Fusion 360 vs Blender for Car Modeling - Which car shapes work best when modeling with Fusion 360 

Thanks Ian, I will see if i can bodge together some blender content. I will focus more on the transition from Fusion to blender and some of the main tools and how they compare. I don't think I have seen any content along the lines of "Learning Blender after CAD"

Thanks Marchin, I learn something new every day and just hope to get the information out there. I hope to have a high quality car series in the near future with full details.

Yeah its not as forgiving for sure! If you want to go through the latest car modeling series I did you can find it here ru-vid.com/group/PLBDfGh8A8kXW2KBn0b7pMsH5q6FLfSYql it is about 10.5hrs all the way through...

I haven't forgotten about you ! :) I just replied to your last email. sorry it took so long!

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign I just sawy, I'm going to work through that over the next few days and see how far I can get. Much appreciated.

yeah about that :) There is one other workflow but its expensive. Auto makers use Blender(or programs like it) to concept shapes, then take it into a surfacing program like Alias to build "Class A" surfaces off that mesh. From a hobby perspective if you want to make something that isn't just 3d printing. Fusion. If the end Goal is to 3d print then use whatever you are comfortable with since it will be a mesh anyways.

Very welcome. I hope to expand on it in the coming weeks. I say several times things like "it's not impossible it is just harder" and I want to diver deeper into the harder to control stuff so we can see it. A lot of foundational content and workflow needs to happen first though.

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign hope to see it soon

Very much so. I had a handful of 60s/70s cars. 68 camaro, 73 charger, 71 ltd, 71 f100. The two fords had more straight hard body lines, but the charger and camaro were rounded enough that would probably work. 50s and early 60s would be rounded enough to be a bit easier.

Well i did try Rhino 7 and i really didn't like the UI/UX and the SubD tools were lacking. years ago they used Tsplines, but when Autodesk bought it and put it in Fusion and Inventor, it wasn't an option in Rhino. I have Rhino 8 on my list but just been too busy. On plasticity. I have a car modeling series with it. There are some nice tools and they are adding XNurbs to it which should bump up the surfacing toolset a lot. I think v2.0 will have that in the Studio version. ru-vid.com/group/PLBDfGh8A8kXXglEZA2MGsn-U8z2pNCPny

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign yeah the interface isn’t perfect but the tool are solids, it’s widely used by industrial designers and grasshopper is so powerful (I wish blender nodes evolve in this direction). I’m also a fusion360 and 3d printing instructor in France, and I also have a growing list of softwares to learn, I’ll add plasticity to it when the v2 comes out then. Keep the good work ! Theses video looks so hard to do

@@BenoitPerocheau Yes I was impressed with the tools. There used to be some grasshopper style add-ins for Fusion that have gone away sadly.... I will had Rhino 8 back to my list for later in the year. It really needs to have good subD and the ability to work with scan meshes for it to stay on my list. I played with Solid Edge and was really not happy with that as a viable option for that workflow. Rhino at half the price has the ability to capture a segment. I still think its public impression is less precise modeling because of how it is presented.

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign Rhino is big on surfaces and works with scanned meshes, I have clients who use it for fender design, I think it’s considered unprecise because it does not have any part history. Yeah I’m not a fan of solid edge either Was pleasantly surprised by shapr3d, It’s not as powerful as fusion360 but more pleasant to use.

It depends on how you want to manufacture the part. I have a few videos on doing a reverse engineer workflow on part of a trunk lid(mx5) as well as using the mesh directly with forms to design a spoiler. If you are looking to CNC machine a part I would say you need to use a CAD program like Fusion. If you are just going to be 3d printing you could stay in Blender if you are comfortable there.

Thanks. I do have a blender series for learning blender slowly ru-vid.com/group/PLBDfGh8A8kXU0m-0xVwrbQFTiGR2wfyKZ and you can email me support@caducator.com

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign Thank you so much man, really grateful to you.

