construction plane perpendicular (normal) to axis

[mbostonsprint]

I did some searching for this topic, and found some mention of this from some time back, but nothing current. I would find it extremely useful to have the ability to create a construction plane that is normal to a construction axis, with a menu command. I find that I can create a point on a plane where a construction axis intersects, and that is very useful, but I would like the ability to create a work plane that is square to a construction axis, in the absence of other geometry to easily work from. In my case(s) of late, there is no orthogonal relationship to the origins of the rest of the design.

The default operation I think could be:

-select "Plane Perpendicular to Axis"

-pick the axis

-enter

and a work plane appears at the end of the axis closest to the selection point. A very useful extension would be to select a point on the axis at which the plane will be generated, but sometimes there is no point pre-existing, and I do not know of any ability to place a point on a construction axis in the absence of other geometry. That would also be highly useful, but requires another posting, I suspect.

[HughesTooling]

Really what's needed is the ability to use Plane Along Path and be able to select an Axis. I've done a screen cast with a workaround using Project Include 3d but using an axis would be better.

Mark

[roambotics_scott]

This one has bugged me for a long time. There are ways to get there with geometric construction, but that takes a bunch of extra steps and pollutes the Construction group with even more garbage.

Closely related but getting a plane normal to a surface at a point would also be useful.

[Anonymous]

This is one that I really miss from Inventor as well. Create Plane Normal to Axis At Point is the name of it there.

[promm]

@mbostonsprint,

Thank you for your idea, this is getting changed to future consideration.  There is a good amount of work a head of this project for priorities, but it is logged and I plan to have the team work on it when we get to plan path enhancements.

Regards,

Mike Prom

[chris]

plane normal to axis at point is needed

[DMCKINN2]

OP was nearly 2 years ago - It would be nice to see this recommendation implemented soon 🙂  Agree with @HughesTooling, selectable axes in  Plane Along Path would be the most obvious action. 

[roambotics_scott]

It's not just that this is 2 years old, but this is stupidly low hanging fruit that can be easily built and tested in short order and doing so would save huge amounts of time and annoyance.

I get that you have to triage, but Audotesk has resources to hire developers / interns, and there is a huge backlog of stuff like this that you could hand off to almost anyone.

[marc.a.grossman]

Look Autodesk fusion360 team, I love the product. There are a ton of us that love the product. I use it daily, and have only minor gripes/feature requests. I love the CAM. It's plenty full-featured for the average shop. I run my cnc lathe and cnc mill and couldn't do it without you for any reasonable price. In fact the only reason I ever decided to try fusion360 was that it came with a Lathe CAM package. I'm looking at getting a 4th axis for my mill because your CAM package supports it. I love the product and want it to succeed soooo bad.

However, I'm going to have to go back to SolidWorks for my startup (starting now) because I simply can't do a few basic things with fusion360. You've got to get frame generator (solidworks calls it weldments) going, better 3D sketches, and just as various users pointed out above some simple features that I would use on a daily basis to really simplify my life. How do we not have the option to create a plane perpendicular to a path at a point? That's insane, and it's fairly simple geometry. I just don't see how little things like that can be so low on the priority list whereas the iphone app is so high. How useful is the iphone app? Can I get a vote from other users? I have an iphone, and I find the app cool, but useless.

Honestly, this really pains me as I type this on my Mac. I hate Windows, but I'm going to have to go back because of SolidWorks. It's not that I'm some yuppy Mac guy either. If you offered fusion in linux too, I'd ditch windows and osx for Ubuntu where I spend the other half of my day programming.

[marc.a.grossman]

Oh, and another thing that I love about fusion360 is the fact that I can automate tasks in python. That is an incredible feature. I've built a timing belt pulley generator and it's amazing. Anytime I need a timing belt pulley, I just generate it and machine it or 3D print it depending on the mechanical needs. That type of ability will change CAD/CAM/Manufacturing in a way that solidworks won't. Again, though you've got to button up some loose ends before you put any more effort into the iphone app. Pull everyone off of that and get them on weldments (frame generator), improved 3D sketching, and a few more construction geometry options.

