Feature Requests

[crounsl]

Thanks for trying out the Fusion 360 Drawings Preview.  As this is a preview, we are just scratching the surface in terms of features and functionality.  

If you were to request 5 features to be added to what we have now, what would they be?  What workflows do you need to accomplish that we do not currently support?  

For those of you that used the Documentation beta released last December, you'll notice that the feature set in this release is similar. That said, we've made a number of changes to the interactions of many of the features and most importantly, as a result of your feedback, have focused on delivering much improved performance in the application overall.  If there were things that we had in the December release that you miss, let us know.

[jburns]

+1 to Shauns comments

I would just like to add that I find this whole discussion kind of baffling.

Autodesk did more to push CAD into the mainstream than anyone. I cant think of another company that can claim such a fundamental role in defining the field. The AutoCad dimensioning tools have become the defacto standard across the industry. What I'm saying is that Autodesk understands demesioning tools, and how and why to use them.

So while Its nice that you are reaching out to users via social media, you already know exactly what is needed, just look at AutoCAD and give us those dimensioning and formatting tools. They are time- proven and they are required to do any work with a machine shop.

Jason

[shaun]

I guess different people have different past experience to draw upon, different countries with different drawing standards, industries and practice.  Must make Autodesk's job very challenging!

OK, I appreciate jburns thoughts are dead on if you're an experienced AutoCAD user.  Unfortunately I'm not very experienced with it and I don't expect that will change. In the past I muddled through with AutoCAD when required to maintain legacy drawings, but I don't see much future in this.  Legacy work seems to have been steadily dropping off since about 1998 as users here generally switched to SolidWorks for product design.

OK, I think I need to add some background to put my suggestions in context:

In product development, Inventor is popular here amongst production engineers, and Solidworks for product designers (in the past many industrial designers also used Rhino for tricky surfacing design problems, now largely dropped away as SW has caught up).  Most recently I was working in an NX environment (awesome CAD program, the best I've used so far for 3D) where virtually no drawings were created.  The internal work flow went from 3D CAD to tooling, to statistically controlled digital component inspection during production, all without a drawing being created.  I can see the the A360 Dashboard and Fusion 360 could support a similar work flow through the browser interface, that would be cool.  NX was almost too clever when it came to creating drawings and it was sometimes very difficult to get it to display what you wanted from assemblies and I didn't enjoy using it for that.

I currently use DraftSight to clean up dwg drawings brought through to use for technical manual illustrations, intellectual property applications and things like that because the vector based dwg file format is good for this kind of graphic design output, allowing importing into Adobe Creative Cloud apps (and open source applications like InkScape from a pdf), allowing lineweight manipulation to suit the final scale of the image.  I don't think I would pay for a license of AutoCAD just to do that.

What I'm presently using the Fusion 360 drawings for is prototype components (mostly internal use, Fusion 360 OK) and inwards goods inspection drawings for clients, where tolerance display is important (Fusion 360 currently not there, but I have every confidence that will change).  For me drawings are as much about appearance as content.  I think your drawings are a representative of your brand and should match the same values as the rest of your brand collateral and reflect the same effort taken in your product design work.  At the moment I think that the drawings from Fusion 360 do not meet my brand expectations from a graphic design point of view.  Not everyone will agree with me on this and that is OK and how it should be.  I'm not trying to get anyone to change how they work or to change their mind about what they think is important in a drawing.  I'm just offering suggestions about what I'd like to see going forward, and if that means that some of the existing AutoCAD drawing tools are pulled through that others are familiar with, then great!

[TimeraAutodesk]

@jburns thanks for your candid feedback. You're absolutely correct that we (Autodesk) have a deep and comprehensive understanding of documentation in particular based on our AutoCAD product line. The challange that we have here is that Fusion 360 users are not always the same people who have an understanding or history of AutoCAD, and the overall workflows/deliverables between the product lines are also unique. We want to uniquely serve the Fusion 360 user with the most relevant, powerful documentation tools they need to be successful out of the gate without potentially over-serving our users with all of AutoCAD. These are great discussions, and we do appreciate the community participation so that we can make sure we are delivering the right features in the right heierarchy of workflow impact. 

@shaun Thanks so much for the background info - this is super informative and I know the product team will appreciate reading this. Would you mind showing an example of the kind of the type of brand-consistent drawing layout you speak to below? Are we talking about the ability to drop in a logo & modify fonts, or more robust template features? 

