Sidetrack from An honest plea

yoshimitsuspeed · ‎11-22-2015

This is in response to Oceanconcepts replies below from the other drawings discussion. I felt i wanted to make my own point without continuing to sidetrack the other thread. My main argument is not that drawings or other areas have developed too slowly but that the rate of growth has ongoingly been very misrepresented.

Oceanconcepts wrote:

I started working on my first tasks in Project Forge, one of Fusion’s predecessors, a little over three years ago, and I’ve been closely involved as a user ever since. Maybe I can offer another perspective.

First, while there are plenty of new Autodesk employees that appear here on the forum, many (most) of those responding have been active for years, and several regular Autodesk contributors you see here are working directly in leading and developing the program- including, not that infrequently, program managers. It’s clear to me that Autodesk, at least for Fusion, places a very high priority on listening to users. Because I’m located nearby, and I’ve been active, I’ve gotten to know a number of those working on Fusion. Visions of a corporate behemoth driving communications- and at odds with or disconnected from development- are I think far from reality. It seems to me to be a tight group of dedicated individuals, with a larger system of corporate support.

Autodesk, with Fusion, is not just repackaging already existing CAD capability into another marketing container- it’s a fundamentally different architecture, and they have a very long term- 20 year- vision that includes things like generative design and fully integrating manufacturing processes. That means that to some extent this package needs to be built on a new foundation. This is a much bigger task than just producing a somewhat enhanced CAD system, an “Inventor in the Cloud”. This kind of stuff is hard, and there is always a tension between rapidly adding features and the risk of breaking functions for some users or losing reliability. My background may well give me a different perspective, but I’m in awe of what has been done in a short time.

I’d ask: How many competitive programs there are that run natively on both Windows and OS X and offer

3D solid modeling

Both Parametric and direct modeling

Distributed (cloud) processing for tasks like file translations

Joints, assembly simulation and animation

Drawings

Surfacing tools

T-splines sculpting environment

Integrated simulation- with distributed processing

Integrated rendering- with distributed processing

Integrated CAM

a decent user interface

in one package, for free or low cost?

In some of those areas- particularly drawings, surfacing, and as I understand, CAM (I’m not a user of that function) some basic capabilities are missing or lagging, and that may be a limitation for for some users. But this is a very new, and rapidly developing, application.

Maybe because I work with developers (and experience some of this in my own work) I somewhat understand how many variables there are, and how complex their interrelationships. Fusion is charting some new territory, you don’t know what you are going to run into- it’s not cooking from recipe book. I don’t expect any timelines generated 6-12 months in advance to be much more than aspirational- and with that standard, Fusion has done pretty well. There have been a few times when promised features were pulled from an update at the last minute due to reliability problems. I’m sure the Fusion team would love to provide more accurate timelines- I’m also sure that any failure to do so is more due to difficulty in the work than to any pressure from marketing.

I’m disappointed in the current state of the drawings module as well, and second the specific suggestions in the original post. But as to the overall level of communication and support I see on this forum- well, if we had 5% of that level of support in our electronics software and IDE’s our life would be much easier.

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One of the first drawing discussions I was involved in over a year ago.
http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/ideastation-request-a-feature-or/annotate-drawings-to-the-asme-standar...

By:

TimeraAutodesk | Posted ‎01-27-2015 04:53 PM

Status changed to: Accepted

Thanks for the feedback. To reiterate the other threads concerning drawings, we do have a large team that is dedicated to bring the drawings workspace of Fusion 360 up to par with the community's requests as fast as possible.

-Timera

Permalink
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Now although the wording in that thread by AD employees is left very intentionally vague it would have been nice to know at that point that we might be looking at a couple years before we had "On par" drawing capability.
When someone uses words like "as fast as possible" " We will be working aggressively to get these added into the software" ones mind does not automatically jump to assuming a 2 year wait.

The next thread I could find.

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/design-validate-document/drawing-changes-in-next-update/m-p/5477769#M5...

Re: Drawing changes in next update?
Options

01-21-2015 03:19 PM in reply to: yoshimitsuspeed
Hi, thanks for your note.

I'm sorry to hear features you were looking for didn't make it into the last update. We, also, wish we could fit more into each update, I assure you. On the plus side we are targeting an 8 week release cycle so improvements and additions to the product are always just around the corner.

Currently we're working on adding Parts list and ballooning tools as well as detail views; these are coming along well and will be pushed out in coming releases when they are ready.

