Step #2: Starting your foundation
It can be overwhelming to start learning CAD. The software is composed of a lot of menus. To get a good introduction and feel less overwhelmed, go here. I only used skills related to the first 4 or 5 videos, but more power to you to go farther. You don't have to know how to do everything right away, but you can start to understand what you're looking at when you use Fusion. The videos are short, so it won't take long.
A lot of the time I spent early in CAD was really slow in terms of progress. Don't expect everything to go smoothly, but believe that you have the ability to get better at it with time. You do. A method that helped me learn was to try and make things to learn 1 specific function of the software. If I wanted to learn how to make a joint, I had a specific CAD file where I made something completely irrelevant to anything just to understand how that worked.
A lot of the time I spent early in CAD was really slow in terms of progress. Don't expect everything to go smoothly, but believe that you have the ability to get better at it with time. You do. A method that helped me learn was to try and make things to learn 1 specific function of the software. If I wanted to learn how to make a joint, I had a specific CAD file where I made something completely irrelevant to anything just to understand how that worked.
This is just a piece of something that I made to learn how to pattern. It doesn't matter if it's pointless if you learn from it.
Remember these key points as you start:
1. Most things start as a sketch. Your intuition might tell you to start with a blob, and turn it into what you want, but that's not a great way to start.
2. Have measurements in mind before you start making something. Saves a lot of frustration.
3. Use the timeline at the bottom of the window. Let's say you make something the wrong size but you've already been working on it for an hour after that. You can go back in the timeline to the exact step where you sized that, and fix it. Then go back to where you were and keep going.
4. Learn how constraints work. If you make a line, the software just sees that as a line in specific space. It doesn't know that you want to change it's angle with another line when you drag it, unless you specify that is what you're changing. The Sketch Dimension command is very useful for this, I recommend learning it early on.