-Timera

[shaun]

I have very few drawings that I can show.  I've had a look through what I have in-house that can be shown and the best I could find is a basic component drawing (pre-tooling).  For this drawing I left the line weights created by Fusion 360 as is (too much work to select and change) and elected to add dimensions in a 1 pt lineweight and 60% grey tone.  I did this because I haven't figured out how to do a detail view at a different scale out of Fusion 360, which meant that the area where the internal features are shown might have been harder to read if I'd left the lines black and indistinguishable from each other.  I chose an arrow size I thought appropriate for the drawing.

One feature option that would be nice to have would be for adjacent dimensions and annotations to snap-align with each other.  To answer your question, yes, the ability to customise a title block template would be good.

[mbostonsprint]

I think the ability to import a prepared drawing format/title block template is a critical feature for many users in existing commercial and industrial settings. "Brand-consistent" appearance, and consistency of an organization's information presentation to both internal employees and customers/suppliers is certainly an acceptance criterion for the software.

[TimeraAutodesk · Accepted solution]

This is great detailed feedback, thanks so much for clarifying. I will ensure these requests get captured in our backlog so they get addressed in future releases.

-Timera

[LMD001]

Hello Miss Crounse

I am just starting with the drawing function in Fusion 360, I have noticed that bodies that are made "invisible" (light bulb off) are still visible in the drawing.

Maybe this is by design but it would be nice to have this, like for showing the interior of a model.

Allready mentioned in this forum: custom scale.

Basic text formatting tools: font size, font type, bold...

Tolerances.

But then again if we keep asking like this, we will end with Inventor 360 

I love Fusion 360, still some stability problems, but these tend to go away when you get more aquinted with the commands.

Nice work!

Kindest regards,

Ludo

[cmiller66]

Hi Ludo,

Thanks for the feedback.  The current view behavior is intentional - we include all bodies (visible or not) in the "Full Assembly" drawing, the rationale being if for example you were working on one specific part of the design and had the rest turned off then switched to the drawing, we didn't want the current visibility in the design to prompt a view update.

We support a version of what you're suggesting, but it applies to Components (not bodies) in the design.  If you have a design consisting of multiple components you can start a New Drawing from Design, then uncheck Full Assembly and select only the components you want to create views of.  If you window select the whole assembly, you'll pick up only the components that are visible.  If you want a drawing of a single component or group of components you can highlight them in the browser then Create New Drawing from the right-click menu.  The drawing will remember the components it was created from.

What type of designs you're creating?  If the Component option doesn't do it for you can you provide some info on when/why other behavior would be more desirable?  Keep the requests coming, they really do help us prioritize the order in which we roll out new features/enhancements.

Thanks,

Chris Miller

Autodesk, Inc.

[LMD001]

Hello Chris

Thank you for your reply.

The component option will cover, I think, most if not all of the cases, I just did not yet came to try this with components instead of bodies. Thanks for pointing this out to me. Still many things I need to learn about Fusion 360.

Kindest regards

Ludo

[yoshimitsuspeed]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

+1 to Shauns comments

I would just like to add that I find this whole discussion kind of baffling.

Autodesk did more to push CAD into the mainstream than anyone. I cant think of another company that can claim such a fundamental role in defining the field. The AutoCad dimensioning tools have become the defacto standard across the industry. What I'm saying is that Autodesk understands demesioning tools, and how and why to use them.

So while Its nice that you are reaching out to users via social media, you already know exactly what is needed, just look at AutoCAD and give us those dimensioning and formatting tools. They are time- proven and they are required to do any work with a machine shop.

Jason

---

I have to agree with this.
I haven't used autocad but I have used draftsight and librecad for 2D and made drawings in many other CAD programs like Solid Works, Inventor, Solid Edge and others.
For the most part it's all similar enough to pick up pretty easy and a good how to guide can work you through the rest.

I love the fact that F360 is so eager to take the input from the community but my issue is that a highschool student, a retired accountant with a wood shop in his basement, and an engineer or CAD designer can all post ideas in the idea station or on the forum and the ideas are all are given the same level of attention.
Now I don't want to sound like the CAD designer is better but I do feel like what is most important to that person should have a lot more importance to the direction of the software.