Would you mind going into more detail about what features you feel you are missing from drawings - as well as how you feel these missing features are impacting your work?

Thanks so much and I look forward to hearing more.

Best,
Scott

Granted Scott did not say just what improvements would be right around the corner but when you use wording like this you expect noteworthy improvements right around the corner and complete solutions within a reasonable amount of time. Again reasonable is relative but I still feel like the wording massively oversells the actual timeline and reality.
Just a little humility, honesty or concervative claims. Some sort of warning that "This might take a while". "You may not have everything you need or expect for a couple years".

Don't get me wrong, I am stoked to see the improvements that were made in the last update but with all the hype words used above, promises of exciting new features in the next update and many many more situations not refrenced and without any definitive timeframe put on much of anything this is where I expected F360 would have been 6-9 months ago.

As far as that goes it doesn't matter much now but if I could make a suggestion for the future it would be to try to use terms that give more realistic expectations and are less open to interpretation.
"We are working on this and hope to have some things implimented soon but this area may not have big improvements for 4-6 months and may not have full functionality for a year or two".

I would also suggest more detailed descriptions when taking about the roadmap or generally discussing what will be available in the next couple updates. For example saying that dimensioning and tolerancing will be added in the next update might make someone think that they would see full GD&T that update especially when it's paired with constant promises of it being a top priority under urgent development.

Try to sell the software you have, not the software you hope to have in a couple years.
You might end up with happier customers.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1229995573786339/

michallach81 · ‎11-23-2015

How about a scenario where I would like to see advanced surfacing before any improvements in drawings? Dose it change anything? Why should I wait?
I think Fusion team is trying to balance whole development, especially that IdeaStation don't get enough votes to be considered a reliable measure.
Posts like @O.Tan have wrote is perfect example how "Ideas" should be written. We should respect other users needs and try convince them to our ideas.
How users like I, should react on posts like this? Shout louder?

I don't want to sound pathetic, we just need to be specific, if we have a problem of any nature, we need to name it properly. That will give others a chance to provide solution.
One good thing at the end, is that you have created new thread and didn't spammed original one.

Michał Lach
Designer
co-author
projektowanieproduktow.wordpress.com

brianrepp · ‎11-23-2015

@yoshimitsuspeed Appreciate you making this thread as it helps us understand specifically what the root of your frustrations are, and the points you make are fair. I'll take the action to make sure we as a team are providing as many details as possible, whenever possible, but also be realistic about our longer lead projects to ensure we're not improperly setting expectations or leaving things open to interpretation. It's a community of engineers, we want specifics, right?! At the end of the day, our goal is to be as transparent as possible while building Fusion 360.

As @promm called out in the other thread, we don't set out with the intention of projects taking longer than expected, but the reality is we don't know some of the intricacies and dependencies until we get into them. While we're aggressively working to add functionality, improve usability and workflows, we're also heavily invested in making a performant, reliable and sustainable back-end, and we ultimately want to make sure we get things right (for the immediate, but also for the impacts it may have on future projects) before we release.

In our next roadmap update you will see more details on the near-term items, and for longer-term, what our current thinking is with realistic expectations.

jeff_strater · ‎11-23-2015

I'd like to chime in on this thread, from the point of view of the software development team.

While I’m not working on the drawings capability, I have been directly involved in other projects where the time to delivery was not what we originally hoped for, so perhaps I can shed some light on the process that we go through. One example was the “distributed design” feature (the ability to associatively insert other designs into the current design). This feature was highly requested by the Fusion community. When the dev team was asked to estimate how long it would take to implement, we came up with an estimate based on our knowledge of the requirements at the time. I can’t remember exact dates, but I think it was in the vicinity of May 2015. However, as we started the project, we realized that we had simply underestimated the amount of work that was needed. In Fusion’s cloud-centric world, managing references to external designs is more complex that just managing pathnames to files on a local disk. So, we had underestimated the amount of data management/data panel/A360 work that was needed. Same thing on the modeling side. Implementing the ability to choose what version of a referenced design is used caused more complexity in resolving geometry references than we first thought. And so on. So, it took us until the July update to get it to a level where we were comfortable with releasing it. There was no attempt to deceive our customers. We really thought we could deliver it in May. But, we were wrong. We do sometimes tend to be overly optimistic in our estimation. I like to think of this as flowing from our basic desire to get working solutions to real customer problems out as soon as we can. We, of course, strive to get better, but I think these are really just honest underestimations, not anything darker.

