Autodesk Fusion Beginners Guide (2025) + Example Project

Summary

Steven from 3D Printer Academy presents a comprehensive beginner's guide to Autodesk Fusion 360, a powerful yet user-friendly CAD software. The video starts with the basics of downloading and installing the free-for-personal-use version, followed by how to navigate through pop-ups and panels when first opening the software. Steven simplifies the save system, working with projects, designs, and the 10-document limit of the free version. In this tutorial, viewers learn practical skills by creating a 3D printable phone stand, exploring sketch-based and primitive-based design methods. The video emphasizes the importance of constraints in sketches for efficient design modifications and shares tips for preparing models for 3D printing.

Highlights

• Discover how to navigate Fusion 360 for the first time, even when it's overrun with pop-ups and panels. ✨
• Master the save system with project and design organization tips, even with the 10-document limit. 🗂️
• Learn to use primitives and sketches to create a custom 3D phone stand. 📱
• Understand how to use constraints in sketches for better design integrity. 🔍
• Find out how to utilize Fusion 360’s timeline to revisit and adjust past design steps. 🔄
• Export your design to STL and get it ready for 3D printing with ease. 📤

Key Takeaways

• Fusion 360 is free for personal use, making it accessible for beginners. 🎉
• You can only have up to 10 editable documents at a time in the free version. 🚫
• Designs can be created using sketches or primitives—or even a combination! 🎨
• Constraints in sketches are crucial for precise modifications later. 🔧
• Fusion 360’s timeline allows you to edit any step in your design process. 🕒
• Exporting to STL for 3D printing is a simple process. 🖨️

Overview

Steven welcomes us into the world of Fusion 360, a beginner-friendly CAD software that's free for personal use. He navigates through initial setup hurdles, simplifying the download and installation process. In 2025, Fusion's hub feature is highlighted for its collaborative potential, though it remains more relevant for teams than individual users.

In the heart of the video, Steven demystifies the Fusion 360 save system, explaining projects and designs structure. He provides practical advice on managing the project's document limit in the free version, ensuring users can navigate restrictions effectively. Fusion 360's design workflows are explored, showcasing the balance between using primitives and sketches.

