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Submitted byAnonymouson10-18-201508:52 PM
Status:
Gathering Support
Ability to reference Driven Dimensions
I have a driven dimension in a sketch, which I would like to be able to use in a calculation for another parameter, but there is no way to reference this. It does not show up in any way under the "Change Parameters" dialog or have any named reference that I can see.
How can it be so difficult to implement? The driven dimension has an internal reference/label that doesn't change.. I feel like even I could get in there and get it done in a couple of days. Its mind boggling that people in control see it as some kind of tertiary extravagance.
@roambotics_scott I am not defending "them" but think that for $495 annually a lot of people get a lot of bang for the buck. Some clearly don't! One has to very carefully assess what Fusion 360 can do and more importantly what it cannot do and then make sound decisions. That does not mean this is without frustrations but I've moved on. Not away, but simply on!
I know what Fusion 360's strengths are and I limit my use to those areas. When it starts fighting back I report bugs (if I find the time and have the patience) but them move on quickly to use other tools to complete my projects. That makes a difference. Between December and January I reported 17 bugs and made a post on the EE forum.
Now most of these bugs (15) are corrected. That makes at least a little difference!
Merely complaining about bugs does not! It does not contribute anything.
In the grand scheme of things however, I am not sure that Fusion 360 or any other Autodesk software will ever be truly as good as it could be but I wont discuss my assessment here in public 😉
So in the meantime I'd rather help those folks on the Fusion 360 team that appreciate the help.
WOW! I'm very surprised by how this thread escalated today.
After ~15 years of not doing mechanical CAD work, I came back via F360 (previously autocad, solid works and some ProE) and have been very pleasantly surprised by what I can do in Fusion and the productivity rate. Yes, it brings on considerable frustration at times and I have to find workarounds to the design, or just bite the bullet and live with hard to maintain designs, but overall I really can't complain.
This talks about stability and not-supported features make me think that I'm not even taking this into 2nd gear because for me it kind of works. I recently reconsidered Inventor and SolidWorks, but I have a physical revulsion to Windows so I decided to stay with F360 for the time being, but I really don't want to get locked in.
Can you share some specifics about what kind of things make it crash? Or what kind of designs are just a nightmare?
I really probably should not respond here again, but it's early Saturday morning, and my resistance is low...
It's very interesting to me that this thread has evolved into a stability thread. Because, encapsulated in this one IdeaStation thread is a distillation of the forces that are pulling on Fusion development every day. On the one hand, this whole thread is started out about an enhancement (referencing driven dimensions in equations). (Before the rants start, I understand that some may disagree with "enhancement" here, but from our point of view it is one). On the other hand, the recent comments here are more about stability and "fix what you have". This is the balancing act that we have to struggle with. Should we devote resources to fill in this missing functionality that, while very important to some workflows, is not critical for, say 80% of them, or should we push for the stability that @roambotics_scott mentions? For any of you that know me, you know that I am 100% in agreement with Scott and Peter here. If I ran the zoo, I would spend an entire year doing nothing but fixing bugs, tracking down crashes, filling in the little cracks in the workflows. But, I also realize that I don't run the zoo for a good reason. Stability, while very important, is not very sexy. The sales team can't sell quality as easily as they can sell new stuff. It's sad that this is the case, but it is the truth. So, we are forced to try to do both. Even on the enhancement front, putting effort into things like Generative are more effective, sales-wise, than workflow-completion enhancements like this one. I wish we could do it all, but it's still a finite team, and the laws of physics apply.
Finally, a rant of my own, if you'll all indulge me. @fraccle says: "How can it be so difficult to implement? ... I feel like even I could get in there and get it done in a couple of days." How I wish I could call that bluff... 😊
To be clear - this topic is what I’m talking about, not just stability. It’s not either or. There is no tension.
You build feature after feature but don’t do the hard last 5-10% which includes things like closing the loop and referencing driven dimensions, or making things work without crashing.
I’m not foolish enough to claim that driven dimensions are easy and patching it in a few days would surely introduce more bugs, but if you thought of that earlier and architected better rather than racing to build, you’d have a complete system with that loop closed.
You’re not some scrappy resource starved startup. How many people do you have in QA alone ? What is your development budget ? There are VC backed unicorns built with fewer people and less money in less time.
As to the crashing - I don’t think it’s a matter of pushing hard. I can use it for hours without crashing *if* I do things just so and tapdance around to avoid things I know will break. I can’t give a specific procedure to break things because there are so many ways to do it. I have no idea what Seth did to make it crash after a little use, but I do know that when AD sent a QA team out to meet with me years ago, it took all of five minutes of playing around to trigger a crash in their stable bug fixed development build, and I gather that is still not far from the case.
I’ve said this so many times into the void but you need to have more naïve testers come in and regularly exercise the program. Don’t give them procedures, just say «make this» and let them go.
I’m sure the testers and procedures you have are great but they’re tap dancing around tripwires in a minefield. Naive testers who haven’t used the program will not know better and will do things to trigger crashes that your experienced testers and evangelists have learned to avoid.
I think this is a pretty fair explanation. You know that I am with Fusion when it was even called Inventor Fusion on macOS and I came to the realisation that Fusion is not an app but more a collection of environments.