Just my $0.02

-Marc

[marc.a.grossman]

Oh, and this could be such an easy win because there are plenty of us that hate solidworks particularly because of their license subscription crap. First you buy it for $3000, then you pay $1500/year to get the updates. If you update but one of the shops you use doesn't you can't send them a native file. You have to send them drawings which suck up a ton of time making... and then you forget one dimension and have to send it over again. If you stop paying for the updates the software becomes more and more buggy and unusable as Windows makes updates. You guys get rid of all that and I love it. I just can't get my engineering team on board because of some basic missing functionality. 

[roambotics_scott]

@marc.a.grossman (and CC: @promm) what kills me about F350 is that it is so nearly great in so many ways, but it has these basic things that have clearly slipped through the cracks.

Weldments would be a major new feature so I get that they're not there (though they should be), but these basic geometric operations would be so easy (relatively speaking) to implement, and they would be used daily by a huge chunk of the user base.

It's maddening that F350 has so long lingered with incomplete features that never quite make it to production quality. Please please please do something about that !

[marc.a.grossman]

Hey A360 people, if you want to get in touch with me feel free to reach out. I think you all are doing a great job, but here are a few of my concerns, or course please correct me if I'm wrong.:

• You're not charging enough for the software to sustain and/or grow the feature set. This may not be quite true if you include the TeamHub feature which is costly, but quite necessary for an actual team that needs to collaborate on CAD/CAM and share tool libraries etc. I use it and think it's pretty **** good.
• If you're not getting enough income you'll be seen as a "drag" on the bottom line of Autodesk and ADSK will divert resources to other parts of the company that have good bottom lines.
• As the codebase grows just maintaining it gets harder and harder as the code "rots". It seems like feature improvements have stalled and more and more resources are dedicated to maintenance rather than improvements. This is a real bummer for all of us that took a bet on you and hoped that the features we really needed would be added by the time we actually needed them.
• I really don't think you're missing all that much feature-wise, however some of the things you are missing are really important and make the product unusable for a real business/startup:
  • improved 3D sketches
  • various construction geometry features such as the one mentioned in this forum
  • improved sheet metal (although even basic sheet metal is a hell of a good step)
  • improved weldments

I think the money is there to make these improvements happen, and you could get some of it from me. Here's why. I'm ordering a nearly $3000 laptop today to run SolidWorks because I had to in order to have weldments, and because my engineering team just couldn't put up with the lack of features in Fusion. I would happily have kept running on my Mac (or even better Linux box if that were available) if I could have. I would also have convinced my engineering team to do the same... I'm the boss after all. I had to make a ****ty decision and I literally just ordered from Newegg a Lenovo P51 with the Xeon CPU and Quadro GPU in order to run the only program I'm ever going to run in Windows (other than some Fusion here and there), and it's such a bummer.

Fusion team. Please keep up the good work... just accelerate it!

Here's my order confirmation (without personal info obviously)

my sales order (without my personal info obviously)

[Anonymous]

1) Create a plane using that axis at "Plane at an angle" function at 0 degree.

2) Sketch a line on this plane. The line should be perpendicular to  your axis.

3) Again create a plane through this new line using the "Plane at an angle" function. Set the angle to 0 degree or 90 degree, whichever seems right

[roambotics_scott]

Yeah you can do it by construction in a few annoying steps that will pollute your timeline and construction geometry / sketch groups, but why not do it programmatically ‽

[marc.a.grossman]

@Anonymous

What you've laid out is the three steps, 10 mouse clicks, and plenty of mouse movement that I'm asking ADSK to replace with ONE button!

I'm a huge advocate for Fusion360, but that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to criticize or suggest improvements.

-Marc

[Anonymous]

this problem was solved in 2019 fusion version ?

somebody can help me ?

[speedfreakgarage]

This problem STILL has not been solved... and yet they are starting to cancel our trial licenses and force us to pay?  This is a feature that every other program has; Inventor, Solidworks, Blender, etc...  Why is it so difficult to add this simple feature?

 - construction plane perpendicular to axis