An honest plea to Fusion 360 Development team

[O.Tan]

Hi,

so I've been using Fusion 360 for a year now and I've actually seen Fusion early days (when it was called Inventor Fusion) and I must say that things has evolve or improved quite a lot, I really appreciate how active the developers are in the forum, answering questions and solving and giving bug fixes. Fusion today is much more stable then last year, I don't get that often crashes so kudos to the development team in getting Fusion to be more stable and for the features added.

However, drawings is still pretty much incomplete since last year and I don't know how Fusion team is organised internally but I feel right now what Fusion needs to focus more is on Drawings, it's very incomplete and even with all the additions of the recent update, it's easily broken like getting unsolveable "A balloon can only be placed on a component" error, when I triple checked to ensure I've used the component selection and created a new drawing, yet the problem repeats. Perhaps it wasn't programmed to handle drawings that's generated from a sub-assembly.

Then there's basic drawings/drafting features that's found on other CAD software but not in Fusion, below is an example of how easy and fast it's to generate dimensions.

1. Basically I use coordinate dimensions for most of my drawings, notice how easy it is to generate coordinate dimensions.
2. Notice how each time I click on a feature it auto-aligns
3. I'm able to easily change dimension orientation
4. Dimensions is able to re-aligned with simple click + drag
5. Hole Callouts
6. Custom Callouts (symbols and etc)

And this is just a small preview of the software capabilities.

A simple analogy I'll use to describe Fusion Drawings is like, a pizza store made the pizza from the dough to baking and only to end up with not having a proper pizza box, and having to go next door to the competitor to get pizza box.

The whole drawings module is a mess, I'm not sure what Fusion team envisioned (or if any thoughts was even given on drafting/drawings during the initial Fusion conceptualisation) on how user should use or manage their drawings cause I notice that a single part drawing is linked to the assembly, so if I update the assembly and not the part, I'll have to update the part as well when nothing has changed on the part. The way how drawings is done now clutters the data panel since Fusion encourages multi-body environment (mixing both assembly and part files). So maybe we need something like a multi-drawings environment as well?

Finally, all that I mentioned is something that all other CAD software is able to do and for the most part, basic features, so I don't think this should be in IdeaStation as there's just too many things and it'll end up spamming the service.

Eventhough Fusion lacks many features like proper mirrored components, there's still some less elegant workaround, but when it comes to drawings, there's no workaround as the tools isn't there. Sure drawings might not be the most flashies of things but it's what seperates between an end-to-end CAD solution and not. Right now I'll have to export my work as STEP only to be opened in another CAD software to do dimensioning, not everyone owns their own CNC machine, so proper drawing tools is very important.

Apologies if it sounds harsh but this is something I felt that needs to be said once in awhile. Perhaps Fusion team could focus the first 6 months to improve on existing features (direct modelling needs more polishing, hole generation tool, bolted connections[supposed to be well in development last year but mysteriously disappeared]) then adding new flashy ones and the other 6 months to add those flashy features/fix rare bugs. This will also give more time to those working on bigger projects to get it done right (gather real-user feedback and etc) then rushing it up.

[PhilProcarioJr]

I couldn't agree more, I constantly hear about them wanting solidworks users to come to the fusion camp.....To be honest they could easily achieve this IF they polish what they have and finish incomplete areas of the software. 

You said "The way how drawings is done now clutters the data panel since Fusion encourages multi-body environment (mixing both assembly and part files)." And this creates a ton of problems (Which is why I refuse to work this way in it's current implementation). I never build parts in my assembly files and unless a lot of things are fixed I never will. Drawings lack core functionality and are linked to files in a bad way. For the life of me I don't understand why I can't change simple parameters that never should have been hidden from the user in the first place. Anyways I do love what Fusion has to offer I just wish the dev team would take the kid gloves off it and make it useful for professionals on a budget.

[O.Tan]

Yeah, someone suggested me to do reference all so it'll work more like a traditional part + assembly method but since I can't edit external reference part in place and that Fusion seems to promote 1 file (no assembly or part), I'm afraid that down the road, doing it "differently" will bite me over the "recommended/general" way of doing things. And TBH, there's some real unique features that multi-body/1 file environment is able to provide that's not found in traditional CAD systems, but it still needs some refinement to fully replace traditional part and assembly environment.