Jeff Strater (Fusion development)

Jeff Strater
Engineering Director

yoshimitsuspeed · ‎11-23-2015

@michallach81 wrote:
How about a scenario where I would like to see advanced surfacing before any improvements in drawings? Dose it change anything? Why should I wait?

Like many others you fail to get the point.
The point is that a year ago it would have been very useful to know it might be a couple years before drawings had anywhere near full functionality.
I might have found another CAD program. Or I might have found another way to streamline the process. Not that there really is any streamlined way to do modeling in one program and drawings in another. You make one change and you have to redo frikken everything. It's a nightmare but something that I have been willing to suffer through because I strongly feel like the impression was given that advanced level drawing capability was a couple months away, then a couple more, then a couple more, then a couple more.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1229995573786339/

yoshimitsuspeed · ‎11-23-2015

@brianrepp wrote:
@yoshimitsuspeed Appreciate you making this thread as it helps us understand specifically what the root of your frustrations are, and the points you make are fair. I'll take the action to make sure we as a team are providing as many details as possible, whenever possible, but also be realistic about our longer lead projects to ensure we're not improperly setting expectations or leaving things open to interpretation. It's a community of engineers, we want specifics, right?! At the end of the day, our goal is to be as transparent as possible while building Fusion 360.

Maybe it's just me or a select few but I feel like this could be done better.
I see two sides. There is the initial response which to me comes across as overly enthusiastic and overpromising. Perhaps that is only after feeling let down from the second part so many times.
After that "We really care what everyone has so say and really want every individuals input on everything" response and you try to address a situation you either get no response at all or "Sorry that just doesn't fit into our plans at this time", or at the very best "We are working on getting this resolved as quick as we can". The latter would be cool if it seemed at all timely. I use terms like that when I am going to get something shipped next week not when something is 4 to 12 months out. Even then I try to give an ETA and if it's something I'm not sure about I'll say that too.
When you first get that Frasier style "I'm listeneng" and really care about what you have to say and then you report a bug that seems like it should be top priority in the idea station and it gets archaived because there aren't enough votes that is absolutely rediculous.
The idea station it's self is complete BS and I have brough this up many times. If one paying professional CAD user makes a suggestion that is very important to a quality CAD program it may not get a lot of votes because CAD users who need that capability aren't using F360.
But then if some new CAD user on the trial thinks that the navigation is too confusing or professional CAD features are too complicated all of a sudden 10 other free new CAD users might vote on it and all of a sudden the priority is placed on dumbing down the program to a market that a. doesn't make F360 any money and b. takes the focus away from real CAD users who could actually help the software to grow.
Not to say there aren't a lot of great ideas in the idea station but there are a lot of crappy ones and the way it's implimented there is no good way of differentiating them.
I have stopped using the idea station because I have lost all faith in it.
Before that I started only voting on the things I thought were really important to me because again since there is no way of prioritizing importance I can vote for one thing because it would be kind of nice at some point and I could vote for another thing that I need urgently and they both count as one vote. The worst part is that more people might click on the thing that wold be kind of nice because more people might think it wold be kind of nice wheras the other thing is extremely urgent to a much smaller group of people.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1229995573786339/

yoshimitsuspeed · ‎11-23-2015

@jeff_strater wrote:
I'd like to chime in on this thread, from the point of view of the software development team.

While I’m not working on the drawings capability, I have been directly involved in other projects where the time to delivery was not what we originally hoped for, so perhaps I can shed some light on the process that we go through. One example was the “distributed design” feature (the ability to associatively insert other designs into the current design). This feature was highly requested by the Fusion community. When the dev team was asked to estimate how long it would take to implement, we came up with an estimate based on our knowledge of the requirements at the time. I can’t remember exact dates, but I think it was in the vicinity of May 2015. However, as we started the project, we realized that we had simply underestimated the amount of work that was needed. In Fusion’s cloud-centric world, managing references to external designs is more complex that just managing pathnames to files on a local disk. So, we had underestimated the amount of data management/data panel/A360 work that was needed. Same thing on the modeling side. Implementing the ability to choose what version of a referenced design is used caused more complexity in resolving geometry references than we first thought. And so on. So, it took us until the July update to get it to a level where we were comfortable with releasing it. There was no attempt to deceive our customers. We really thought we could deliver it in May. But, we were wrong. We do sometimes tend to be overly optimistic in our estimation. I like to think of this as flowing from our basic desire to get working solutions to real customer problems out as soon as we can. We, of course, strive to get better, but I think these are really just honest underestimations, not anything darker.