As the tutorial progresses, users are taken through the process of creating a 3D printable phone stand. Steven highlights crucial design principles like using constraints in sketches to allow for easy adjustments. The guide wraps up with tips on exporting designs to STL format for 3D printing, ensuring your creations jump from screen to print with ease.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction to Autodesk Fusion 360 In this introductory chapter on Autodesk Fusion 360, Steven from 3D Printer Academy presents a beginner's guide to the CAD software. Fusion 360 is highlighted as a user-friendly, powerful tool that is free for personal use. To start using the software, users must search for its personal version, set up an account, and complete the installation process which involves logging in and additional verification. A significant feature in the 2025 version is the 'hubs' function which facilitates collaboration.
• 01:00 - 02:00: Navigating Fusion 360 Interface The chapter discusses the initial experience of opening Fusion 360, noting that for first-time users, the interface might seem cluttered with too many popups and helpful panels that aim to assist but can end up being confusing. The advice given is to close these panels to get straight to the essential aspects of the interface by starting with a new design.
• 02:00 - 03:30: Understanding the Save System The chapter titled 'Understanding the Save System' explains how to navigate Fusion's save system. It highlights the importance of knowing where the data panel is located at the top left of the screen. This panel displays all user projects. The chapter guides the user on creating a new project by using the 'New Project' function and allows naming, for instance, 'project one'. Within a project, multiple designs can exist. The chapter also includes step-by-step instructions to save an empty design by going to 'File' and selecting 'Save', making a point that the design can be saved in a specific location.
• 03:30 - 05:00: Working with Designs and Collaboration Limits This chapter explains the process of organizing designs within a project. It begins with the creation of a new project, referred to as 'project one.' Within this project, multiple designs can be created and managed. For example, a design can be named 'design one' and saved within the project. Additional iterations or versions of this design, such as 'design 1a,' can also be created and saved, showcasing the flexibility and organizational capabilities within the project structure. This setup allows for efficient management and collaboration on various designs under a single project umbrella.
• 05:00 - 06:00: Creating a 3D Printable Phone Stand - Basics The chapter discusses the limitations of the free personal use version of Fusion 360, specifically the restriction of having only 10 live or editable documents at any time. Despite this, users can still have more than 10 documents in total, although the software interface might give the impression otherwise. The chapter begins with a demonstration of creating a new project in Fusion 360, showing how to manage designs within the constraints of the software.
• 06:00 - 09:00: 3D Object Creation Methods: Sketches & Primitives The chapter discusses the process of creating designs in 3D software using sketches and primitive shapes. It highlights a scenario where a limitation is encountered due to a read-only document limit. The solution involves changing old documents from editable to read-only status to free up space for new designs, ensuring that users can continue saving their work. The example given involves renaming and saving a new design, illustrating the steps needed to manage document limits effectively.
• 09:00 - 16:00: Understanding Constraints in Sketches The chapter discusses the concept of constraints within sketches, specifically focusing on managing editable designs in Fusion 360. It explains how users can have up to 10 editable designs at a time, and how to switch projects between editable and read-only states to utilize the software's capabilities effectively without exceeding limits. The chapter provides a step-by-step guide on managing these constraints, allowing users to have virtually unlimited designs using the free version by rotating editability among the projects.
• 16:00 - 21:00: Designing the Phone Stand - Step by Step In the chapter titled 'Designing the Phone Stand - Step by Step', the process of learning and designing a phone stand using Fusion 360 is introduced. It emphasizes starting with a simple, easy example project to understand the software better. It explains the basics of the design interface, such as using the data panel and rotating the view with the view Cube, in preparation for creating a 3D printable phone stand.
• 21:00 - 23:00: 3D Printing Preparation & Export The chapter discusses how to navigate and use basic functionalities in CAD software, specifically Fusion 360, to prepare and export 3D printing models.
• 23:00 - 25:00: Final Thoughts and Resources Chapter Title: Final Thoughts and Resources. The chapter starts with how to create custom 3D objects using a 2D sketch. To begin, click on 'Create Sketch' and select a plane, such as one of the wall planes or the floor plane. In the example, the floor plane is chosen, and a 2D shape can now be drawn to form the basis of the 3D object. The process of transitioning from 2D sketches to 3D objects is demonstrated.