And yeah, if they polish up the software and make it more feature parity to traditional 3D CAD softwares (needs to have same features or at least an alternative to it), the marketing budget will be of good use, but right now you'll more likely end up with responses like "but it's missing X feature"

[PhilProcarioJr]

Actually, the way I work is to create all my part files separately, then create an assembly file or sub-assembly files. That way if I make a drawing of a part I do it at the level that's needed for the drawing that way no other parts get added that shouldn't have been there in the first place. Making edits to the linked parts is pretty easy and updated in the assembly file. To be honest working this way makes it very close to how things work in Solidworks. Granted its not perfect or exactly the same but its close enough to keep me from pulling my hair out. The way they market it now gets Solidworks users interested, then like me the users download and start using it then realize its missing X Features and those users say it wont work for them and move on. I had this same discussion with a bunch of Solidworks users the other day and they all said the same thing.....

You said "And TBH, there's some real unique features that multi-body/1 file environment is able to provide that's not found in traditional CAD systems" There are some real benefits, but not with the current implementation and given the fact that fusion comes to a complete crawl with very large assemblies kills the benefits anyways.

[TimeraAutodesk]

Hey @O.Tan,

Thanks for the candid feedback - we appreciate the constructive criticism. I want to be clear on a few things first:

1. I assure you, we put a lot of time, energy and expertise behind design and development of the Drawings workspace in Fusion 360 - to the point that over the course of this year we have put additional investment on it to accelerate quality and feature development (as you recommended in your post).
2. We are 100% aware that Drawings is not "where it needs to be for you" - no one is going to argue with that fact.
3. Rome wasn't built in a day. Just yesterday marked our 1-year anniversary of releasing Drawings as a beta on the Mac platform. What has taken other CAD packages 30 years to do, we're doing in record time - even though it feels painfully slow in regards to the cadence of Fusion 360 updates.

With all that said - your frustrations are valid and heard here on the Drawings team. This past November update was specifically targeted around the Drawings funcitonality to explicity communicate to you, our valuable community, how important we know rounding out the Drawings feature-set is. No, we have not "finish" by any means, but we have released a lot of value over the course of the year. In all transparency and honesty, I expect that it will be a year from now before someone of your expertise to feel satisfied in regards to the Drawings workspace, but the good news is that we know what needs to be done, and we have the support to do it.

If you're interested in having a chat about your concerns or feedback, I'd be happy to set up some time with myself and some other key members from the Drawings team - I know we'd love the chance to hear from you directly and give you more insight to our plans and processes.

Best,
Timera

P.S. Just to help put this in perspective, here's a list of everything that the Drawings team has released net-new on both PC and Mac Platforms over the course of the year (not including bug fixes)

- Drawings on Mac
- Section Views
- Editable title block
- Parts List
- Balloons
- X-ref support
- Detail Views
- Dimension edit
- Inherit From Design
- New Drawing dialog settings
- Document Settings to Nav Bar
- ANSI->ASME
- Hatch Edit
- Centerlines
- Centermarks
- Balloon renumber
- Balloon re-align
- Support for Chinese language
- Support for Japanese language
- Parts list flip (bottom-up)
- Dimension restore defaults
- Shaded Views
- GD&T Datums
- GD&T feature control frame + symbols
- Improved performance via architecture reconstruction
- Single Dimension
- Trailing Zeros
- Exploded Views from Animations

[O.Tan]

Thanks for the reply and Promm already contacted me, so I've just set up a time for a call.

And the list sounds a lot but tbh, a lot of those listed is still very basic in function and I guess, this is why many feels like nothing has been done in drawings cause those features seems to be half baked or doesn't really contribute to allowing drawings for fabrication to be given out.

For example from your list:
1. Editable title block: a user is still not able to customise it (with their own column/rows, reposition cells) to fit their needs or even add their company logo.
2. Parts list: can't reorder part list (by qty or by alphabetical order, decrement, increment), or edit the cells (like I can't remove description or reorder the table so that it'll be [no|component|qty])
3. Balloons: have to manually create balloons, this current limitation is okay I guess but for most situation, I see more people just auto generate the balloons and let the software auto arrange it. The user will then just do some touch up jobs like removing balloons or reposition the balloons
4. X-Ref support: I guess this refers to drawings able to update upon change? Cause if it's, then I've mentioned in my original post how this is all messed up with it linking to the assembly and having to update a part when nothing changed in it, perhaps this can be address with a proper workflow explanation. From my experience with SE, what they did is to have drawings to analyse the part so even if it has a different name if I choose to link it (the part) to the drawing and it matches the drawing, it'll just re-associate the dimensions. And if I further change the referenced part, it'll update accordingly. This is very useful when you have a template part design and there's many iterations of it, this allows only 1 drawing to be created and the rest copied from there and referenced to the other iteration so the user doesn't have to keep on make new drawings.
5. Detail views: custom scales would be great
6. Dimension edit: can't reorient the dimension (horizontal or vertical)
7. Centermarks: should allow click (hold) + drag over drawing views and relevant holes/arcs to have centermark generated.

