Why is Inventor freeform inferior to Fusion 360

[jmturner]

So I'm trying to design a car body for school. I knew about Inventor Fusion, then notice that it had be depreciated in favor of Fusion 360. I used it on another project, and I love and think is nearly the greatest piece of CAD software that I have ever used. It's lacking some of the more advanced project management features, but for simple parts, I have no complaints. Anyway, I started designing the body in Fusion 360, and really enjoyed how easy it was to manuiplate the freeform body. Everything just seamed to work. However, I quickly scrapped the idea when 

 A.) I found out that the body was not easliy integrated back into Inventor (I know I can export but this is far from seamless)

 B.) I found that Inventor already had freeform modeling tools built in

Great, I thought, and I tried to make my body directly in Inventor, where I already had the frame designed. But it just didn't seam to work very well. I kept running into limitations, even with seemingly simple modifications to shape, such as deleting geometry, I would get errors. I tried to do a fit to edge from a sketch. This basically renders the body completely unuseable. I finally gave up on editing the part and decided to retry Fusion 360. Same company, I thought, same result. I was wrong. Fusion 360 is a real joy. It lets me do things Inventor won't. It lets me flatten the freeform to planes. It lets me crease edges without creasing every connected edge. In 5 minutes I am able to create a shape closer to what I wanted than I could in 5 hours with Inventor. This is a really great piece of software. (Also the CAM integration works like a charm, but that was for a different project)

Sorry about the rant, but why is Inventor, the more expensive flagship software, so inferior when it comes to this featureset? Is there plans to rectify this? Am I missing something? 

[johnsonshiue · Accepted solution]

Hi! T-spline was acquired by Autodesk in 2011. Fusion was the first product integrating the technology not long after that. It has exemplified to its users how powerful T-spline can be.

Inventor 2015 is the first official release adopting the same technology. There is room for improvement certainly. If you would like to participate in evaluating future enhancements in Inventor pre-releases, please send me an email directly (johnson.shiue@autodesk.com) so I can send you an invite to Inventor Beta program.

Many thanks!

[blair]

I guess it really depends what you are doing. Fusion360 is a great "free-form" modeling software and in it's infancy. Very basic rudimentary drawings, (the lack of Section Views and Detail Views) bare's this out. No Structural components, Tube & Pipe, View Representations and the lack of FEA are other short comings. No component center in Fusion360 either. This reminds me of the early days (releases) of Inventor.

Each has there strong points and advantages, for free-form modeling Fusion does excel and it should being basically a free-form modeler but currently that is the only place that Fusion360 excels when compared to Inventor.

[jmturner]

Thanks for the info. This is what I was guessing, the tech is new enough that is hasn't been completely implemented. I'll just look forward to 2016 or 2017

[JDMather]

Zip and attach your *.f3d file here.