topic Re: Upgrading from Fusion 360 academic to subscription seems impossible. in Fusion Support Forum

Upgrading from Fusion 360 academic to subscription seems impossible.

Anonymous — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 01:02:15 GMT

I have an academic license of Fusion 360 and today I purchased a subscription of it.

It turns out that it seems impossible to do the switch, even after I got the email to download the software.

I have uninstalled and re-installed Fusion 360 several times and each time Fusion 360 picks up the academic license, essentially blocking access to the features I paid for.

Has anybody successfully upgraded Fusion 360 from academic to subscription?

I couldn't find any support pages in regards to this issue. Autodesk customer support has not been able to help. It seems nobody at Autodesk knows how resolve this issue.

Re: Upgrading from Fusion 360 academic to subscription seems impossible.

gymnyan-man — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 01:46:50 GMT

There was a question similar to the Japanese forum

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-ri-ben-yu/xue-sheng-banraisensukarasabusukuripushonraisensuni-yi-xingsarenai/m-p/8462709

But there is nothing we can do.
Contacting Autodesk's license management desk is a solution.

I think that it is good to wait until the person in charge sees this and contacts, or contact from here.

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/contact-support

Re: Upgrading from Fusion 360 academic to subscription seems impossible.

Anonymous — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 03:21:43 GMT

Thanks for the link.

It is unfortunate that there is not an easy and clear path from an academic license to a subscription license. The whole point for Autodesk to offer free software to the academic community is to expose the future workforce to their products before they become professionals. This in turn would eventually lead to these new professionals to invest in the software products they already know.

There is now another version of Fusion 360 showing up in my account, but upon installing this version, it picks up the academic license again.

Years ago, I migrated from an academic version of Maya to a subscription. In this case, things went very smoothly. I have two versions of the software in my Autodesk account, an academic one and a commercial one. Each version generates its corresponding license so there is never a license issue.

This license problem and some stability issues with Fusion 360 begs the question: when will Fusion 360 be ready for prime time?

Re: Upgrading from Fusion 360 academic to subscription seems impossible.

Anonymous — Sun, 27 Jan 2019 02:18:50 GMT

I found an easy solution to this issue: create another account with Autodesk and purchase Fusion 360 with that account.

Fusion 360 will still launch with the credentials from the old (academic) account. In this case, just log out and login with the new account. This step will bring in the full featured Fusion 360.

Autodesk Support answer to this problem was to wipe out my academic privileges in order for the subscription to remain active. The agent said it was the only solution. Ouch! This is pretty radical since most of my work is research. I said "no thanks!"

It dawned on me that Fusion 360 gets its version settings from your Autodesk account. So, I just thought that creating a new account, requesting a refund from the old account, and purchasing Fusion 360 again from the new account would work. And it did!

This process brought up another issue though:

Projects with referenced geometry cannot be moved to other folders. What?! Fusion 360 won't even allow you to download them to your computer. This includes assemblies from components you created yourself. You can only "share" the files with other accounts or even yourself.

I hope Fusion 360 will be ready for prime time soon. Its workflow is the best in the industry, IMHO. Having said that, Inventor is much more mature and has much more design capabilities than Fusion 360. It is shocking to me that it took so long for Fusion 360 to get CV splines (still very glitchy) and that it still doesn't have plastic part tools, frame design, 3D sketch dimensions, draw a rectangle and a angle and other hard-to-live-without technologies.