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign ❤

Found things in Forms can get out of shape quickly but there are some ways to deal with it. The mesh in Blender is never really round because its a bunch of straight lines. So it kind of depends what you are doing with the model. If you are just 3d printing it might be fine. You still have the same issues you do with forms but Blender has edge weighting which helps a bit. As for round things you can use Match in the forms tools. If you extrude an arc for example you can attach a form to that arc. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-TkuRF-fVlcs.html

Those trucks are pretty boxy so you could get away with many different options honestly. Depends a little on what your end goal is with the model. It could be modeled in Fusion as surfaces or with Forms and it could be done in Blender as well. Here is a quick start I just did after looking at a picture. Might get you going in the right direction. a360.co/3uMzhg9

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign I want to print it in resign later. I will go with Fusion I think 🙂👍

To be clear you can print from Blender. you are directly modeling the mesh so little details will take more time and expertise. If you know Fusion I would stick with that.

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign Yes I prefer Fusion because I am working On it for some time 🙂

Rób w fusion, ja robię modele w ski 1:10 w fusion

If you subdivide an individual face you have 2 options. Simple and Exact. Simple will divide up the face just as you ask it to, but the box model geometry will remain flat and the overall shape of the design will change. What this means is that the tangency of the nurbs surface under might get a wave in it. The exact mode will retain the current shape and divide up the select face and others around it to maintain the shape. Fusion allows what is called T-points, where an edge can end in the middle of another edge, not a vert. These points offer up some flexibility in modeling(and can be toggled to star points), but also can very easily create bad surface geometry. Fusion does pretty well until you ask it to keep a straight edge and blend that into curved geometry, or if you ask it to change directions creation N-gons. Those two situations are difficult and require a lot of care in the modeling approach to get a quality surface out of it. 3ds max is a polygon modeling program so the smooth visualizations are done in the software. Fusion is using subdivided modeling that is very similar but the geometry is converted to NURBS surface so rather than a visual representation of the surface it has to come up with the mathematical equivalent of it. In fusion you can insert edges, you can also insert points (similar to a knife tool), crease or bevel edges, subdivide faces etc. The main thing that is different is there is no edge weighting. Crease is 100% and other than that it tries to maintain curvature continuity. One big benefit to Fusion over say 3ds, maya, blender. is that after you create the shape you can boolean it very easy using sketches and surface/solid tools. In say blender you can boolean 2 shapes and leave it in the mod stack, but if you try to incorporate it into the base mesh it can be tricky to maintain your edge flow. Since the fusion workflow doesn't care about edgeflow after the conversion to a NURBS you don't have that limitation. Pros and cons to each.

It depends on what you want to do with the model. You can model by surfaces but you have to be extremely precise with the sketches and curves. I started a series on doing this but haven't uploaded everything yet. ru-vid.com/group/PLBDfGh8A8kXXB1PBaScYI4fWfyCbJQ8om That will give you the basic techniques to get started. It is a bit frustrating in Fusion 360 because you need 3 sketches to create a 3d curve.

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign if i want to make models to print, for use as bodys of rc models... what type of method do you recomend to learn???

@@davidterraza889 Thanks for the comment David. Are these models going to be 3d printed? if Yes, either method will be fine. I would still lean the direction of Fusion 360 as you are able to create surface and solid features easier after the main body is done. If you are going to do another method of fabrication, say CNC machine a block of wood for a vacuum form, I would go with Fusion 360.

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign thanks a lot, i have just started to model a jeep wrangler with your advice and technique. My goal is to print it with a fdm printer and the use it on my chasis. So i only need to model th body shell without base. Is a really challenging process, the most important advice y to be consisten between the faces and sides that i will use for each part of the body to make the welding process a little bit easier. Thanks for your time, great great content! Cheers!!!

I had not seen Giichis videos, but I just checked them out. Funny enough that Porsche 930 is one i have the blueprints laid out for on a fusion series because it is a good fit for the way the tools work. I took a look at his older (2018) car in fusion. It is very nice work! You will notice that it has very "flowy" lines to it. I do like his method of using curves. A lot of Poly Modelers set up control sketches and that is a method we can use in Fusion 360. It is a little bit of a hybrid workflow between the surface edges to form bodies except using 3d sketch curves rather than surface edges. I haven't looked at his most recent porsche videos yet but I will try to check them out and see if he does anything differently. Thanks for mentioning it! We can always learn from others. The day you think you know it all is the day you stop learning!

LV, I checked out more of Giichi Endo's content and looked into him a bit more. Thanks for the suggesting it! He was a car designer for Nissan starting in the 90s so he has been designing cars by hand and digitally for 30+ years. He does an amazing job and I am going to explore his process a bit more.