Autodesk Fusion Beginners Guide (2025) + Example Project Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hello my name is Steven from 3D printer Academy and this is a complete beginner's guide to Autodesk Fusion 360 Fusion is an easy to use beginner-friendly yet powerful CAD software application that's free for personal use you can find the download page by searching for Fusion 360 for personal use you'll need to create an account and verify your email after going through the install process you'll be prompted to sign in again and it'll ask you a few more things in 2025 Fusion 360 is really pushing their hubs feature it basically allows you to collaborate
• 00:30 - 01:00 with the team but for individual users it doesn't really matter when you open Fusion for the first time it'll look something like this go ahead and click new I personally think they've over complicated opening Fusion for the first time for new users there's really too many popups and I know they're trying to help but it's a little bit confusing go ahead and browse through the helpful panels if you want but I'm just going to go ahead and close them and show you exactly what you need to know right away so here we are in an empty new design
• 01:00 - 01:30 now before we go and create our first design it's important to know the save system for Fusion up here on the top left right here you'll see the data panel and here's where you'll see all of your projects for example if I click new project here we can name the project project one and in the project you could have multiple designs so when I go ahead and save our empty design here simply go up to file and go to save and we could save this design in in a location so if
• 01:30 - 02:00 you click this drop down here you can see we have our new project that we just created project one so how it works is you basically have a project and inside of a project you can have multiple designs so I can call this design one and I could save it now if I go ahead and click save as you'll see if I drop down here in our project one there is design one and now maybe I could call this design 1 a or something like that so now we have two designs in that
• 02:00 - 02:30 project so the default project is the admin project and here's the new project we created here so I double click there you can see are two new designs so an important thing to note with the free personal use version of fusion 360 is that you could only have 10 live or editable documents at a time you could have more than 10 documents even though it makes it seem like you can't really but you actually can so if I go ahead and so you notice here on the left here I have 10 designs that I've created if I
• 02:30 - 03:00 go ahead and try to create a new design you'll see it says read only document limit has been reached so what you have to do is go to one of your old documents and change it from editable to readon and you can always change it back to editable again in the future but now I can save this new design that I have here go ahead and save and now I could call this one design 11 so you notice now we have more than 10 designs right here there it is but we could only only
• 03:00 - 03:30 have 10 editable designs at a time so if you ever want to create another project after you've done your first 10 just go ahead and make one of the old ones go to editable and then just click on read only make read only so that's all you have to do to basically have unlimited designs with the free version so that's basically how the save system works in Fusion 360 now I'm going to go ahead and make design 11 here readon go back to design one and make that editable so now let's go back make sure we're in design
• 03:30 - 04:00 one here now we're in design one and it's editable so to close the data panel you go back to home and then click on the x button up here all right I think the best way to learn Fusion 360 is to go through a quick and easy example project so in this project we'll be creating a 3D printable phone stand now what we're looking at here is the viewport this is where we're going to create the object and on the top right here we have the view Cube you can use that to rotate the view round like so
• 04:00 - 04:30 you just click on it like this or you could pan by using the middle Mouse button like so or hold shift and the middle Mouse button to rotate the view and you could use the scroll wheel or your trackpad to zoom now in Fusion 360 there are two ways that we could create a three-dimensional object we can go up to create here and we can start with A Primitive a pre-made simple basic shape like a box a cylinder a sphere or a pipe
• 04:30 - 05:00 or the other way to make a little bit more custom objects is to start with a 2d sketch so if I go here and click on create sketch we'll need to select a plane to create the sketch on so you could click on one of the wall planes or the floor plane so let's go ahead and click on the floor plane here and now we could draw a 2d area or shape and use that to create the 3D object I'll show you how it works so let's say I click on
• 05:00 - 05:30 the line tool and I start from the origin here I could go up and I could type in let's say 20 mm press enter create another line right here you can click line or you can press L on the keyboard and let's say this time we want it to be 40 click and I can go down here and it'll snap there and I can finish the shape like this now we have a custom shape and I can even create a circle inside of the shape like so and you can move the shape around by clicking the center button like this I'll snap it
• 05:30 - 06:00 here and if we click finish sketch we can now take this custom sketch here click on the area like so and go ahead and extrude it so that's the really easy way to create three-dimensional objects in Fusion 360 using a sketch the other way we create this same object here is by using The Primitives so we go to box and once again we have to select the plane we want to create the Box on and I'll go ahead and hide this body here
