NOTICE: June Update Materials changes; retiring legacy material library

[jakefowler]

In the June release of Fusion 360, coming this weekend, we are introducing a brand new material download service. This will allow you to browse, download and apply cloud-hosted materials directly from the Appearance dialog:

We hope this will make browsing and accessing new materials much easier. Going forward, we will also be adding a new set of downloadable physical materials, and continue to add brand new high-fidelity appearances & finishes to the Fusion 360 Appearance Library.

As part of this change, we’ll be retiring Exchange Materials download service, and the Legacy Material/Appearance Library will be removed. These will no longer be available in Fusion 360.

If you wish to keep any physical materials or appearances from the Legacy Material/Appearance Library beyond the June update, you can do this by saving them to your Favorites library before the update on June 20th:

1. If not already downloaded to the local machine, open the Exchange Materials browser and download the required material(s)
2. Open the Physical Material/Appearance command
3. Use the Library dropdown to switch to the Legacy Material/Appearance Library
4. Right-click each material and select Add To Favorites

These materials will now be available to you beyond the June update from your Favorites library.

Note that if you have legacy materials assigned to existing designs, these will be unaffected by the June update changes. You can also copy these to your Favorites library at any time to reuse them on other designs (no need to do this before the June update):

1. Open an existing design with the required material(s) applied
2. Open the Physical Material/Appearance library
3. From the In This Design panel, right-click each material and select Add To Favorites

Please do get in touch if you have any questions about the changes. We’d also love to get feedback on new materials you’d like to see added to the new downloadable library in future.

[Anonymous]

Hi Jake ,

June 20th is June 21 over here in Asia, is that correct?

Thanks!

[jakefowler]

Hiya Kingson,

Yep, that's right! It will be early on June 21st in SE Asia.

Jake

[Anonymous]

Thanks Jake.

But I do have one last question for you. Phil told me in the last STEP FILE EXPORT PROBLEM thread that the Shanghai team (Jerry and others) are working to solve the Hidden Body problem  in STEP file export (from the Parametric Mode). Is that a fix in the next update?

Thanks again!

[jakefowler]

Hi Kingson,

Let me check that out and I'll get in touch tomorrow.

Cheers,

Jake

[cekuhnen]

Hey thats a nice idea! Looking forward to it!

[jakefowler]

Thanks Claas, appreciate the feedback!

Kingson - the STEP issue you mentioned should be resolved with the update this weekend. Be sure to get in touch next week if you're still seeing the problem after the update.

Thanks!

Jake

[Anonymous]

Hi Jake this is great! Have a wonderful holiday over there!

[Anonymous]

Hi,

when you think to add dispersion to transparent materials and coatings?

Glass and gems aren't realistic at the moment.

regards

[cekuhnen]

@Anonymous I am not sure if it would fit into your finances but Thea Renderer is coming out with a Fusion plug-in right now. It is a pretty affordable render engine that blows Keyshot out of the water. The material system there is pretty fantastic as it was coded for product and architecture rendering in mind! Caustics are a time consuming calculation and Thea just crunches through it with ease.

[Anonymous]

I got licenses of:

Octane (Max, Rhino, AE), Vray, Thea, Arion...:)

I always use Octane render because is the fastest gpu renderer on the planet.

I'd like to create photorealistic renders directly in Fusion360.

The Fusion360 render kernel is very good, not hyper realistic but it's ok.

[cekuhnen]

but the kernel is pretty slow - when you do GPU rendering with Octane try thea with GPU + CPU at once. I found Octane also not that fast when you switch to better modes.

I am not sure if that will come but I could see Thea working on an internal IR like they have for Rhino and SketchUp etc.

[O.Tan]

@cekuhnen, woot! Thea is creating a plugin for F360? Sweet! Would love to try it out!  

aargh, just realised they're not done with the OpenCL port :(, my MacPro uses AMD GPUs

[cekuhnen]

O.Tan

But even in CPU mode Thea is incredible fast and good. While Keyshot uses some cheap shortcuts thea does not but delivers stunning results.

[O.Tan]

Looking forward to it, either way, Thea already has OpenCL port in development so it's only a matter of time. Can't wait to see my nMP hardware be put to full use

[Anonymous]

Hi Jake, 

This post was also made to inform Phil in the other thread.

I am happy to inform you that the STP export from the parametric mode had been fixed in this new update. A screen shot is attached here. Thanks everyone for listening!
This model had been exported into STP from its Parametric File. From now on I do not have to clean up the file in the DM mode anymore. This file was viewed with a third party CAD viewer which I used to check stl, stp and other files. As well as obtaining the dimension of the file (I think it is easier for me to use this CAD viewer to get the dimension of the file):

[Anonymous]

So now the specific materials are gone like aluminium 5052,... Where can i find specific materials?

[jakefowler]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for posting. I'm afraid the new download system does not yet support physical materials, so the physical material library just contains the bundled Fusion 360 Material Library materials for now. We’re aiming to provide a wider range of downloadable physical materials through this library later this year.

If you need access to specific physical materials before then, there are a few options:

1. If you already have the required material applied to an existing design, you can use the workflow described at the bottom of the initial post (save the material to your favorites, and reapply from there).
2. The Manage Materials dialog still has access to a database of physical material properties, which may give you what you need (for example, this includes physical properties for Aluminium 5052). You’ll need to add a material from the Physical Materials dialog into your Favorites (e.g. Aluminium), to use as a base for your new material. Then inside the Manage Materials dialog, find this in the Favorites library, and click the pen icon to edit its physical properties. The ‘left-right arrows’ icon in the tabs will open the full database in a seperate window, and let you swap-in new properties. (If you try this and get stuck, let me know and I'll provide more details.)
3. If neither of these provides what you need, let us know and I’ll see if there’s any way we can send you the material(s) you require.

Hope this helps, and sorry that this isn’t so straightforward at the moment.

Thanks,
Jake

[jakefowler]

Hi Kingson,

Awesome news! Very glad to hear that, thanks for letting us know.

Hope you had a great holiday weekend,

Jake

[jakefowler]

Hi @Anonymous,

I'm following up on the question about dispersion effects, will let you know when I have more info.

Many thanks for raising this!

Jake