If you need to add a simple mode for people who aren't familar with this stuff and don't want to learn it then so be it but are they the ones who will be paying for the annual ultimate subscription or choosing not to because the software doesn't have proffessional core functionality?
I say take what you know, get GD&T symbols and capability implimented in the easiest and most familiar method possible and if we have problems with it we will let you know.
Knock out the easy low hanging fruit. Make it so that you can rotate the base view in the view properties tab.

Shaded views would be huge too but much lower than these other basic functionality things.

I believe software like this should be made to make it as easy, intuitive and fast to use as possible for professional users then there should just be good documentation to allow others to learn how to do what they need to as quickly and easily as possible.

[jburns]

Great comments Yoshimitsuspeed

I have a theory about what is going on here.

If you look in Timera's response to my post (#23) she says:

"The challenge that we have here is that Fusion 360 users are not always the same people who have an understanding or history of AutoCAD, and the overall workflows/deliverables between the product lines are also unique. We want to uniquely serve the Fusion 360 user with the most relevant, powerful documentation tools they need to be successful out of the gate without potentially over-serving our users with all of AutoCAD"

My experience is that Fusion 360 works very well for 3d printing and CNC machining. I use it at home for my hobby where  I use 3d printing for electric guitar  pickup spools and CNC milling for guitar bodies. For these jobs the modeling tools and output are appropriate. Fusion 360 speaks the language of 3d printing and CNC milling.

At work I need (mostly) stainless steel components milled to a high degree of accuracy for mechanical systems working inside vacuum chambers. These sometimes include welds, high tolerance reaming, special surface finishes - you get the idea. These components are made by machinists in traditional shops, where they fuss over getting all the details right. Fusion 360 is unable to produce drawings that can communicate subtle and critical information to machinists, it doesn't speak the language of traditional machining.

So,

Timera points out that Autodesk considers Fusion a product for a unique market.

Fusion 360 was designed to work very well for 3d printing.

Fusion 360 is nearly unuseable for traditional machining.

From this I assume Autodesk has made a strategic decision to develop Fusion 360 for the 3d printing revolution, and not to service the traditional machining market. I can understand why they might do this, the 3d printing world is absolutely amazing, and they want to be a player. I feel this attitude is short sighted because my expectation is that 3d printing will not replace, but rather live along side traditional machining, with each applied to the task for which it is most appropriate. If this is the case why would I want to maintain two software environments, one for traditional machining, and one for 3d printing. I may have components of each class in the same assembly... I need my design software to speak both languages fluently.

For me it probably means I will keep my subscription at home, but for work I'll have to switch back to SolidWorks when my first year subscription runs out.

[yoshimitsuspeed]

I have had similar feelinge but someone like me needs their software to do both.
I started using F360 because I could not justify the cost of Solidworks, Solid Edge or if I had my way NX because I could run it on Linux.
I started using F360 because it was the most cost effective solution for my business and I was willing to loose the time to find workarounds to save the money.
This is before Autodesk had mentioned anything about the Ultimate version. Fortunately I am grandfathered in at the lower price. If I had to pay for ultimate the only thing that would make it halfway cost effective is the included CAM.
I almost went with Alibre before I found F360 but they had just raised their prices and I couldn't justify the cost when for a little more I could get big name software. If 3D printing was a priority Alibre can do that very well and has many basic CAD features that F360 currently does not.
For F360 to be truly competitive and IMO to warrant anything near the prices they are charging for ultimate they really need to pull this stuff together and get it implimented ASAP.
Someone like me with a small startup business and yet to make a profit is not going to buy to different types of software. If it came down to that I would ditch F360 and go with something that could do everything I needed. For me that would probably be Solid Edge or Alibre since inventor has been the most challenging and least fun CAD program I have ever tried to learn.

[prabakarm]

I would like to clarify few things here...

Fusion 360 is not for some unique market but users like yourselves designing and manufacturing products thru both additive and subtractive methods.  I completely agree with you that printing and machining will live along side.  It is an "and" and not an "or".  That is why we added CAM tools which we will expand to turning etc.  We also clearly understand that shop drawings with the right detail is an absolute necessity to communicate the intent to machine shops.  That is why we are building the drawing toolset based on AutoCAD technology so that we can offer all the rich toolset.  The question is how fast we can offer the tools you need.  That leads to what Timera was trying understand...

