nealeb
Well-Known Member
One of the problems with trying to learn something like F360 from videos is that you might find out what to do, but not necessarily why. I know that a lot of people these days prefer to just watch pictures but they don't give anything like the full story. I've just watched the first couple of Rowntree videos and dipped into a couple more. Yes, nice friendly style and if you want to replicate exactly what he has done, you will be able to do that. But one problem that I have found with a number of people (and I have run F360 tutorials myself for model-engineering club members) is that particularly if someone is coming from a strong 2D background, a lot of what you do seems silly, pointless, "not like I'm used to doing it". Rowntree made a couple of interesting little components on his first two videos but never said that he was not producing engineering drawings but a 3D model of the finished item. They are not the same thing! Let me give a couple of examples of where this is different to "traditional" 2D CAD. First of all, there is a reason why a sketch is called a sketch and not a drawing. Think of it as a back-of-the-envelope job except that when you put dimensions on it, magically all the lines and circles change to the desired sizes. And if you don't like one, just go back and change the numbers and the sketch will adapt to suit. Another example is the "student" I had who didn't listen to what I said and dimensioned all his sketch elements from two datum planes. Absolutely fine if you are producing engineering drawings and subsequently going to a machine to make the part concerned. However, it throws away an enormous amount of the power of the product as it completely destroys the ability to go back and easily change things later - as we later demonstrated to that guy. If I want two holes equi-spaced from the two ends of a bar, I find a way of producing a sketch that embodies this principle - and in a way that means that if I change the "master" hole position the other hole moves without any effort on my part. After years of fighting TurboCAD and generally finding that any significant changes to a drawing meant scrapping it and starting again, the time-saving during the design process with F360 is amazing. In fact, one of my little mantras that I try to preach to anyone I'm working with on F360 is "never use a dimension when you can use a constraint". This is so far from being obvious to a beginner or someone moving from one of the (excellent in their way) 2D CAD systems that it's worth pointing out.
To illustrate how much I feel is missing from many of the online tutorials, my first online session given to a group of fellow club members took around 1.5hours, not 10 minutes, although we only went about as far as Rowntree's first component. And I set my students homework to do before the next session!
In summary - if you want to get the best out of F360 or any similar product, find tutorials that cover some of the theory, not just impressive demos, and forget everything you knew about 2D CAD. This is a whole different world!
To illustrate how much I feel is missing from many of the online tutorials, my first online session given to a group of fellow club members took around 1.5hours, not 10 minutes, although we only went about as far as Rowntree's first component. And I set my students homework to do before the next session!
In summary - if you want to get the best out of F360 or any similar product, find tutorials that cover some of the theory, not just impressive demos, and forget everything you knew about 2D CAD. This is a whole different world!
