topic Re: Unusable due to crashes and freezes on powerful MacBook Pro in Fusion Support Forum

Unusable due to crashes and freezes on powerful MacBook Pro

Anonymous — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 21:35:16 GMT

Hi, I'm working in fairly simple models with 6 linked components and fusion crashes at least once an hour. I've just spent an hour on a drawing and now fusion has frozen when I tried to save, presumably I have an autosave, but it's still disruptive. I'm happy to send any diagnostic files or the files I'm working in to diagnose this problem. I assume you can see the many crash reports on my account.

Fusion also takes around 10 seconds to save, even autosave which happens every five minutes and gives me the spinning wheel the whole time. The appearance tab takes between 15-20 seconds to load every single time which is frustrating.

Also, what is up with custom .hdr in rendering? I've tried to attach different custom environments and when I click render fusion just crashes. If there are file limitations then I understand, but this should be stated clearly somewhere.

Would appreciate your help with these issues. I really want to like fusion but the instability makes it very difficult.

Re: Unusable due to crashes and freezes on powerful MacBook Pro

jeff_strater — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 05:48:18 GMT

@Anonymous - are you sending in the crash reports when Fusion crashes, including with the email registered to your Autodesk account? I did a search, and I can find only 3 reports in the last 30 days. All of those involved a Form/Sculpt/TSpline body. I will have the team look into those, but if you've crashed more recently, it may be a different problem.

[edit] - also, if you have the design from the earlier TSpline crashes (I think they were around Nov 17 or so), would you be willing to share those with us? We'd like to investigate those crashes. Thanks!

Re: Unusable due to crashes and freezes on powerful MacBook Pro

Anonymous — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 10:01:13 GMT

Hi Jeff, thanks for your reply.

Unfortunately the last thing I have when fusion crashes is the patience to wait the 30 seconds it takes to send a crash report, although I thought I'd sent more than 3. My diagnostic log file is attached.

The file with the Tspline form is https://a360.co/2KYLRkU, the most crashes happened when trying to change the 'sections' when adjusting a pipe form command. Fusion crashed after almost every move, it took me all day to adjust the pipe to what I wanted. This file is also what I am experiencing crashes on, maybe once an hour, mostly while saving fusion will just hang and never come back. I had a couple of crashes when saving drawings from this file and found if I force quit 'not responding' AcCoreConsole then fusion became responsive again, although my file was lost.

My main issues are the 10 second save times every five minutes which freeze fusion. Also the appearance window taking 20 seconds to load every time, I do have about 10 custom appearances but this shouldn't matter.

What are Fusions .hdr limitations? I cannot find this anywhere.

Hope you can help, Ben

Re: Unusable due to crashes and freezes on powerful MacBook Pro

TrippyLighting — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 11:22:48 GMT

If you roll the timeline back to right after the first T-Spline and delete the rest, does Fusion 360 still crash ?

IMHO you are using he wrong software for his task! If rendering is your end goal then use a Sub-D modeling package with a builtin or external render engine. E.g. I'd use Blender for this.

If your end goal is to design the shelf, after creating the clean quad mesh in Blender or any other Sub-D modeler, you can still import the mesh into Fusion 360 and convert it into a T-Spline. But again, it should be a quad mesh.

In general the shelf T-Spline contains a number of modeling techniques I would not recommend. In a Sub-D modeler you can get away with those because a Sub-D modeler does not need to convert the T-Spline into an NURBS surface. T-Splines are less forgiving.

For example you used a large number of T-Junctions resulting in a large number of N-Gons. While that is touted as one of the benefits of T-Splines is has some very clear disadvantages and I personally very rarely use it and definitely only less than a hand full of times in any given T-Spline model.

The next thing that is pretty clear is that you modeled exclusively in Smooth View mode, because otherwise the somewhat distorted shapes and polygon layout is hard to explore in Box View mode.

If you honor these 2 things alone, quad polygons only and model 80% in Box view mode your T-Splines will likely be free of problems with reduced crashing, assuming for a moment that the crashing is due to the T-Spline model.

Re: Unusable due to crashes and freezes on powerful MacBook Pro

Anonymous — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 12:18:11 GMT

Hi,

The crashes occurred before I created the shelf form, so I do not think that is the problem. Also how can your only solution be that I use different software? Fusion has advertised their 'form' function, and you're telling me that I should use different software because it doesn't work well unless I get the splines perfect? How can I make this form work better inside Fusion? If the form is finished, can I convert it? I don't see what I've done wrong..

As a student I get unlimited cloud credits to render using fusion, and I can get very successful renders quickly and easily with a very simple workflow. So why would I learn a different software?..

I see this as a problem with Fusion, not the way I've created my model. Even if I have done it wrong, there should be something to tell me this before Fusion becomes an unstable mess!!

Any idea about the long save times or appearance load times?