It is maybe more a cad platform. Yeah and sadly that means development will not be as intense on each area the different users we have want to. Thats is just a reality.
In the end like Peter said, look if Fusion offers what you need and make a decision.
Alias has so much as a professional surface modeler and so does Rhino and I made a very calculated decision to use Fusion instead. While I miss some tools from Rhino and Alias overall Fusion offers a very different workflow, approach to exploring designs and toolsets Rhino and Alias don't and wont ever offer.
This would be such a useful feature for me, saving me from having to work through each step of how certain dimensions are made and then recreating them in formula. or just going into a sketch reading off the value and typing it into a parameter over and over again.
I can't imagine what could have caused this to be 'priority' and repeatedly promised over a few different threads but nothing seeming to be down about it. I first see people asking for this in late 2014, as of writing it is the 4th of December 2019, around 5 years of this being a requested feature.
I would really like even just a blog post going through why this has taken so long and what is causing this to be so hard.
Because driven dimensions are calculated and apparently are tracked and just hidden in the parameters window. I think it would be useful to stop people complaining so much if you would explain what issues arise when driven dimensions are allowed to drive parameters. Is it stability and performance? Are infinite loops causing crashing? Does adding max iterations not help? Why would just having the number appear in the parameters window allowing people to quickly find the value and type it in not work as a stop gap? Do you have concrete plans for implementing this?
Whilst I think the fusion people at autodesk are a very passionate team that try their best I totally get why it is in autodesks interest to keep fusion the somewhat cobbled together playgound thing where they can test out ideas for their real product in a giant public beta with people that pay little or no money for this piece of software. and for what it costs, fusion is really awesome. especially the cam side. but if you try to work with it professionally you bump into these awquard bugs and weirdnesses constantly. I get why. and if I could justify the expense I totally would buy inventor. And I thinks this is in their interest. Why would somebody spend so much money? It´s way easyer to justify the cost to get features that you benefit from every day and not some fancy future gimiks like generative design. just my two cents. peace. fusion team, you rock. autodesk is just doing what every profit oriented company should do. why not.
When I first downloaded Fusion 360, the first thing that came to mind was that Autodesk was creating a Solidworks killer. By making this kind of software highly affordable, it would not only open up solid/parametric modeling to a vastly wider range of businesses than can now afford Solidworks and Inventor, it could re-balance the market share between autodesk and solidworks (the latter which outsells inventor 3 to 1I.
I don't have a formal engineering and design background, but have programmed computers for many years. Some time ago developed a php/mysql program to parametrically define bicycle frame geometries, and it works quite reliably. I don't have the time to program this as a solid model. My dream was to be able to use 360's parametric modeling engine to allow us to design and present a more complete representation of our product and to help us anticipate the increasingly demanding design requirements of our industry. I could see the promised land.
About a year ago, after I had developed a range of skills needed to bring meet our objectives, I went back to putting together the basic geometry model. Lo and behold: You cannot correctly design even a simple bicycle frame stick drawing without at least a simple reference driven dimension. In my php model, I tied this together with a special regime that required iteration. Mistakenly, I assumed that this fairly manageable feature would be buried somewhere in what seems to be a wonderfully designed system.
Nope. No way, as I found after joining this thread. What's more, as I reviewed my learning and exploration of the software for various design projects, the lack of this feature made a wile number of design projects vastly more complicated and prevented true parametric modeling.
I could see the promised land, but . . .
So, without this feature, Solidworks-killer is something Fusion 360 can never be.
Please give me some hope this will be addressed soon or I won't be able to justify renewing my subscription.
@Anonymous - re: "I would really like even just a blog post going through why this has taken so long and what is causing this to be so hard." While not a blog post, if you go through all 12 pages of comments on this item, you should find some that address this point. I know this seems simple on the surface, but if it were simple, we would have done it long ago.
I am not in a promise-making position on this. Understand all the requests here, and acknowledge the outrage expressed as well. This is one of those items that falls into the "super-important for a relatively small number of people" category. It is very hard to figure out how to prioritize those kinds of features, especially when they are expensive to implement. Knowing that this is not helpful to you, we do talk about this one a lot.
Just ran into this when playing around with sketches today. This seems like an incredibly intuitive feature to have and seems like a reasonable think to reach for. In fact, it felt so obvious to me that it must already exist in Fusion 360 that I spent a few hours hopelessly searching how to accomplish this task. I mean it seems like a big hole in the constraint system for sketches. After all, the equal constraint is just a 1:1 ratio, why should I not be able to make a constraint that is a 2:3 ratio for example. Moreover, the lack of this future forces user to provide fixed dimensions on things that they do not want to be fixed in order to fully constrain their sketches. Anyways, I hope to see the ability to reference a driven dimension in Fusion 360 sometime in the near future 🤞.
@jeff_strater I for one really appreciate you taking the time to comment in this thread, it really improves the perception of Fusion/Autodesk unproportionally.
A little disappointed that this does not work. Surprising that it is shown in the videos and written training materials. Converting over from Inventor so I am reviewing the training materials to get up to speed, and the training is wrong.
@Anonymous - can you show us where the training material says that you can reference driven dimensions in an equation? If that is the case, then we need to update that training.
