Exporting Fusion models to Blender: what's the simplest way of doing this?

[louisS3LYW]

I have a client who wants to export a Fusion design to Blender, which he believes will give him better visualisation. Putting on one side whether he's right on this, is there any one hop route to achieve this?

[TrippyLighting · Accepted solution]

I've only tried .stl directly through Fusion 360 and .obj through the web interface.

Both do not maintain the object/body/component structure and mangle everything in a design into one mesh.

.fbx through the web interface take a few minutes, but it maintains the object structure and brings over a material of sorts from Fusion 360.

That is indeed very nice!

Just to be clear in case you are not aware of it. All of the above are triangulated meshes and am not sure how to control the resolution of that mesh when exporting into .fbx.

@jeff_strater is that something you can help answer?

Edit: If your client is familiar with the render engines (Eevee and Cycles) in Blender, he's definitely correct! That does not at all mean the render results from Fusion 360 are bad and there is definitely the advantage of a fully integrated render engine, but for specific needs, there are better tools available.

For example if you want to do an interactive presentation in real-time raytraced quality, Blender's Eevee render engine is a phenomenal tool.

[LeonardoBN · Accepted solution]

As @TrippyLighting mentioned, I don't think we have a native way to control the FBX quality. I know there are some add-ins that promise this feature, but I've never used them.

FBX Converter for Autodesk® Fusion 360™ 

FBX Exporter for Autodesk® Fusion 360™ - Trial 

[jeff_strater · Accepted solution]

@LeonardoBN is correct - there is no way today to control the resolution of an FBX export, because it is a cloud-only translator, and there is simply no UI to set the resolution.  We're working to solve that problem, but it will be a while, I'm afraid.

[louisS3LYW]

Many thanks for these replies. Obviously, it would be great if the problems could be overcome.