• 06:00 - 06:30 it's kind of in the way I'll click on the floor plane once again let's turn on that body again now let's go ahead and create the base shape like so so I'll just click and drag out the first two dimensions and we'll pull up here for the third dimension and go ahead and click okay but now we need to create a hole so we go to create and go past hole don't do a hole let's do a cylinder and we can select the top surface of this object and then we could drag it down and when it's red here it means it'll take away from that object it'll ract from it so it'll create a cut on that
• 06:30 - 07:00 object and we go ahead and click okay so that's the two different ways that you could create objects in Fusion 360 either starting from a sketch or using The Primitives and they both could end up with the same result and you could also do a combination of sketches and Primitives as well for example let me go ahead and hide these two objects here and create a new box on the floor plane again and just do it kind of quick we'll go slow for the phone stand so you could follow along if I click on on this face
• 07:00 - 07:30 here and click on sketch now we're creating a sketch on that face and I can make a 2d sketch like so I'll just make it kind of like this just something random and you could take this now custom uh sketch on that face and extrude it you could either go out and make kind of a like this triangle Peg or I could go in and it'll cut that a jagged triangle hole in the object now the really cool thing about Fusion 360 is you could go back in time to any
• 07:30 - 08:00 command that you've done and change it for example let's say we're not happy with the shape of our custom sketch cutout right here well you go down to the timeline and you can double click on it and now we can edit this sketch so I go ahead and change the shape of this sketch maybe you want to be like this or something or let's just make it a little bit wider how about that now if we click finish sketch it'll update that hole You could also go back to any any step along
• 08:00 - 08:30 the way so you can also scroll back like this just by clicking on this back arrow and it'll take us back in time and you notice we can't see anything because our object visibility was turned off but if I go ahead and let's go all the way to the to the end here and turn everything on you'll notice we can see every step every kind of command that we've taken along the timeline and you just jump all the way back to the the current position that we have here I'll go ahead and hide those objects there now I've been using this tree right here this is our object tree and basically we have this folder
• 08:30 - 09:00 which contains our bodies and we have so we have three bodies right now you can toggle the visibility here and we have this folder which contains our sketches so just like on the timeline we can go into the sketch and edit it as well so if we want to change this hole another way you could double click on this sketch here and you could change it as well it really makes the design process a lot easier because if you ever need to modify or adjust something you can simply go back to the timeline or back to your sketches and change a feature
• 09:00 - 09:30 all right now with that let's go ahead and do a complete project from start to finish using Fusion 360 now we're going to be creating a phone stand so the first step will be creating a mockup of our phone that way we can design the stand around it so to do that let's just go ahead and create a simple box primitive right here so we'll go to create and box and let's go ahead and create it uh this time let's do a vertical plane since the phone will be standing up vertically and let's go
• 09:30 - 10:00 ahead and click the origin point right here at the center and we'll drag out and set the first two Dimensions now I have an iPhone uh 15 Pro so in this case it'll be let's see how tall it is uh 146.640 of the iPhone 15 Pro is
• 10:00 - 10:30 8.25 mm and go ahead and click enter or return for measuring objects I highly recommend getting some digital calipers like these I like these ones so much I've purchased them three times already they're on sale I'll have a link in the description below okay so that's looking pretty good let me just zoom out a little bit and pan and rotate a little bit as well so now let's go ahead and round the corners it'll introduce you to a new tool which is called uh fillet so we could select the edges of our shape
• 10:30 - 11:00 like so and if you hold shift we could select multiple edges at once and then rotate around while still holding shift and we can select all four of these Edge Corners now if you go up here and click fill it we could round the corners so I'm going to type in 10 and just have a more realistic phone looking mockup here and go ahead and click okay now another tool similar to a fillet is the chamfer tool so if we select on this edge here and this Edge here and if we add a
• 11:00 - 11:30 chamfer this is pretty cool what it does is it automatically will chamfer the entire uh loop right here so I'll go to modify and if you go to chamfer you'll see it's right next to the fillet tool because they're very similar go to chamfer and now you'll see it automat uh selects the entire it's called the tangent chain here you can turn it off or on if you want as well but it automatically selects the entire tangent chain basically the the whole Loop of edges and we could set the chamfer amount in this case let's just do one so
