. I recommend using the book to supplement a online course.

[Jim Tiffin Jr · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice compliment to online tutorials.