Fusion 360 needs a CV curve for designers - seriously!

[cekuhnen]

Just a reminder to an old suggestion that Fusion 360 sketch really needs a CV curve so designers have better control

over the curves they create.

Splines are great as two point curves to create G1 or G2 blend curves but for sculpting smooth profiles it is a less

effective and efficient tool.

What is a click click done in Alias or Rhino is a painful adjust here adjust there adjust here adjust there and it still does not low well.

Here is a screencast showing how different the two curve tools work:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byzv_NlyKp_2alRoREhjVmJab0U/view

In Fusion 360 the splines are really great to be used as blend curves but for sculpting as shown in the video they are really hard to manage.

[cekuhnen]

@promm do you have any eta? As stated also by others the spline tool is not very ideal for all modelin sketching needed.

[scott.mayson]

@promm If this tool is in "speed form" already it should not be hard for the team to implement CV's in to F360? Or am I not understanding the implementation process correctly?

Regards

Scott

[cekuhnen]

@scott.mayson the team that works on speed flow is different. Also speed flow has no sketch solver to deal with like fusion. But never the less inventor has cv curves.

[21652157]

Good news about state future  consideration. 

[Anonymous]

My own poster about the same

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/ideastation-request-a-feature-or/nurbs-cv-curves-3d-curves/idi-p/5852...

"

By: colin.smith

| Posted ‎01-19-2016 10:48 AM

Idea Options

Status changed to: Accepted

This should be in Fusion in the early half of this year.

"

Come on Fusion !!!

[Anonymous]

This should be in Fusion in the early half of this year.

[21652157]

Good news that this idea is accepted now 

[roambotics_scott]

Whether we're working with cubic splines, NURBS, or any other parameterisation, it'd be great to have a solver that lets the user constrain or grab handles on the curvature graph or the curve and directly manipulate those (with the solver doing the work of determining what the best choice of parameters is) 

[Anonymous]

I love the underlying architecture of Fusion 360, but I cannot recommend it my students and my school because if missing some very basic features that not hi-end CAD software should exclude.

It's been a tradition in industrial design and automobile design to base most of your surface design off of Control Vertex splines.  Fusion 360 only gives the option of using Bezier curves, which are really, really difficult to work with in 3D design.  I've been using Alias, Maya since the 90's, and Inventor for a couple of years.  I'm shocked that Fusion up to this date does not have a serious set of surfacing tools.

If the Fusion 360 development team would include an industrial or automobile designer onboard, this is probably the first feature they would suggest.

This is the future of 3D CAD, but it's embarrassing that CV Splines are not included from version 1.  

Please look at the history of NURBS and you'll see how CV curves are the foundation of modern surface design.

[cekuhnen]

@Anonymous

They are actually working on the next set of sketch and surfacing improvements.

Compared to Maya or Alias Fusion offers a lot both are quite terrible at - so it is a give and take at the moment.

But you can always at the moment pair Fusion with Alias created NURBS geometry (lets ignore Maya here as it has rather weak modeling tools for NURBS).

This would be a pretty cool and productive combo:

Class A surfacing with Alias

Solid Modeling of B surfaces with Fusion.

[Anonymous]

I'm glad to know that a CV based spline tool is coming to Fusion 360.  At the moment, I'm using Inventor for most low-scale work.

I wish that Fusion 360 implements a tool shelf (ribbon if you wish) feature, ideally customizable like in Maya.  I work faster in Inventor than I work in Fusion 360.  In Fusion it takes two clicks and some waiting to access the tools, while in Inventor and Maya I get direct access to the tools.  If the menu-based interface will be the only choice, then I wish most common tools get a single-key shortcut.

When Maya came out in the 90's, it really disrupted the whole 3D industry at the time with a flexible and customizable user interface.  You simply could not talk about interface design without using Maya as an example.  I think Fusion 360 is at the same place in our time, but they need to allow the end user to work faster by allowing more customization to the UI.

Maya has a much more robust spline-based toolset than both Fusion 360 and Inventor, as shown in the attached image.  But Maya has been around for more than two decades now, so it's not fair to compare.  Also, Maya's spline tools were derived straight from Alias when it was conceived since they were splitting Alias into a design-only software (no Anim, FX, etc.)

In the end, I really hope the developers of Fusion 360 take spline-based tools more seriously, particularly since they're trying to attract SolidWorks users.

