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Adding advanced parameters to decals

Adding advanced parameters to decals

Hi,

 

I'm really enjoying Fusion 360 and I love the simplicity and speed of setting up a rendering scene.

Nevertheless there's one detail that needs a dramatic improvement in the way it is implemented in Fusion 360, the Decals.

 

Currently the Decals settings are very basic and I'm unable to set its material properties like I can with the regular materials in Fusion.

This limitations prevents me from, as an example, to set a decal as just a bump map that assumes the material properties of the shader that is already applied to the object with the goal to add a bump detail to a geometry such a logotype, a symbol or a small decoration.

 

Why do I need this?

I know that I can model the bump but, in an preliminary concept exploration phase, I often simulate the application of bumps just to check if they work, and in an ordinary project I can create dozens of variations of those bumps so imagine the time needed to model every single study.

 

Another example... imagine a plastic part that has a chemical grainy matte texture applied but that also has some precise localised decorations that are polished. In other 3D software I can either create a texture with a bump map that already sets the roughness of the surface or I can simply apply the hemical texture to the object and apply a decal on top that just has the polished decoration, allowing me to control it's properties (color, bump map height, size, surface finish and transparency mask) independently from the texture beneath.

 

Anyone familiar with other 3D software with integrated rendering engine, knows that this is a very basic feature that is extremely useful.

 

For your reference, I already tried to set up an existing texture map from Fusion's material library, that I duplicated and added the bump map with the size and proportion of the object that I want to apply the bump to but I found extremely hard and complicated to precisely align the texture map position and size with the geometry and even when I did that, when I started the raytracing rendering, the position of the texture map was different from the GPU vizualisation (maybe it's a bug?).

 

The goal of Fusion 360 is to provide the tools for both design and engineering development in an integrated 3D software, and in my personal opinion, Fusion is the first 3D software that I used that is effectively capable of doing that without anyone (designers and engineers) loosing their souls.

But you should understand that, in the concept exploration phase, not everything should/needs to be modeled and providing the right tools to support that also helps optimize the overall development time of a project.

 

I would love to ear the comments of other Fusion 360 users about this...

 

Best,

 

Carlos

10 Comments
panzinip
Contributor

 

"Decals" applied to faces in Fusion do not seem to shade at all, or at least beyond a Lambertian shader.

It would be extremely useful to have a full textured shader, with which one could also control surface specularity (from any one of the source image channels), opacity and roughness.

Tags (1)
colin.smith
Alumni
Status changed to: Gathering Support
Hi Panzinip, this is a known issue that we will be working on for a upcoming release. Thanks. Colin.
lilbitartist
Contributor

I was taken by surprise when I saw a rendering "workspace" san bump map! And just 9 votes so far for such a basic feature! I can understand the mindset that excludes bump map from a CAM software but still it is a basic rendering feature needed in a serious product developement software. But I wanted to add the idea of another very obvious feature, and that is the good old "displacement map". I am not sure that they are going to read the comment sections for that so please add this to the main text of the idea. I don't think it makes sense to make two seperate idea posts for these little basic features. Besides, displacement map goes hand-in-hand with bump map. It is really annoying and makes the Fusion like a half-baked software without BOTH bump-map AND displacement-map features. At least add it as an advanced feature to Ultimate version if it seems to be a big luxury.

schneik-adsk
Community Manager
Status changed to: Gathering Support
 
schneik-adsk
Community Manager
Status changed to: 実装済み
 
joseangeljimenez
Participant

My vote also for "displacement maps" as a basic feature a modern CAM software should have. Otherwise, I won't be able to etch/pattern a surface according to a 2D decal design.

colin.smith
Alumni
Status changed to: Future Consideration

There has been work done to improve the rendering of decals.  We intend to add functionalty to decals in line with your indea.

 

colin.smith
Alumni
Status changed to: Gathering Support

We have changed the behaviour to have the decal adopt the shader information from the material that is assigned to the body.  However there is still a requirement to have independent control of the decal shader properties.

 

JamieRE
Community Visitor

I am pretty sure that it is still the case that you cannot change the properties of a decal, such as surface roughness. 

davidcuesta76
Enthusiast

Anybody linked to this thread, there are some other threads started please vote on them.

 

Agree Fusion is Amazing, however it is not being used by just engineers or 3D printing, so please lets have features that allow some decent texture mapping.

 

Tried using the decal feature again today and it is painful.

 

Please Autodesk, thanks.

 

dc

 

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-ideastation-request-a/decal-improvements/idc-p/7535250/hig...

 

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-ideastation-request-a/import-decal-at-correct-scale/idi-p/...

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