Face offset and the ghost offset of past edits

[ltomuta]

Today I though I'm going mad as I could not figure out why a simple face offset by -.01mm command was moving it 0.01mm in the opposite direction. It took me a while to figure out it in fact adds to the previous offset I had used a few hours back to push/pull the same face.

This is bad bad BAD! The UI does not help to flag the odd behavior and there is no common sense for it. The offset type field has no help/hint associated with it and if setting it to New offset is what it takes to always start from current position then there is no way to make this default.

[DarthBane55]

Do you mean "press pull"?  Cause offset face goes in the history tree at the bottom, and there is an arrow that points in what direction it was done.  However, "press pull" does not go in the history at bottom (why!??, it's a modification, it should definitely be tracked in the history!!), and that one has this "new offset" thing you described.  "Press pull" can be very frustrating.

[ltomuta]

Yes, that press pull (Q shortcut), indeed. For it only acts as a "smart" filter and ends up doing an offset face if I select a face. It does give me an indicator arrow, which I pull in order to figure out whether the offset should be positive or negative but then I had no idea that I should account for some offset I used there in the past so the results were puzzling.

It does generate a breadcrumb in the timeline but I had no interest in it since in my mind I was just pushing a wall 0.1mm in one direction from where it was now. I had no reason to suspect I should care about how that surface got there to begin with nor do I think someone should ever care about that when doing a press pull. If I want to move it somewhere relative to some initial position then and only then I would look for and edit that original change in history and edit it.

The UX is broken yet again in Fusion.

[ltomuta]

OMG! There are two offset face commands.

Go home Fusion, you're drunk!

[DarthBane55]

Oh I see the "press pull" 1st shows "press pull" as the window title, but when you click a face it changes to "offset" lol

Try using the actual "offset face" function instead of "press pull", that might work better, as it gets into the history tree.  

Also, there actually is a 3rd method to do the same, with "move/copy" and selecting "face" as the option...  

 

[TrippyLighting]

The offset face command was added because too many users got confused. It seems you still are confused 😉

The offset face command accessible separately through the menu creates an offset face feature in the timeline.

The Press/Pull command is a meta-command with three options. It usually defaults to "Automatic". In that mode, Fusion 360 tries to determine if the original feature can be modified and if it can, the offset command will change the value of the original feature. For example, if you create a cube with 10mm in all dimensions and then use the press/pull command on the top face either with the "Automatic" or "Modify existing feature" option enabled, and pull 2mm you'll see that the original extrusion for the cube is now 12mm.

Only if you use "New Offset" will you get an additional feature in the timeline?

That invokes the same tool as the separate Offset face command.

Nothing wrong with the tool. It's more a PEBKAC thing 😉

[DarthBane55]

Thanks for the clarification, it is not exactly obvious when using it.  Good to know the difference, thanks again!

[ltomuta]

I agree, the problem is between chair and computer but both those things
belong to Autodesk. And some times to people who have spent too much time
with Fusion and now consider its oddities "normal".

Press pull is supposed to route you to the best command suitable for your
selection but should that command be an extrude the expectation is that it
is "the extrude" and not some weird flavor of "extrude".

I've seen old post where people were asking for a menu entry point for
offset face. Never ever was there a discussion that doing so should create
a new offset face command with different parameters and different
behaviour. Furthermore, the call was to bring to light this previously
hidden feature, which should also mean to document it, explain what the
offset type is for and make its behaviour consistent.

It makes absolutely no sense to create an offset based on a previously used
offset, one that you may not remember the value off, nor even remember ever
using it. Should there ever be cases where that is needed one should be
able to opt-in for that and then the UI should help by providing hints such
as offset chain history and/or refernce baseline.

As it is now Fusion pretends to be able to "automatically" determine
whether I do remember that I used an offset on that face before and what
its value was, 5 offsets ago. And even after I set an offset and then undo
it and try again and again for 100 times Fusion still thinks I want to use
that old index somehow.

[ltomuta]

Open an offset face operation from the timeline. It shows where the face is and what offset was applied. And because I explicitly opened the item from history, I know what that means. Do I need a "offset type" field there? Why [not]?

Now do a press pull on the same face. What hints do I have that this is a "history edit"?  Three apostrophes above an item in the timeline, tiny and in an area I have no reason to look at.

Is the undocumented offset type field supposed to be the "hint"?