[cekuhnen]

@Anonymous

Yeah the challenge is not to just add a 3d Curve but a tool that can be dimensioned and that for a parametric workflow.

Maya/Alias use a different design history approach than Fusion 360. Apps like Fusion have a sketch solver which

is why it is so important sometimes to fully constrain a sketch unlike in Alias/Maya you do not need to constrain

because there is nothing that can change/influence a sketch.

Also a lot of surface or curve tasks in Maya Alias can quickly also break the construction history.

[anton.kuptsovEJSSW]

Hi, this CV topic has been around for years – first feature requests are dated 2015. I don't know how Fusion team sets priorities, one might say that your user-base is growing no matter CV curves. And it is simply because humans can get used to anything.  Professional users use software to get the job done, even it's painful sometimes.

Absence of CV is not a show-stopper, but rather an incremental improvement like (from 1.0 to 1.3). So you may say, okay, let's instead add sheet metal (from 0 to 1). I use Piter Thiel framework here.

But how about trying to measure how painful it is to design curves via arcs or crippled splines? This just sets Fusion back as a hobby-software in the area of designing complex shapes. Far behind Rhino, where I originally came from... and have to go back from time to time. 

This not makes me lock into Fusion as one-stop-shop. I guess there are thousands of "floating" users in your user-base. "Floating" means they are considering other alternative software. If Fusion shuts-down, they will continue doing their thing. If fusion changes payments plan, they will consider other software. They are with you now, but they are not yours really.

Beucase of these tiny things. CV is one of them. Having CV implemented will make me yours 100% - a loyal user, the one who actively recomments Fusion across his network. Believe me - this is the kind of user you want.

Please let me know your thought on this.

[roambotics_scott]

CV curves aren’t a big thing for me but on the subject of floating‥

At this point there are only two reasons why I haven’t jumped ship.

1) history / the fallacy of sunk costs. I’m relatively comfortable with F350 (getting things done using it, not the instability and incompleteness of features)

2) it’s still by far the best native option I know of for macOS

I actually use sheet metal a bit but it pains me and doesn’t inspire loyalty to see outstanding issues in basic features and functionality go unaddressed for years.

Things like CV curves may be incremental not 0-to-1 type things, but they represent a much smaller investment in developed time than new features and still they’re so de-prioritized that they linger forever despite being wildly useful to the people who want / need them.

I don’t even complain about instability anymore most of the time I’ve gotten so used to it, but that’s still a huge lingering issue and the strategy still seems to be whack-a-mole rather than doing the short-term hard work of re-architecting.

When you submit at times dozens of crash reports in a day, are told it’s because you’re running a late β of macOS, and then nothing improves after the GM and production release, it doesn’t suggest the slightest bit of genuine care or effort.

My crashes have decreased recently but only because I released designs for a big project to manufacturing and I’m not using F350 as much. Per minute of use they seem every bit as frequent as they were a week ago.

I feel like I’m just screaming into the ether here but please honor your users who have invested many years with you. Take a break to make the program whole. Have developers not Phil deal with crash reports so they’re motivated to untangle their messes. Stop focusing so much on new features until you’ve done the last 20% of work on existing ones.

Not to get on a rant here but drawings is still incomplete and painful to use. Sketch is too and that’s been there from the beginning. There is no reason to believe that sheet metal will ever get near 100% despite it being the new hotness until the next major incomplete feature comes in

I know it’s boring and hard work and it sucks, but make the leap from F350 to F360. Stop trying to send your baby off to college when you’ve somehow kept it in the womb until near-adolescence.

[cekuhnen]

@roambotics_scott @anton.kuptsovEJSSW

I think the main reason for the absence of CV is the terrible state the sketch engine is in which needs to be fixed first.

Currently in my Furniture Design course Fusion performs very well but that is also because the designs are pretty basic

nothing advanced or curved - everything is made out of blocks (extrusion).

For product design this semester I went back to Alias and Blender after the disaster of the sketch engine bugs last 2 semesters.

We will use Fusion to make the solid design adding it to the imported surface models only.

[roambotics_scott]

I just noticed @colin.smith's post from January 2016 saying «This should be in Fusion in the early half of this year.»

If I was on the F350 team, I'd be very concerned seeing someone like @cekuhnen leaving it for product design classes. You can dismiss people like me as simply being whiny*, but someone like him having to drop it should scream to you that there are very big / existential problems not far under the surface

I ask for this a lot but please freeze development and put 100% of your resources into fixing these things (and by that I mean really fixing them, not just adding more spaghetti, duct tape, and bailing wire).

