Better feature system for DM environment

[cekuhnen]

While the design timeline is a great idea to finish a single part the timeline is not ideal when working with many parts creating them and then doing the assembly.

The features in the DM environment seem to be kinda wonky like sometimes I cannot edit a value like I can in the TL.

I coming from Alias / Blender prefer working on a per object basis when it comes to features. In Blender like Alias objects have an object center point and transformation values. So I can do my design history on the object but the positioning placement scale or rotation is taken care of by the object data.

There I see the problem in the TL. I would need to build all my furniture parts first and then do them assembly and move a lot forward and backwards in the timeline.

The problem with that is also when I move back all the following steps are not visible. Thats a great problem.

That's why for furniture design I prefer Blender because it allows me to work like with solids in Inventor add modifiers such as thickness, boolean operations etc as interactive features and position and arrange all parts with the object data. When I model / modify one part I always see everything else because I do not go forward in time or so.

I do now know how hard it would be to enhance the DM mode so that it has a better feature system.

Alternatively I would need to build parts alone in files and then insert them into an assembly file.

[schneik-adsk]

Long answer comming...

First let me address the "Wonky," Direct Modeling (DM) features.

In direct modeling there is no order. Fusion has psudo features that try and help you ahve some smarter editing on top of the geometry.

But these direct features will never be able to be as smart as timline features because you can affect the model in ways that invalidate the feautures.

If you add a slot to a hole in DM the hole is not longer intact as a hole. tying to edit the hole and change it to a counter bore would be ambigious because of the slot faces. In the worst of cases the lost could get lost.  We try and keep Fillets, Chamfers Holes, Patterns, and Mirrors as smart as we can, as long as we can. Other features like revolve, sweep, loft are just not possible to allow editing because there is no history and no ability to roll back changes to the model to the state it was at when the feature was created.

As to your problems with Timeline models (TL). Fusion 360 was built with a new assembly design method. It was designed to allow you to do what we call top down design and skeleton modeling much more easily than ever before. It also allows bottom up design too There are tools built in that allow you to get easier editing in the context of the assembly that you might not have found yet.

Isolating a component hides other parts so that you can see one part at a time.

Activating a component ( this is the radio button in the browser to the right of the component name) Filters the Timeline to show only the features that affect that one part.  Activation and isolation can make it very easy to work on one part at a time.

You can turn sketch's on and also turn on sketch dimensions (Right mouse click on the sketch) this allows you to edit the sketches without having to roll back. This makes it easier to make changes where you can see the effects on later features. 

If you are in the early concept phase you can leave sketches undimensioned and use press pull to move faces. This does not require roll back and will change the underlying feature definition even though you are at the end of the Timeline.

This should give you a lot of the same push/pull resize capability you have in DM but the power of Timeline models.

We are always looking to make the TL models easier to change without needing rollback as often and have improvements coming.

We did spend a good long time working on the DM features that are there and making them smarter is not trivial or easy. If there are more specific examples it might help us think up some new ideas but, to your question enhanced DM features is a problem we are not working on.

We are also realizing that these more conceptual workflows and techniques are not explained well enough in the help and tutorials. The team is working to beef up that material. 

I hope this answers at least some of your questions.

[cekuhnen]

I see your point - and I am not criticizing Fusion in anway.

I was just curious. I find the TL great for single objetc design but found it difficult for multi part designs.

However it can easily be I simply do not use it right.