Having seen many shop drawings they all have their nuances.  Timera was trying to identify the right set the current users of the product need to create their shop drawings.  We discussed some of it in the following thread.  For example, we would not have considered theoritical edge dimensions something to focus on in the inital set.

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/general-fusion-360-questions/2d-drawing-dimensions-to-rounded-corner/t...

I want to assure you guys that we are working as fast as we can to provide the drawing tools you need.  With all the feedback provided in many drawing threads we are adjusting and accelerating our efforts.  We should be able to provide you specifics end of this week or early next week.  We also created a specific roadmap blog (link below) where we will provide regular updates on the overall Fusion progress. 

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-product-roadmap/bg-p/79

We have every intention to disprove your theory as that is not why we built Fusion

Prabakar.

[jburns]

I'm glad you guys see it that way.

I can be patient for quite a while, but I kind of lost hope when the last two updates came and went without any improvements. 

[prabakarm]

I can understand why you might feel that way.  In the last two updates we focussed a lot on getting the drawings tools we have currently stable, supporting MAC and Mac App store while adding section views and title block editing.  It was more platform work than tools to create complete shop drawings.  We had to that as many of the users were on MAC and leveraging Mac App Store.  Also our intent with our 6-8 week update cycle is to do few features with good stability and performance.  That said, as I indicated in the previous thread we are looking at accelerating it based on the feedback from you guys.  We are working towards updating the drawing roadmap next week accordingly.  

Prabakar.

[O.Tan]

Hmm..so should Drawings feature request be posted here or in idea station?

Currently IMHO, Drawings in F360 is a complete joke, can't pass it to the machine shop guys as there's just too many tools missing and getting the drawing out and to manage it seems messy at the current implementation.

I do hope F360 consider the use of tags and smart tags, tags is able to contain user input + smart tags so basically it allows user to customise their own annotation.

So for example:

FAR SIDE (c'bore symbol)<c'bore dia> (depth symbol)<c'bore depth> (diameter symbol)<hole dia>(depth symbol)<hole depth>

If we're talking about the standard that I'm hoping F360 drawings will be, take a look at SolidEdge, I'll say out of all the mainstream CAD drawings, theirs is the gold standard, you can literally customise many things to get it to do what you want.

[scott.price]

I appreciate your thoughts -

When it comes to missing tools, which ones do you feel are the highest priority ro your workflow? We're just getting started in adding functionality to Drawings and it's great to get input on how we can prioritize our work to get you what you need, faster.

I'll have to explore customized annotation more, thanks for bringing it to our attention.

Looking forward to hearing back,

Scott

[O.Tan]

Well this is what I'll consider a complete drawings feature and probably will elaborate some of them that I feel important later on. This is ST5 btw, so it's not the latest (latest ones even have auto dimension; different from the one listed here and etc)

Drawing Views is pretty much self explanatory

Tables is almost self explanatory, the 2 icons on the right, one is to create family of parts table and another is a custom table

Dimensions:

• Smart Dimensions
• Distance Between
• Angular Coordinate Dimension
• Auto-Dimension
• Line-Up Text
• Angle Between 
• Symmetric Diameter 
• Attach Dimension
• Copy Attributes
• Coordinate Dimension
• Chamfer Dimension
• Retrieve Dimension
• Edit Properties
• Styles

Annotation

• Callout
• Weld Symbol
• Datum Frame
• Connector
• Centerline
• Balloon
• Edge Condition
• Datum Target
• Text
• Center Mark
• Surface Texture Symbol
• Feature Control Frame
• Leader
• Automatic Centerlines
• Bolt Hole Circle

And the rest is pretty much self explainatory. Some features is possible to be consolidated into one. Bold is what I'll consider important (to me at least)

[scott.price]

Thank you sincerely for the detailed list, it really is helpful - And we are focused on building Drawings out in a way that satisfies the biggest needs first, so the bolding and prioritizing really helps.

Appreciate your input, and I hope you'll continue to keep us posted on your thoughts on Fusion as it develops.

Best,

Scott

[cekuhnen]

The drawing module seems to be a nice start but after some careful evaluations I have the current observation:

1. stability issues are a serious problem
2. lack of tools
3. inability to create simple 2d drawings from views which are not linked to the geometry
4. Speed
5. Lack of multiple pages (or I did not figure this out yet)

Currently we use Rhino as out main drawing tool and it is quite sufficient and more important very very fast!

I hope that in future version this part of Fusion will be more competitive