From Fusion to Blender - Creating a Marble Run
In this video, I create a simple Marble Run in Fusion 360. I start with the base and begin to build a pillar. The pillar raises the marble's start point to begin its journey using its Gravitational Potential Energy. I create a series of ramps connected by rails, a barrier to prevent the marble from rolling off these rails and a bowl to catch the moving marble at the end of its run.
I create a sphere to represent the marble but in real life, I would use a pre-existing one due to the mass needed.
The entire model is created using solid modelling, but in order to apply properties of physics I need to convert these models into meshes.
The components are exported as OBJ files.
An excellent piece of Software for handling meshed models is Blender, the software is completely free and is available for both Mac and Windows, it also has a huge community which means learning how to use it becomes very simple due to the amount of help out there on the web.
I open blender and import the 2 OBJ files. I need to rescale and rotate them as the formats from Fusion to Blender don't always match up
Rotate the X-axis from 90º to 0º
Rescale X-Y-Z from 1.0 to 0.1
When exporting the mesh file, it takes the origin point of the body as the 000 value of the XYZ axis, this creates crazy effects as the centre of mass for the Marble is no longer within the marble itself. So, I 'secondary' click the Sphere and set the origin to the centre of Mass (Volume).
The next aspect is to assign the Physic Properties, select the sphere, select physics, and then select rigid body.
Assign the following:
Active - Mass: 0.1kg, Friction - 0.01, Sensitivity - 0.01, Dampening etc 0.035/ 0.6 (I think...)
Then select the base and assign it as a Passive body, Friction - 0.01, Sensitivity - 0.01.
Now press play.