Making the case for Fusion 360 parity with Speedform

[Anonymous]

This morning I browsed a few older posts and over the years there have been quite a few people asking for better T-Splines tools such as the ones already implemented in Speedform (same technology). the list is probably not complete but a good example.

-Straighten Vertices

-Reverse Normal

-Simplify

-Cut

-Lattice

-Edit by Curve

-Pull in 2D and 1D

Tools like this really allow you to define shapes more accurately with better control and faster. As such it would make the T-Spline environment much more useful in Fusion 360. I have a really hard time understanding the premium cost Speedform demands , currently roughly 5 times more expensive than Fusion.

At $2,400/year I don't believe a lot of people are adopting Speedform as their primary subD tool. It's simply not as good as dedicated poly modelers and more expensive. In addition, there's plenty of good alternatives, such as Maya/3DS Max/Modo/Blender and convert the OBJ to Nurbs using Fusion. The Maya/Fusion combo is roughly $2,000/year and offers way more functionality than Speedform alone at a lower cost. The Modo/Fusion combo is roughly $1,200/year and the Blender/Fusion combo is roughly $500/year. There's several examples on the forum of people using these workflows. The reason they use these workflows is to work around the limited T-Splines toolset in Fusion compared to other subd modelers.

In addition to this, the Fusion user base is much much larger than the Speedform user base and I believe the growth rate of Fusion is also much much larger than Speedform. The question is, how many additional people would adopt Fusion 360 if it had better subd tools? Well I don't have the answer to that, but I don't believe it's a stretch to think that the specific growth rate for Fusion 360/T-Splines modelers would be 5 times greater than the Speedform growth rate, thus generating more revenue for the same technology.

And you would make a lot of people happy including me

[bgulassa]

weighted edges would be fantastic in sculpt

[cekuhnen]

Speed form is for the car industry they operate at a different price point and also designers there are more trained in digital tools than the typical parametric modeler engineer you find with Fusion 360.

so thank the industries are quite different but agree without better tools in t-splines it will remain as it is seen in fusion right now.

[TrippyLighting]

@Anonymous I agree that it would indeed be very nice to get better T-Spline tools integrated into Fusion 360.

Unfortunately I don't see thin happening any time soon for two main reasons.

1. As @cekuhnen has already mentioned Speedform is a product used for concept modeling mostly for transportation design. The price tag is completely associated with what that industry is willing to pay for such a tool along with that the T-Spline tools in Speedform are developed to target those specific workflows.
2. Since a while Fusion 360 is aggressively targeting the mechanical design and machine design market. T-Spiens are not used in that area. We only get the occasional tool enhancement and bug fix if it is convenient enough for the development team and may to not appear stagnant.

The reason I mostly use Blender to get shapes close to the final form if not completely to the final form is because of the much better and much faster to operate modeling tools. The modifier stack has no equivalent in the T-Spline tools and is very powerful.

I believe there would be a number of tools, some of which you mentioned that would be generic enough not to interfere with Speedform that would really help in Fusion 360. E.g. snapping vertices and faces to other vertices and faces is very powerful in Blender and allows for quick and precise modeling.

[Anonymous]

@TrippyLighting @cekuhnen @bgulassa Thanks for pitching in guys, appreciate it.

While I understand that Speedform is targeted towards the automotive industry thus demanding a higher price, I still have a hard time understanding the value it offers @TrippyLighting you use Blender in combination with Fusion which provides you with powerful poly modeling and the conversion to Nurbs inside of Fusion. The same would be true for the other combinations I mention above, all of which are lower cost than standalone Speedform.

James Robbins has a video where he takes a car model from Modo and converts it to Nurbs to bring into Alias. Granted he is using Speedform, but he doesn't do any actual modeling inside of Speedform. All he does is recrease the edges before he converts it, and this operation can be done just as well inside of Fusion, which would be a cost of roughly $1,200/year. Same result as the Speedform/Modo combination, just $1,900 lower cost/year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUqW9g1JZm8&t=20s

With regards to targeting mechanical design and machine design and thus T-Splines not being used, I don't believe that's entirely true and I also believe this is changing at a rapid pace. One of my other posts mentions generative design and the need to be able to clean up and stylize the resulting T-Splines bodies. If we are going to use generative design effectively we need to be able to work on the resulting dense T-Splines bodies in efficient ways, thus requiring better tools such as the ones mentioned above.

It would be really great if we would get better T-Splines tools inside of Fusion and I believe it's important we continue to ask for it. If we don't ask for it Autodesk will simply not know that this is important to the users. Thanks guys.

[subversivespeed]

as an aside, one CAN do a perfectly acceptable t-spline car in Fusion360.. Only feature i want is Vertex straighten right now. 🙂 If I could get that, Fusion would be about near perfect as I could want..

[Anonymous]

@subversivespeed Yes I agree that you can make perfectly acceptable T-Spline models in Fusion 360 with the current toolset. The point I was trying to make is that adding improved tools to Fusion 360 will allow you to define shapes more accurately with better control and faster.

Work-arounds take unnecessary extra time and in some cases may not get you the effect you're looking for in an easy/predictable way. This is especially true if you're trying to edit a dense T-Splines mesh from generative design.