Re-architect the sketch engine. Make sketch features not sketches timeline features. Add real symmetry, patterning, and constraints. Make the program stable and reliable.

Take that seriously, fix things, and then regroup and start adding new features on top of a much better foundation. What you're doing now isn't working. You can coast for a long time, but if you don't fix the fundamental issues, someday somebody is going to build something better and people will abandon the ship en masse.

*though I'd claim to be more of a canary letting you know of issues early

[cekuhnen]

@roambotics_scott

Well to be fair AD does not force me to use it.

I am also not interested in SolidWorks as it is PC only and they do not offer a good support for students like Fusion does.

SolidThinking I could get for free for the school and while it offers pretty decent surfacing and a perfect render module what I like about Fusion are the solid tools.

True in that regards we could also use onShape for the solid modeling part but I feel Fusion in that area is more competitive.

We also at Wayne have a specific mission to help and empower those who are less fortunate and with Autodesk's generous Fusion 360 licence that was also a no brainer to start with.

After my years in the forum and providing input what I as a professional and teacher think a modern design tool needs I feel

there is nothing left for me to add. In many areas Fusion does deliver to a level that is satisfying.

In the end this is only my opinion but I know talking to basically every other designer in the Detroit metro area they think the same.

When Fusion is used then only as a cheap replacement for SW to make quick mock-ups which then engineering will rework in SW.

For me that is not a really desirable outcome and I know for a fact that most who do not use Fusion 360 for industrial design do that

because of the obvious and known short comings. Actually the cloud is the least mentioned problem.

So with the new leadership for Fusion and mentioned new focus and increased resources for bug fixing we will see if

in 3 to 5 years they will be able to achieve what they envision. Maybe then all their construction sides will achieve a level of completion that

will make Fusion look like a mature application.

In the meantime I simply go back to using tools in a way where I know that exercises and demos will work.

Last semester literally in each student exercise I found bugs in the software and gave up reporting them because of the amount of time that this sucks away.

In the end it is their product which is why I have no hard feelings.

So it is wait time - soft dev also takes time.

[roambotics_scott]

Definitely agreed it takes time @cekuhnen, I just worry that a lot of time has passed already and there is little sign of things heading in the right direction

They shouldn't have to force you to use it. You should want to 🙂

Haven't tried it in awhile, but onShape definitely doesn't do it for me.

For me the thing is that F350 is sooo close to being great. It's Mac native and already in many ways better than SW and other more expensive competitors. It's just that last 5-10% of everything not being done while new things come up regularly that really irks me.

Just for the record (re: cloud) I've spoken about it because the dependence seems like an unnecessary design choice and it bothers people. Personally (if it was built right) I have no objection to cloud backing, in principle (though I do want it to be closer to local editor + Github + enhancements with offloading compute to the cloud for things like simulation than putting the network in the critical path and having lots of things break down with a slow or unreliable connection for no good reason)

[cekuhnen]

@roambotics_scott

Hand's down sketch drawing and sheet metal in onShape when they released it worked well.

But onShape also lacks tools and it is a repetition of SW. Amazing that it runs in the cloud

but everything else are external 3rd party apps that have to be installed.

They have something like T-Splines but it is hardly implemented as well as TS in Fusion.

Most I know that use onShape actually are more mechanical engineering orientated and less design.

For them I would say it works well as it fits their needs. But the CEO of onShape himself states that

it is NOT for designers.

I share your concern that with Fusion what we saw over the past years was just adding modules

generating a very big construction side that know shows the initial issues of the rapid development.

We will see how and when they can adjust that.

[Anonymous]

This is an example of how Fusion seems to be a product developed by engineers for engineers. It's like they looked at industrial designers and said "they draw things so we'll give them crayons"

Good curves are the root of good form and good curves cannot currently be made in Fusion. What follows then, is neither can good form.

I know this is on the radar and is being worked on, but it's really important to many of us and it's a major oversight.

I still use Fusion a lot, but often it's to sew up my Alias models or to make models which I will then modify in Alias.

To be fair, that is awesome because I then get the strengths of both.

When I use Alias and Fusion together, I get a really powerful toolset. At this point I would give up neither.

I think Autodesk would be well served to be rid of the fiefdoms of individual apps and recognize the power of integrating the strengths of the community of apps they have.