Jeff Strater (Fusion development)

I totally understand botching a delivery date by a little bit.
I think for me the main issue is how things have been portrayed here on the forums and elsewhere. And it's hard to find posts where AD employees give actual dates on the things I am talking about. For me two months late would be nothing. One year ago I honestly was under the impression that pretty much where the drawings module is after this update would happen within the next couple updates. Or about 8-9 months ago. Had it happened even 6 months ago I wouldn't have been that frustrated. And again a lot of this may come down to inerpretation. When professional CAD users are saying, we need this functionality yesterday and this CAD program is not working for me without it and AD developers come back saying they are making it top priority, working on getting stuff out as fast as they can and that we should be excited to see what comes on in the next couple updates you don't expect 6 updates and 10 months later see maybe 2/3s of what you were hoping for originally.

It would also be cool if this information were more readily available. I'm talking about honest open dev talk. Not "We are urgently working on this as fast as we can" but instead like "**** this project has turned out to be a much bigger PITA than we expected. I know we were hoping to have this out in may but it might still be a couple months. I know your marketing dept would have a fit because they want everything all polished and hyped to the max but that doesn't interest people like me. In fact I flat out hate it.
That's actually why I subscribed to the F360 facebook page. I hoped there would be useful updates and important imformation but instead I am bombarded with marketing adds telling me to try F360 and how much better it is than Solidworks (Which has pretty capable drawings BTW).
I already know about fusion 360. If I wasn't sold on it why would I subscribe to the facebook page?
I am not signed up to all the other CAD pages so they can try to sell me on their software.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1229995573786339/

kellings · ‎11-23-2015

@yoshimitsuspeed wrote:

@brianrepp wrote:

@yoshimitsuspeed Appreciate you making this thread as it helps us understand specifically what the root of your frustrations are, and the points you make are fair. I'll take the action to make sure we as a team are providing as many details as possible, whenever possible, but also be realistic about our longer lead projects to ensure we're not improperly setting expectations or leaving things open to interpretation. It's a community of engineers, we want specifics, right?! At the end of the day, our goal is to be as transparent as possible while building Fusion 360.

Maybe it's just me or a select few but I feel like this could be done better.

I think the Fusion team has done a good job of setting expectations. They have been pretty clear that this product is aimed at the less experieced part of the market at this point and will get more capabilities as the product matures. As an Inventor user, I get a little miffed when functionality that I think should be there isn't yet. As Ron points out, Fusion ins't as good at some of the traditional modeling things yet, and far exceeds other packages in other areas. If I had a product to design and was at the startup phase, I don't know what other CAD package I could get for $300 a year that ran on Mac and PC and included the capabilities that Fusion 360 has.

If the Fusion team never made any progress on delivering improvements, that would be one thing. They have done pretty well at keeping the cadence of a minor release every 6 weeks followed by a more substantial release every 6 weeks. I don't feel like the have over-hyped anything yet.

Kevin Ellingson
Technical Specialist

If my post resolves your issue, please click the Accept Solution button.

daniel_lyall · ‎11-23-2015

@yoshimitsuspeed you defintly have a point and now you have said it very straight to the point, they cant get you wrong now, there are improvements needed in certin area's that make fusion fall over for people who do the stuff you do.

with any of the routing stuff I do fusion is know where I wont it for that (the bits I wonted I have now Vcarve and 4th axis rotation of X or Y),

where I have to do stuff on a manual lathe or mill with the drawing's not 100% I have to just draw it on a bit of paper, so I can have the centre datim so I can work out from the centre useing the DRO on the mill, so if we had centre to centre mesurment or centre to each hole centre or slot start point, so on that would be good.

lathe stuff not so bad but center to centre drawings.

if centre to centre has been added someone please tale me.

one thing I do have to complain about is when someone ask's if something can be done, like with me asking about 4th axis rotation of X or Y axis, no fusion staff member gave a reply if it could be done, that I find not so good a simple yes or no would of done.

well it can and now you know that it can work and does are you going to push this as something fusion now has, yes it is limited to what you can do with it but you can BS it and do many things with it like useing it to cut shapes into pipes with a plasma, water jet or laser well with anything round on a 4th axis.

kellings · ‎11-23-2015

I think it is great that you found a 4th axis workaround. I don't think that BS'ing the system is the workflow they were looking for though.

