Hi,
I'm really enjoying Fusion 360 and I love the simplicity and speed of setting up a rendering scene.
Nevertheless there's one detail that needs a dramatic improvement in the way it is implemented in Fusion 360, the Decals.
Currently the Decals settings are very basic and I'm unable to set its material properties like I can with the regular materials in Fusion.
This limitations prevents me from, as an example, to set a decal as just a bump map that assumes the material properties of the shader that is already applied to the object with the goal to add a bump detail to a geometry such a logotype, a symbol or a small decoration.
Why do I need this?
I know that I can model the bump but, in an preliminary concept exploration phase, I often simulate the application of bumps just to check if they work, and in an ordinary project I can create dozens of variations of those bumps so imagine the time needed to model every single study.
Another example... imagine a plastic part that has a chemical grainy matte texture applied but that also has some precise localised decorations that are polished. In other 3D software I can either create a texture with a bump map that already sets the roughness of the surface or I can simply apply the hemical texture to the object and apply a decal on top that just has the polished decoration, allowing me to control it's properties (color, bump map height, size, surface finish and transparency mask) independently from the texture beneath.
Anyone familiar with other 3D software with integrated rendering engine, knows that this is a very basic feature that is extremely useful.
For your reference, I already tried to set up an existing texture map from Fusion's material library, that I duplicated and added the bump map with the size and proportion of the object that I want to apply the bump to but I found extremely hard and complicated to precisely align the texture map position and size with the geometry and even when I did that, when I started the raytracing rendering, the position of the texture map was different from the GPU vizualisation (maybe it's a bug?).
The goal of Fusion 360 is to provide the tools for both design and engineering development in an integrated 3D software, and in my personal opinion, Fusion is the first 3D software that I used that is effectively capable of doing that without anyone (designers and engineers) loosing their souls.
But you should understand that, in the concept exploration phase, not everything should/needs to be modeled and providing the right tools to support that also helps optimize the overall development time of a project.
I would love to ear the comments of other Fusion 360 users about this...
Best,
Carlos
