Fusion 360 Event in Gujarat Brings together Students & Industry

A new community group in Gujarat makes waves with an inspiring event bringing together 200 students, educators, and industry practitioners.

Led by MohammedAzim Shaikh*, this new group of mostly students has joined the Autodesk Group Network. 

The group hosted a Fusion 360 Meetup in October at the L.J. Institute of Engineering & Technology in Ahmedabad that included interactive keynote sessions and live design battles. This is the first meetup event of its kind in India for Fusion360.

The keynote speeches were by Varun Heta, a Fusion 360 Evangelist from Autodesk Inc who traveled to the event from Delhi, and Abhit Kumar a co-founder Social Hardware who made the trip from Bangalore. 

Varun presented the necessity to adapt to the cloud-based collaborative CAD platforms like Fusion 360 to reimagine design and manufacturing in today's world. He explanied the unique workflows in Fusion 360 and narrated the capabilities of the tool. He as then followed by Abhit, who talked about how he uses these tools in his design practice.

Abhit Kumar knows the value of community well. He met his company’s co-founder on Reddit working on an open-source prosthesis project. Now Social Hardware is a start-up company that is building prosthetics designed for low-income rural amputees from agricultural or construction industries.

In his talk, Abhit described the workflow his company used to design its prosthetics. The workflow included importing scan data from human arms as a foundation for design, and then creating high performance designs using Fusion360’s Generative Design tools.

(See this article from Redshift to learn more about Social Hardware: Meet the Prosthetics Startup Aiding Amputees in Rural India With Helping Hands). 

Following the keynotes there were 5 rounds of Live Design Battles, where two people squared off to model and render a design within 5 minutes. Themes included: Design a bell pepper using any one Workspace of F360 and Design a water bottle using Extrude feature only.

The leaders of the Gujarat Autodesk Community had a lot of fun organizing and running this event – and were encouraged by how engaged everyone was. The event even got some press! 

Here’s some of what the attendees had to say afterwards:

"I would like to suggest that this session was amazing, it was the best, such more sessions are needed and I’m ready to make this community grow stronger and wide." - Manasi Jain (Karnawati University)

"The conducted session was on point and more than my expectations. Loved the 5 min battle which was quite intense and inspiring at many levels, Really indulged myself to that moment. Learned a lot about how the mind-set should be towards this software and possibilities are limitless." - Shubham Mevada (LJP)

What’s the Gujarat Autodesk community up to next? They plan to host an interactive & immersive Design Bootcamp that may also include a Design Slam. Connect with the Gujarat Autodesk Community: •    Facebook •    Instagram

* MohammadAzim is also an Autodesk Student Ambassador and contributor to the Autodesk Gallery.

(Images in this article from MohammadAzim Shaikh)