Kevin Ellingson
Technical Specialist

If my post resolves your issue, please click the Accept Solution button.

daniel_lyall · ‎11-23-2015

@yoshimitsuspeed sorry for posting this in your thread.

@kellings doing the rotation is not BSing the system that is banger's, it's done properly ( bad wording again on my part) it's you can BS the tool paths if you can visualize the tool path on a flat say a table leg that has flutes in it if you can do it, or a pipe with holes in it. I have done it in the past with vectric V carve pro it's the . it's just thinking out side the box, multy axis movements is easier moving all 4 axis at once's but the rotation is a good stop gap for people who wont to put text on a pipe or something like that.

yoshimitsuspeed · ‎11-23-2015

@daniel_lyall wrote:
@yoshimitsuspeed sorry for posting this in your thread.

@kellings doing the rotation is not BSing the system that is banger's, it's done properly ( bad wording again on my part) it's you can BS the tool paths if you can visualize the tool path on a flat say a table leg that has flutes in it if you can do it, or a pipe with holes in it. I have done it in the past with vectric V carve pro it's the . it's just thinking out side the box, multy axis movements is easier moving all 4 axis at once's but the rotation is a good stop gap for people who wont to put text on a pipe or something like that.

No worries, At this point I have said my piece.

I'm actually really interested in this. I would like to get a 4th axis and would love to see what can be done currently. If you start a thread on this you should let me know.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1229995573786339/

daniel_lyall · ‎11-23-2015

@yoshimitsuspeed it's here http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/computer-aided-machining-cam/fusion360-wrapping-function/td-p/5917234

mark is doing a update for it at the moment it is quite simple what he did but by dam does it work well. all credit for it is his I just asked for it

yoshimitsuspeed · ‎11-23-2015

Thanks for the link. I wonder how hard it would be to do similar with linuxcnc.
At the rate I'm moving toward 4th axis F360 will probably be able to do everything by the time I'm ready.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1229995573786339/

daniel_lyall · ‎11-24-2015

It's coming when they get working properly in HSM and HSM for inventor problem a year

michallach81 · ‎11-24-2015

I do agree, I've missed the point because I was making my own. Your tread is just a rant. What answers did you received? Another promises only. When you post a rant, only thing that is urgent for Fusion team is a PR problem to solve, and that's what they do here.

Michał Lach
Designer
co-author
projektowanieproduktow.wordpress.com

daniel_lyall · ‎11-24-2015

a user having a rant they usely don't get a reply on the forum, they get a pm or email if what they said is usefully. but it does tales ADSK what a person would like changed, what they wont, where they think ADSK is going wrong. that sort of thing if they had a problem with it the post would disappear

brianrepp · ‎11-24-2015

@michallach81 I'd have to disagree with your comment that we're only interested in solving the problem outwardly and hope you've noticed in your time on the Forum we're solving customer issues on here daily. In this thread, for example, @yoshimitsuspeed provided specific examples as to the root of some of his frustrations. The Fusion team took that feedback to heart and honestly realized we need to be more intentional when we are posting dates, estimations, etc. As mentioned earlier in the thread, it's never been our intent to mislead, but we can do a better job of being transparent - even if that means we dont yet have a timeframe for something people are asking for, or if it's something we simply dont have on our roadmap.

yoshimitsuspeed · ‎11-24-2015

Thanks Brianrepp

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1229995573786339/

michallach81 · ‎11-24-2015

Hi Brian, should I assume that there is on honest PR, that no one is trying to build fair relation between company and customers? I'm confused because it looks like you've treat my comment as it would be sort of insult. I really think that you and Jeff made a decent PR job. Did yours comments solved @yoshimitsuspeed problems? Did you provide accurate estimates for drawings development? No, what you've made is you have provide some explanation, and that's part of "public relations". Don't get me wrong I don't treat all PR as it would be a lies only. I know that my comment could sound a bit harsh, that was just to illustrate my point, about pointless rants, that's all.

Michał Lach
Designer
co-author
projektowanieproduktow.wordpress.com

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Sidetrack from An honest plea

Sidetrack from An honest plea

Sidetrack from An honest plea