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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.
My god how is this still not possible like 5 years after being requested and with a ton of upvotes?!
Some calculations are REALLY hard or super long (especially given how small of a box F360 gives you to edit) and simply referencing a driven dimension would make things about a billion times easier.
It's very easy to understand once you realize that the F350 team's primary goal is to create bullet-point features for marketing material and once things have been completed enough to justify the bullet, everything else that goes into making the feature complete has exceedingly low priority and gets indefinitely delayed
The original sin occurred when they first blueprinted Fusion, fixing it now is a major pita akin to dropping LS engine inside a Toyota ie: how is it going to fit in the engine bay, how will I mate it to the transmission, etc... truly a major job. I'm still hopeful this feature will get implemented eventually however I might be forced to go back to Inventor (not that I dislike Inventor, I just like Fusion better!)
Well, I wish you all the best of luck with this and all the other common sense core functions that F360 is still missing after years of development. At this point I've gone back to Solidworks, just picked up a full seat and have to say, its so nice to have MCAD where everything actually works as is it supposed to. At the current price, I'm keeping my Fusion subscription for CAM and just in case AutoDesk actually fixes all the broken core stuff that should be in any modern MCAD package, but really not much incentive to go back after buying the Swerks seat.
Now I'm at a point where I can't go on without a reference to driven dimensions. And the problem isn't very difficult. It has to do with intersections of multiple circles, and as long as I can't reference driven dimensions or solve equations with multiple solutions and pick the one I need, I'm stuck.
What is the status of this request? As it was accepted several years ago and is, as for myself, the single biggest reason I'm not committing 100% to Fusion for my business. I believe that this is not only me who feel like this 🙂
@GlennFelthaus wrote: What is the status of this request? As it was accepted several years ago and is, as for myself, the single biggest reason I'm not committing 100% to Fusion for my business.
It hasn't been accepted. It's marked as Future Consideration, which means that the team might, at some undefined time in the distant future, when all other features have been implemented, consider tackling it. I'm glad we could have this little chat. 😁
Take a look - this thread was created in Oct 2015 and it is almost Oct 2019. After 4 years of "we are looking at it and may fix it at some point in the future" - there is still no fix and no solid commitment to fix, only "we are looking at it".
Sadly, if you dig through the Fusion360 forums, you will find issue after issue like this. Core areas that should have been fixed shortly after being reported, but instead, inexplicably, lag on for year after year in limbo.
It is for this exact reason that I've made the jump back to Solidworks. I use Fusion to maintain existing project data and for CAM. I do hope at some point AutoDesk can figure out that you don't succeed with a solution that has all the features you ever wanted (CAD, CAM, Analysis, FEA, etc) but all implemented at ~ 85% . . .
Yeah @CruftMeister I love so many things about F350 but this kind of thing is such a problem we finally had to give up and switch to SolidWorks for almost everything which was very painful because we're a Mac shop and between that and Altium we had to get some PCs.
This has 629 votes and is such a basic and obvious thing that it should have been on the roadmap almost immediately when driven dimensions and the constraint solver were conceived of.
My intern had to do some work in F350 a few weeks back and it almost immediately crashed multiple times. Just basic stability isn't even there and there are so many features that seem to have been roughed out and implemented just far enough to go into marketing material and wiz-bang demos but that last 10% is just somehow always elusive.
It's been such a bummer to see the promise of this program in the labs that someone with no CAD experience could pick up and model things in dashed on impact with reality. It's so long been so close to being so incredible, and it's definitely great for hobbyists and for CNC tool path generation, but for modeling and hard engineering, it's just unusable.
I really hope one day management will change and this will turn around.
Holy smokes, that was kinda my path too. I run MacOS as well and kicked the tires on Eagle as it had a nice integration w/ F360, but it was just too primitive compared to Altium. That begat the first Win10 box and after struggling with capturing a video to post to the F360 forum to do something pretty trivial - and thinking, why am I doing this again - I broke and called Hawk Ridge Systems and got a Solidworks quote and bought the seat.
Agree with all you've stated above. F360 has heck of a lot of promise, but not enough delivery to use where dollars are on the line.
