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Extrude Problem ---- is this a BUG?

7 REPLIES 7
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Message 1 of 8
TRACERfire
1070 Views, 7 Replies

Extrude Problem ---- is this a BUG?

The extrude command typically defaults to creating a new body when extruding a sketch or face, etc.

 

A problem that is occurring for me is that if other solid geometry exists in the environment as soon as the preview of the extruded element comes into contact with the other geometry is automatically defaults to CUT. This often results in an error message or a processor hangup of several seconds.

 

My entire purpose for having the other geometry visible is to gauge how far to extrude.

 

A workaround is to select the NEW COMPONENT option prior to extruding, extrude the element to the desired position and then reselect NEW BODY.

This has to be performed every single time I perform an extrude.

 

This really need to be optimised. It's the equivalent of shutting off your vehicle every time you want to change gears.

As with many features in Fusion 360 it's too many clicks to perform a simple task.

-John-Paul McCarthy
7 REPLIES 7
Message 2 of 8
schneik-adsk
in reply to: TRACERfire

We will look at what we can do to improve the logic. What other operations take to many clicks? Even just a simple list would help us look at what we should be making easier.
Kevin Schneider
Message 3 of 8
TRACERfire
in reply to: schneik-adsk

I'll put a list together and post more substantial something up.

 

I'd say that workflows can be improved substantially with seconday command functions that may be triggered via a keyboard press.

 

For example, while creating elements within a sketch and TRIM is active, a press of the CTRL key will toggle to EXTEND and vice versa. (This is a nice function that Inventor has). Even a single keyboard press (or discrete keys) that cycles through NEW BODY, NEW COMPONENT, CUT, JOIN, etc would be really speed up the use of a primary commmand such as EXTRUDE.

 

More soon!

Just about to stumble off to bed (I work through the quiet hours of the night while our wee 7mo baby sleeps; otherwise it's unending chaos! :))

 

 

Thanks for the reply Kevin, it's very much appreciated!

 

-John-Paul McCarthy
Message 4 of 8
jakefowler
in reply to: TRACERfire

Hi John-Paul,

 

In addition to the usability improvements, perhaps there's also more we can do to improve the modeling robustness in these circumstances, to avoid the errors & performance issues you encountered when interacting new Extrudes with existing geometry.  For the cases where you encountered issues, do you have any examples for which you might be able to share the models with us? If we’re able to get some sample cases to our development team, it should help us in making improvements here. But if you’re not able to share the data, that’s totally understandable 🙂

 

Many thanks for letting us know about this!

Jake



Jake Fowler
Principal Experience Designer
Fusion 360
Autodesk

Message 5 of 8
TRACERfire
in reply to: jakefowler

Hi Jake,

 

I'll first see if the problem can be replicated in a 'new' design and then get some files your way.

I'm really interested in helping to make Fusion all it can be, as it ticks a lot of the modelling boxes that not many other, more expensive, packages contain.

Namely: T-Splines

 

Cheers.

-John-Paul McCarthy
Message 6 of 8
jakefowler
in reply to: TRACERfire

Hi John-Paul,

 

Thanks for your help, really appreciate it! If it’s difficult to reproduce this, I understand, so no problem if you have to give up on this – I would expect this problem to be specific (or most apparent, at least) on certain datasets/operations. The most concerning thing is that you’re encountering this on a regular basis: so if you are able to share an example with us, it would be interesting to see what kinds of models you are seeing this with.

 

Very glad that to hear that Fusion 360 is providing you with the right tools; obviously we want to keep making those tools as useful and robust as possible, so please do continue to let us know when you have problems or suggestions for us - it’s this kind of feedback that will help us continue to make Fusion better and better.

 

Thanks very much again!

Jake



Jake Fowler
Principal Experience Designer
Fusion 360
Autodesk

Message 7 of 8
TRACERfire
in reply to: jakefowler

Hi Jake,

 

I've tried this in a new file and also a working file associated with my project but was unable to replicate.

I can share the problem file with you if that would be helpful.

 

To give you some background, the project is for a robot mech that will be produced as a collectible/designer toy.

The file where the problem is occurring is for the foot.

 

Another thing that may be causing some problems is that this project is a "resurface" of an old, craggy OBJ file.

As an experiment I'm using Fusion to create surface geometry over the old file. Using Rhino I converted the polyface mesh of the OBJ into NURBS and imported as a STEP file. A sneaky OBJ-to-SOLID workaround in order allow a complex model into Fusion, as some of the elements easily contain 40,000 polys.

 

This isn't what Fusion was meant to do but I'm managing to get results. And the mixture of hard modelling, parametric features, the organic forms of T-Splines really provides me with a flexible toolset to replicate the model without reinventing the wheel too much.

 

Did you want me to upload an F3D file to Dropbox and send you a link?

 

You can always drop me a line on mccarthy.johnpaul@gmail.com

-John-Paul McCarthy
Message 8 of 8
jakefowler
in reply to: TRACERfire

Hi John-Paul,

 

Thanks for the background, sounds cool! This doesn’t sound like something Fusion wasn’t ‘meant’ to do – it seems like a perfectly good workflow to me, and a perfect example for making use of the multiple toolsets in Fusion. It’s a smart move to convert the OBJ to NURBS first – you can actually bring OBJ files into Fusion (using the Import function in the Sculpt workspace), but mesh facets will get converted into T-Splines faces, and it’s really not recommended for opening dense poly meshes such as yours (I wouldn’t even advise trying it! More just an FYI).

 

One possibility that comes to mind is that perhaps the Extrude features you are experiencing problems with are actually interacting with your reference model? From my experience, Rhino’s mesh-to-NURBS conversion tends to create very dense NURBS surfaces (which will generally be slow & difficult to operate on), so if any operations you were performing are interacting with this geometry, that certainly might explain the errors & performance issues you are seeing. If you suspect this might be the case, one workflow you could try is to move all of the reference geometry into its own separate component, and then activate your ‘working’ component (hover over the component in the browser, and click the radio button) - this will make the reference component inactive, which means new Extrude features will no longer cut into this geometry. (Another thing that might be useful here is that you could toggle the reference component between ‘Selectable’ and ‘Unselectable’, so you could easily avoid accidental selection of the reference model.)

 

This is all a bit of a guess at the moment though; this may not be the root of the problem at all. If the above suggestions don’t help, it would definitely be helpful to take a look at the model. If it’s easy for you to upload the F3D to Dropbox, that would be perfect (if you’d rather not post the link to the forum, you can send it to me a private message, or email it to jake.fowler(at)autodesk.com). Otherwise, let us know and we can arrange another way for you to transfer the file to us.

 

Many thanks!

Jake



Jake Fowler
Principal Experience Designer
Fusion 360
Autodesk

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