• 11:30 - 12:00 there we have our 1 mm chamfer and it's looking a lot more like a regular phone let's go ahead and click okay and now that we have a mockup of our phone let's go ahead and create a phone stand by the way this video is sponsored by Fusion 360 Master Class if you want to go deeper into Fusion 360 every year we come out with a new master class so 2025 is coming out soon if you want a big discount go ahead and click notify me on launch you can find more details in the description below we also have have more in-depth free tutorials on the 3D
• 12:00 - 12:30 printer Academy tutorials channel so in Fusion 360 you can measure the distance between points you can measure the lengths of edges and the distance between faces so to do that all you need to do is select one or more things and it'll tell you some details about that so for example if you want to see how long this Edge is right here just select on that edge and you can see it says one Edge on the bottom right here one edge of a length of 6.25 now that's not the total uh thickness of the phone because
• 12:30 - 13:00 of the chamfer if you want to know the total thickness we can select on in this face here rotate around and hold shift and select the face on the back and we can see the distance is 8.25 so let's go ahead and create the actual phone stand so let's go to create up here in the top left and I think for this instead of starting with a sketch let's go ahead and start with a box so I'll select box here and I'll rotate around like so and let's select on this face right here now start from the
• 13:00 - 13:30 origin point and let's kind of eyeball the dimensions here we want it to be wide enough in this direction so it's stable but not too wide let's do 42 so I'll press tab to switch between the two dimensions and I'll type in 42 it's pretty short so it's not going to be the most stable but I want it to be kind of small and kind of out of the way and for the height let's do also another pretty small Dimension here let's try 20 so we'll have a pretty low profile phone stand a press enter now you notice here
• 13:30 - 14:00 it's automatically detecting what it thinks it should do and right now it's cutting away from our model if we go to the settings of our box over here we could change the operation to create a new body so you notice there's different options we could either join it we could cut it intersect new body or a new component let's go ahead and do a new body now we could drag it out here and a cool trick you could do is instead of manually setting the dimension here we could select on this face and it'll automatically snap to that face there so
• 14:00 - 14:30 once again if I drag this Arrow here I can click on this face this point this Edge and it'll automatically snap to that length so it's the same width as a phone which is 70.6 MM now's go ahead and click okay so we have the mockup of the phone and we have the kind of the start of the stand here but the phone is kind of in the way so let's go ahead and turn that off and now with the phone turned off I noticed it's not quite enough of a of a box to start with in my
• 14:30 - 15:00 opinion so what we could do is if you select on this face here and right click you notice we have all these tools that we could select from so one thing we could do is go to move and copy and this is a great feature of fusion 360 that makes designing things really easy because you always just manually move faces like so so watch this you go to move copy and now we could just drag it up like so and change the position of whatever we have selected and we can even rotate it as well like so so it's a
• 15:00 - 15:30 little bit confusing to see from here but you can see I'm rotating it like this so I want that to be zero and I think this is a little bit tall I think right here should be fine I believe that's taller than it was before yeah it's 30 instead of 20 so let's go ahead and actually create the cutout for the phone stand so a good way to do that would be to create a sketch along this face here and then we'll extrude it and cut it along lengthwise so let's go ahead and create a sketch after selecting this face here we'll create a sketch and let's go ahead and create a
• 15:30 - 16:00 custom sketch here and I'll introduce you to a new thing as well which is called constraints so if we go up and create a line here and if you drag your cursor over this line here you'll notice a triangle appears right at the midpoint and that means it's automatically going to create a midpoint constraint so if we click here where the triangle is and drag down and let's go ahead and type a dimension as well let's do 18 and click you'll notice the line first off is a black line second off we have a triangle
• 16:00 - 16:30 here and we have this kind of t-shape here as well as a dimension here if I create another line again and this time just click anywhere in here and this time I don't type a dimension or anything you'll notice the line is blue so basically this line here is properly constrained and this line is completely unconstrained if I try to move this one I can if I try to move this one I can't because it's completely constrained so in Fusion 3 60 the proper way to design
• 16:30 - 17:00 something is to design things fully constrained that way if we want to go back in our timeline and change the dimension of something you could always just go back to that Dimension and change it now this triangle here that's our midpoint constraint you'll notice here I selected it and you can see it's actually telling us what it is it's the midpoint constraint basically means that this line here has to be on this midpoint now this T here means it has to be perpendicular or a 90° Angle now in this case we don't want it to be uh perpendicular so let's go ahead and