100% Agree with what you said. The video is more because I mainly teach Fusion 360 and a little bit of Blender and always get asked which is better for cars. The answer is neither :) There are dedicated programs like Alias. Taking a poly model from Blender, Maya etc into Alias is the preferred workflow for most, but Alias is much more expensive/specialized than something like Fusion 360 or Blender. I have modeled cars in Solidworks with surfaces or with nPower, in Inventor(even in Acad), Fusion and Blender. If someone just wants to model cars as a career learn alias :) I have seen comments from Auto designers at OEMs that do use Blender for concept development and take it into Alias for Class A surfacing then into another program for manufacturing. Do you teach auto body design?

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign blender is indeed great for digital clay sculpting Some of my students work at ford and develop concept cars but now on maya Since Alias has amazing subD tools it is even more attractive- for the commercial designers For all hobby users I feel I would start clay modeling in blender A truck so more liner surfaces I would rebuild in fusion then An organic design resurface in blender because t-splines snapping is terrible And then finish the design with the surface tools For cars I would even go DM and not use the timeline I am not a trained car designer but teach in industrial and interior design but in my work I cross product to medical to architecture to transportation design But those are mainly research projects

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign also maybe me text was to direct and can be understood in a negative way - this was not my intent !

@@cekuhnen Not at all. All comments and critique is welcome :) I was more curious what it is you teach. One thing that is always hard to convey in videos is the amount of time something actually takes. The videos are always a paired down section of a bigger project. But nobody wants to watch 100hrs of video making a trim piece for a door :) It is always good to get insight!!

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign Video length hahaha yeah MIT said 15 minute lectures - stuff takes time so my videos for my students are 30 to 2 hours often. And honestly in class we would spent even more time.

It all comes down to what you need to do. Fusion has the ability to make actual surfaces/solids off the models which is typically used in production. but it is tricky to use Forms and get certain shapes. If you wanted to make a car part to say CNC mill a foam mold then you would want to use Fusion. Polygons like Blender let you explore shapes pretty easy but they are bound to topology. Meaning you can't just subdivide and hope things will be ok. You have to be very careful of edges/loops and where they go because the star points will cause issues when subdividing. If I were just looking to make cars for renders or animation and wasn't really worried about the surfaces being actual BREP surfaces then I would stick with Blender. You have loads of rendering options that you just don't have with Fusion. If you are trying to design cars for a living neither program is really the right one. Something like Alias Auto is where you would go, but those programs can take mesh data from Blender and let you build true class A surfaces on top of them.

Thank you

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign hi ,is there any recommended software other than fusion for car modeling, solid form, rhinos? moi3d? design sparks? which one is easier?

@@kenlintang it kind of depends on what your end goal is with the model. I have heard good things about Rhino but have yet to really play with it. MOI is likely more for concept art and less for this type of thing. If you are just looking for a 3d model, game asset, animation etc you might just work in Blender. Most of the programs I have seen out there fall into 1 of 3 categories. 1. Poly Modeler (like Blender, Maya etc). This are great for making designs meant for renders, animation, video games etc. They have a lot of tools built in to let you build a low polygon mesh and smooth it out with modifiers and do details with textures. 2. CAD programs. These vary a bit depending on their tool sets. Programs like Solidworks and Inventor are very much mechanical but I have modeled cars in both programs. Solidworks wins with its surface tools over Inventor in my mind. They both cost a good bit and still aren't true car modeling programs. Fusion falls in that spectrum but because of the price is used a good bit more (and the native sub D forms).. Inventor has forms but its actually missing a few key tools that Fusion has for some reason. Solidworks 3d experience has forms(as do programs like Solid edge), but they are lacking. and 3. True surface modeling programs. Things like alias from Autodesk are meant for Class A product design including automotive surfacing. These programs have surface tools and subD modeling and deal with edge weighting and transitions much better than Tsplines in Fusion. BUT they come at a cost. To get into a true Class A modeling program is thousands of dollars over hundreds for some of the other options. I think Rhino is $1000, Alias is $4k-$10k/year. In the end if you plan to "make" something from your design I would lean into a CAD program. If Fusion doesn't work for you I would give Rhino a try. They have a 90 day trial. Alias is $$ but they have a home learning edition that is free for a year. If the goal is for visuals/graphics. animation, games or even just 3d printing then Blender being free and having so many add ons(sketchfab), and such a big community is probably the direction I would lean.

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign thank you for the information, this really helps me in determining the choice of software that I will use.