Lab 1

When I started thinking about this assignment, I was trying to think of objects that would not be too difficult to model as this was my first time modeling an object, but I also wanted to model something that would be fun to make. I was thinking about what object to choose for a while, then I sat down at my desk and saw my Rubik’s cube and thought that it would be the perfect object to choose as it didn’t seem too complex to model but would also be interesting to do so.

I was tempted to leave the design as shown in the image above and only add color to that, but I wanted it to look more realistic and use the fillet tool to round the edges and create a little space in between each square. The thing I struggled with the most was figuring out how to use the fillet tool to get rounded edges on every single square because initially I had just made the cube with lines dividing each face into 9 smaller squares and only the outside edges would get rounded. I then discovered the split body tool and used that to split the cube into 27 equally sized cubes and used the fillet tool to round the edges of each square on the Rubik’s cube. It took me a while to figure out how to add color to each face, but after messing around on fusion for a few minutes I was able to figure it out. Something else that was very annoying was that when I was almost done my fusion crashed and I had to restart the whole thing again.

The tool I found to be the most useful was the split body tool, because it allowed me to just start with one big cube and then easily split that up into 27 different sections instead of creating 27 small cubes one at a time and putting them into the right spots. I wish I had figured this tool out right away as it probably would have saved me a good amount of time on this assignment, but I think it was really good to spend time playing around with a bunch of different tools as now I feel far more familiar and confident with fusion than I did a couple days ago. A tip I would have for myself and others in the future is to fully render the model and check if it looks how you want it to look since the appearance slightly changes from the designing area to when it is fully rendered. For me the main difference was that most of the colors looked slightly different while I was designing the model than they do now that it is fully rendered.

In the areas of research and teaching I can imagine this tool being used for countless different uses including a more interactive learning style, recreation of historical artifacts, and sharing rendered models of objects to people all over the world who want to research these objects instead of having to carefully transport very fragile objects and artifacts.