I do hope they get it figured out someday, would love native CAD on the Mac that had all the bells and whistles, but also worked.
@CruftMeister@roambotics_scott I am not necessarily disagreeing with some of your arguments but comparing roughly $600 of annual subscriptions for Fusion 360 + Eagle with the $15000+ price points (notwithstanding staggering annual maintenance fees) of SolidWorks an particularly Altium seems to be anywhere between unreasonable and completely out of proportion.
@TrippyLighting that'd be fair except it's not $15k+ unless you get the fully maximal version with everything. They have a single seat annual license for free and the basic version of SW is in the low single digit k$ range per seat (and that's also about what we're paying for Eagle).
Both of those sound like a lot of money until you factor in an engineer's hourly rate and it doesn't take many passes of spending hours fighting with crashy software or dealing with endless issues with PCB manufacturers / assembly shops or injection molding companies to see how cheap SW and Altium actually are. Paying $520/yr for Eagle isn't a bargain vs even $10k when you need for things to work so you can get stuff done.
I've gone over this many times before and don't want to rehash it all yet again, but the thing about F350 and Eagle that really gets me is that they're trying to do so much and they're doing everything poorly. These are mature products yet basic stability still isn't there. Every new / cool feature that I've ever gotten excited about is still incomplete and buggy. The amount of extra work we had to do just to get drawings for sheet metal was shocking. In one rush job alone last year, SW would have paid for itself there.
I'm not asking F350 or Eagle to be SW or Altium (though with some effort, they could easily compete with both for most users) - I just want them to work reliably and not feel like they're held together with duct tape and bailing wire.
Indeed, Altium and Solidworks are at a different price point than Eagle and Fusion, even if you just look at ongoing maintenance they are both a good bit more. As roambotics_scott said, there are a number of use cases where F360 works as needed, but at the same time, for some of us, it does not. Were I doing this as a hobbyist or just to learn I might be OK with Fusion and the uncertain path of progress, but I need the tools to just work and Altium and Solidworks do that, today, now and it sounds like roambotics_scott is in the same boat. Anyway, I should probably just kill myself from the thread; my solution isn't helping other F360 users.
Likewise I don't think I'm adding anything here but I will just end with this - I have a lot of experience with software development. I get that it's hard, and I understand what is reasonable to expect from a product like this.
The things that I and others are complaining about / bothered by aren't «I wanna pony!» type stuff. It's more a matter of just (a) stability and (b) closing the loop on basic functionality that is already (more or less) there. I'm not asking for magical multi physics simulation that just works for every Reynolds number and accurately predicts things from the quantum to macroscopic scale. I'm asking for software that doesn't reliably crash after just a bit of serious use.
These are just such chronic problems and they're things that are fixable and should / would already be long-since fixed. That's what is and has been so frustrating to me. I like the program. I want to use it. I've spent and arguably wasted hundreds of hours of my own time and my employees' time trying to make it work for us.
I get that maybe it looks like I'm just complaining for the sake of complaining but literally all it'd take is the right bit of concerted effort over a few quarters to take these programs from where they are to things that could reasonably be used in production environments (and they'd be much less painful for hobbyists and startups that can't afford or don't want to use SW and similar).
That's been the case for years and it pains me to see and fully expect that it is almost certainly going to continue to be the case into the foreseeable future.
Fusion 360 simply does not fulfill your requirements and while the concepts are great, it still will have a lot of implementation hurdles to overcome to get to the level of maturity more established players already are.
I don't see that as a bad thing if you need to make the decision to go back to SW and Altium. I also work with other software (ZW3D) because it allows me to easily do things that are very difficult to do in Fusion 360.
I have accepted (well .. only to a degree) that it will take Fusion 360 many more years to "get there".
It’s not that it «doesn’t fulfill my requirements».
It’s that it is fundamentally broken.
«not crashing if we use it for anything nontrivial unless we intentionally avoid tripwires» isn’t a stringent requirement, it’s a basic expectation for mature, commercial software.
I get that you like it and the team and want to defend them, but you’re not helping them, you’re enabled and keeping this product from fulfilling its promise.