Since last year there's 2 areas which I'm very critical about in Fusion and it is Drawings and large-assembly graphic performance for Mac, large-assembly graphic performance has improved tremendously with the introduction of OpenGL Core Graphics and kudos to the graphics development team! As for drawings, again, nothing much has changed as I still can't get a proper manufacturing ready drawing out.

And I do understand the complexity of drawings especially when it comes to managing versions, and in the future branching and etc, hence why I'm very curious to know what Fusion team vision in regards to drawings workflow in Fusion.

[TimeraAutodesk]

All good, and fair points @O.Tan. I understand you feel that the features we have released so far are "basic" - but we have to start with basic implementations of features before we can add complexity, and these features are helpful to many Fusion 360 users today.

For example Title Blocks as you mentioned below. Allowing users to have a title block was phase 1, phase 2 was providing an editor for the title block, phase 3 will be allowing users to bring in custom title blocks, and phase 4 will be customized title blocks within Drawings. We daily are fighting the prioritization battle between delivering features that deepen a current tool, or adding new features (like GD&T, which was one of the highest requested features from users). Software development is a process, and like I mentioned before, we're aware we have a long way to go still.

Again, we appreciate your feedback and patience.

-Timera

[O.Tan]

1 more thing, what about

"The whole drawings module is a mess, I'm not sure what Fusion team envisioned (or if any thoughts was even given on drafting/drawings during the initial Fusion conceptualisation) on how user should use or manage their drawings cause I notice that a single part drawing is linked to the assembly, so if I update the assembly and not the part, I'll have to update the part as well when nothing has changed on the part. The way how drawings is done now clutters the data panel since Fusion encourages multi-body environment (mixing both assembly and part files). So maybe we need something like a multi-drawings environment as well?"

Is there any discussion regarding workflow cause the current one is as mentioned above and it'll be a nightmare once the user has more than 1-5 drawings. And I'm not the only one, Phil had to do his workaround which works but I'm not sure if that's the best way since Fusion encourages 1 part/assembly files

[PhilProcarioJr]

Yes because of the way fusion handles assemblies and drawings it gets messy real fast without doing things the way I have been. I'm very curious to this as well.

[HughesTooling]

Hi Timera

It wouldn't be so bad if you could export a DXF\DWG you could open in another program to finish the details you can't do in Fusion. Are there plans for a usable export, at the moment it seem only AutoCAD will open the files and I'm not sure you're able to use what you get in AutoCAD to finish a drawing.

Thanks Mark

[O.Tan]

Hmm, if it requires some more side work on AD side I'll disagree to it as it'll not help in getting drawings to where it needed to be and it'll likely not have associated links to the part file as it has been exported out, so it'll be useful for one off drawings but any update in the part and the user has to manually re-update or create a new drawing

[Anonymous]

Mark

I have just recently completed a drawing set that only required me to add our company logo and confidentiality statement in AutoCAD. Which for me is a reasonable workaround since our company won't be ditching AutoCAD anytime soon. But this results in a disconnect between the model and the finished drawing which I don't like.

To me it seems crazy to not have a more polished drawing environment, but I look at Fusion as a CAD program that also does Rendering, Animation, CAM and Simulation. With the CAM and 3D printing integration, it seems the Fusion team is focused more on a workflow that goes directly from modeling to manufacture without generating drawings. I've never worked in an industry where that would be feasible.

[daniel_lyall]

yer its more for the one man band and the maker moement, depending on what you do it's fine, but manufacture not so much yet. they may add in the other programs they are doing what are like fusion based on fusion what would make it a everyone program but the drawing well that should always be available and work properly you cant always take a ipad in a workshop

[O.Tan]

Agree with both of you and where I work at, we have our own in-house fabrication but we also outsource our parts as well. But both in-house and fabrication needs physical drawings and I don't think this will ever change as there's always a benefit to having actual physical drawing.

And I've been pestering my machinist to learn Fusion CAM, though I do wonder how will all this workflow work as let say I have an assembly of 1000 parts, perhaps 10 of those parts are the same. How the machinist should approach this? As the machinist will probably need to rotate or reorient the part, and he/she definitely doesn't need to see the whole assembly, all that he/she cares about is the actual part, material and quantity needed. And I don't want the machinist to mess up my CAD file setup. So what's Fusion team take on this situation?

[daniel_lyall]

yer that's where it get's broken, unless you break out all the parts to there own sketch and drawing.

Drawings should allways be available not everyone who use's fusion has all the cnc machines they need to make parts so drawing are very important, and they need to work paper is still importaint. 

[burnandreturn]

The drawings deficientcies have been the biggest stumbling block for  me regarding Fusion.  I also need to send files to fabricators to actually build things!   Real paper printouts of drawings with all needed data is basic to manufacturing.   I want my machinists to see it on paper with everything they need to produce a part to correct specs.