Thanks

Re: Unusable due to crashes and freezes on powerful MacBook Pro

TrippyLighting — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 13:12:52 GMT

I do think the T-Spline is part of the problem and the content of the crash reports Jeff has looked at seem to support that.

I did not say that this cannot be done with Fusion 360. I stated that Fusion 360 is not the best software to do visualizations with. Blender is much better and magnitudes faster at handling these purely mesh based models as it include as Sub-D mesh modeler. Blender is foremost a software devised for animation/visualization. However, it is also really formidable Sub-D (quad-)mesh modeling tool that has many more tools than the form environment in Fusion 360. I frequently use Blender to model meshes for use as T-Splines in Fusion 360. Combine the strength the two and add some herps and spices in form of a couple of other tools (Meshmixer, Instant Meshes etc.) and you've got some pretty powerful tools.

Fusion 360 on the other hand is a CAD software and as such its purpose is to create models for manufacturing. It can also do nice visualizations, but that is not its main purpose.

I also did NOT present the use of another software as the only solution. I gave pretty pointed advise to improve your modeling technique in Fusiosn 360 . Just because you are not aware of your modeling mistakes obviously does not mean you did not make any.

The topology of your T-Spline does not need to be perfect but there is a lot of ground to be covered between the topology of your T-Spline and a "perfect" T-Spline. I hope I don't have to be any clearer!

In other words the T-Spline you have created has a number of topology problems that are modeling mistakes. In Box view mode self intersecting geometry can clearly be seen and while it still converts into a BRep the NURBS geometry I creates is flawed. N-gons are supported, but still are not advised, particularly in a large number.

It helps to understand some underlying principles how T-Splines and NURBS surfaces work under the hood and what their similarities are. T-Splines as well as NURBS are based on a quadratic mesh of control vertices. A 5-sided polygon for example is by nature not quadratic, so Fusion 360 has to create some approximations, which often result in bad and often collapsing curvature. That is just simply based on the underlying math and not per se a bug.

It helps to understand this to avoid modeling mistakes.

But, yes, you certainly won't find that information in marketing materials 😉

Re: Unusable due to crashes and freezes on powerful MacBook Pro

TrippyLighting — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 13:14:01 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:

What are Fusions .hdr limitations? I cannot find this anywhere.

How big (resolution, file size) are the .HDRs ?

Re: Unusable due to crashes and freezes on powerful MacBook Pro

jeff_strater — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 19:59:16 GMT

@Anonymous - thanks for the design. We will look into the crash with the TSplines.

I understand not wanting to send the crash reports, but, frankly, if you don't do that, it becomes hard for us to track and fix these crashes. The log files do not contain information about crashes. The crash reports contain very detailed reports about exactly where in the code the crash occurred, which is critical to fixing them.

also being honest - a 10 second save time for a design of this size is pretty reasonable, IMO. This is a 400MB download. And if you have lots of embedded images or HDRs in this design that are large, that can contribute. I have Powerpoint files that take minutes to save. And, you know you can change the frequency of the recovery file save, right? If it bothers you that this happens every 5 minutes, set it to 20 or 30. The danger, there, of course, is potentially losing 15 minutes of work. That's a tradeoff that you need to decide about.

Re: Unusable due to crashes and freezes on powerful MacBook Pro

jeff_strater — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 23:33:24 GMT

@Anonymous - the crashes that do show up in our database definitely have TSplines in the call stack, so at least those crashes occurred when there was at least one Form in the model, or that code would not be involved.

and, that TSpline body is pretty large. Not prohibitively large, but editing it will be certainly slow at times. You say: "the most crashes happened when trying to change the 'sections' when adjusting a pipe form command." In the version you shared with us, there are no remaining Pipe constructs (they are short-lived - if you edit them with Edit Form, they go away as a Pipe item in the browser). So, can we assume that this happened when you were creating new Form Pipe sections for this design? Or, were you editing the design in its current form, perhaps using Edit Form? I tried a bit of Edit Form on this model, and it seemed to be pretty snappy, and I did not experience any crashes, but, of course, I also did not do extensive work with this model. If you can give us some pointers as to what you were doing at the time of the crash, it will increase the likelihood that we can fix these crashes.

I noticed that there is a very tiny body in this model:

not sure if that is intentional or not. I also don't think this is related to the crashes, just thought I would point it out.

I also understand, now, why the F3Z is so large: All those mesh models of plants. I understand that you want them in there for your rendering, but you might have a more pleasant experience if you rolled the design back before those designs are inserted, while you are working on the stand itself.

My last question is: You mention doing a Force Quit (I know that you refer to that in the context of drawings, which I realize is not related to what we know about the crashes that are reported), and it made me wonder. When you experience a Fusion crash, is it a real crash (meaning you get the crash report dialog), or are you maybe experiencing some slow operation, and doing a Force Quit? Some operations are just going to be slow, and you sometimes need to wait them out.