• 17:00 - 17:30 select on this constraint here and delete it and you'll notice our line has become blue and I'm going to delete this line here by selecting and deleting cuz we don't need that one now let's go ahead and set the angle that we want our phone to be at so we could create a new constraint by selecting this top line here and it's the line that's being projected from the shape underneath and let's select this line here and if we press D and move our Mouse you'll see we can create a new uh dimensions sketch or in this case it's the angle constraint
• 17:30 - 18:00 and now we could manually select whatever angle we want so in this case it's 90 uh let's do 90 and we could just do + 10 which will give us a 10° angle so now we have it fully constrained at a 10° Angle now this might seem Overkill but trust me you want your sketches to be fully constrained so now let's go ahead and create another line and this time I'll show you how we could start with a line just kind of floating in space and then fully constrain it afterward so just create a line like so
• 18:00 - 18:30 and actually in this case I know how long I want the line to be I want it to be 10 mm and then click we want the center point of this line to connect to this dot here so what we could do is Select this line and select midpoint constraint and then select this point and now we have let me zoom in here we even rotate actually no I want to look I'll click on The View Cube to go straight to look straight on again now we have this line perfectly centered on this point now let's add one more constraint for this small line here and let's make it perpendicular to this line
• 18:30 - 19:00 so I'll select the this line first hold shift select the next line and if we go up here to our constraints we could create a perpendicular constraint all right there we go now let's go ahead and draw a line by pressing L from this point to the top of our box and I'm just going to go anywhere for now it'll be blue for now and create another line from here all the way up to there but we want these lines to all be parallel so we just select all three lines here and then click on the parallel constraint so
• 19:00 - 19:30 now all of these lines are parallel now the center line we don't really need that's a guid line so what we could do is we could change that to a construction line here so I just went over here to the sketch pallet tools and selected construction so now you can see it's dashed and if I hover my mouse over this area it selects the whole area compared to before if we change the line back to a regular line we have two separate areas we can select on this line select on construction and now we have this one area here controlled by
• 19:30 - 20:00 the construction line which is 19 mm so I know that was a lot of detail on sketches but sketches are really important in Fusion 360 now one more thing I think we could do to make this better is instead of using a midpoint constraint here let's set a distance of this point to let's say this point over here so we could create a line starting from this point and let's just create it let's do 14 and now we could force this point which is controlling basically this entire sketch here let's select
• 20:00 - 20:30 this point here and this point here and force them to be connected now this is called a coincident constraint so if we go up to uh coincident right here it'll force that point from our original sketch onto that point and now instead of it using the midpoint of this Top Line we could set the offset of our shape here now look how cool this is we could change anything we want about this sketch to customize our phone stand if you want to change the angle here make it steeper no problem if you want to change the offset here no problem we can
• 20:30 - 21:00 just double click and change it if you want to change the depth no problem super cool so there we have our complete properly constrained sketch I hope that wasn't too confusing but sketches are really important let's go ahead and click finish sketch take this area here go to extrude and it'll cut through the entire shape and I'll just drag past it it doesn't really matter and click okay so now we have our custom phone stand and if you want to make it a little bit less angular we just just take these edges here and add fillets to them so
• 21:00 - 21:30 I'll select all four of these corners and go to fillet and let's do a 5 millim fill it like so and I'll also add a chamfer to this top Edge as well just so it's not quite as sharp of an object so I'll do a chamfer in this case let's do 1 mm now let's say we want to 3D print this object here well the first thing we have to do which we probably should have done at the beginning of the project is actually save the project so let's go ahead and go to file save and it's saving it in Project one that's okay
• 21:30 - 22:00 let's go ahead and call it phone stand one and click save now for 3D printing we need to export the file as an STL file so it's really easy to export a single body INF Fusion 360 all you have to do is go over here to what it says body 3 actually let's rename that also to phone stand and rightclick it and click save as mesh Now by default it's a 3mf let's go ahead and switch it to an STL file and we can even set the refinement settings let's go ahead and
• 22:00 - 22:30 set to high that way these rounded Corners look nice and let's go ahead and click okay it'll ask where to save it I'm just going to save it to my downloads and click save now simply drag the STL file into your slicer of choice in this case I'm using bamboo studio and go ahead and click slice and then click print so here it is fully 3D printed and now you can get some cool shots for future videos I hope you found this video helpful once again my name is Steven the creator of 3D printer Academy
• 22:30 - 23:00 go ahead and check out our site 3D printer academy.com we have a bunch of free resources STL designs courses and more thanks for watching and happy printing