[HughesTooling]

---

@O.Tan wrote:

And I've been pestering my machinist to learn Fusion CAM, though I do wonder how will all this workflow work as let say I have an assembly of 1000 parts, perhaps 10 of those parts are the same. How the machinist should approach this? As the machinist will probably need to rotate or reorient the part, and he/she definitely doesn't need to see the whole assembly, all that he/she cares about is the actual part, material and quantity needed. And I don't want the machinist to mess up my CAD file setup. So what's Fusion team take on this situation?

---

In the CAM side you orientate the setup to the part so you don't need to move anything in the assembly. There's a bit of a discussion here on assemblies and CAM and @vex pointed out large assemblies don't really work well if you keep every thing in one file. But it looks like in place editing of external designs is on the way.

Mark

[yoshimitsuspeed]

---

@TimeraAutodesk wrote:

Hey @O.Tan,

Thanks for the candid feedback - we appreciate the constructive criticism. I want to be clear on a few things first:

1. I assure you, we put a lot of time, energy and expertise behind design and development of the Drawings workspace in Fusion 360 - to the point that over the course of this year we have put additional investment on it to accelerate quality and feature development (as you recommended in your post).
2. We are 100% aware that Drawings is not "where it needs to be for you" - no one is going to argue with that fact.
3. Rome wasn't built in a day. Just yesterday marked our 1-year anniversary of releasing Drawings as a beta on the Mac platform. What has taken other CAD packages 30 years to do, we're doing in record time - even though it feels painfully slow in regards to the cadence of Fusion 360 updates.

The problem is that the F360 team has continued to promise that it will be built in a day. Had you guys posted accurate and realistic timelines the people who stayed would be much less frustrated and the people who couldn't wait would have moved on. But the F360 team knew that so they kept telling everyone things like "I think you will be very excited on the things you will see in the next update" and We are working on getting all these things done in the very immediate future". 
Giving people the impression that 90% of what was needed would be done in the next update. Then we only see 5% accomplished. It may have suckered some of us into sticking around when otherwise we would have moved on.

I have been on vacation so I haven't really played with things since the new update. I have been excited to see the progress and will check it out when I get home but it makes me sad to see a post like this one so shortly after the update that has been promising the biggest drawing advancement yet. 
And it is even more frustrating to see a response like yours that makes it sound like we are just being impatient and unrealistic with our expectations. 
This was marketd as production ready software from the time i started using it even before it had drawing capability. If you guys don't like our expectations then stop overhyping your software. 

Edited by
Discussion_Admin

[Oceanconcepts]

Maybe because I work in software some and have sympathy for the complexity- particularly in a cross platform implementation- but I think the Fusion team has done a good job of posting realistic timelines and updating them when it turns out a planned feature is not ready. Not everything, drawings particularly, is where I would like it to be, but I haven’t seen many specific features promised that didn’t come through reasonably close to the projected time. I’ve been around a lot of software for many years, and the communications- and ability to listen and respond- from the Fusion team are the most honest and direct I have encountered. It’s one of the main reasons I’m using the program. They are enthusiastic, as they should be, but I’ve never felt that they overhyped and it’s always been acknowledged that features important to some users were not yet included, or not fully implemented. 

I’ve been able to do real work for a couple of years now in Fusion, and the capabilities keep improving. It doesn’t have feature parity with programs that have been around a lot longer, but it also does things those other applications don’t do. And the future direction is a lot more promising, in my opinion. Whether Fusion as it is now is capable of doing what any individual user needs to do is up to them to determine. 

[Oceanconcepts]

Timera,

I second the things that O.Tan points out, and understand that the drawings module has been and will be evolving and gaining capabilities. 

My added concern, though, is around the user interface, how those features are accessed and implemented. It seems very un-Fusion like. Tools are accessed in ways that are cumbersome and non-intuitive and require lots of clicks. Tool use/ access isn’t consistent from one tool to another- right click, left click, secondary click on some other menu item that may or may not make sense. After selecting the Delete tool, as far as I can tell you don’t just click on what you want to delete, you need to right click (?) and get a marking menu, from which selecting delete doesn’t delete, OK does… The model of selecting an element, then performing an action doesn’t apply since there really isn't a Select tool. 

Unlike the rest of Fusion, the interface isn’t internally consistent or efficient. Since many of us don’t do drawings all the time, or are forgetful, each time we do it means needing to re-learn a very non-intuitive interface, with limited help resources that fail to explain how to perform basic operations. I really hope there are plans to bring the drawings user experience up to the standard of the rest of Fusion. Right now it seems slapped on without much thought. I hope this changes, as I can see it becoming a stumbling block.