Survey: What tools are in your toolbox?

[TMC.Engineering]

One of the great things about this forum and fusion to me is how many people have different perspectives, experiences and workflows to achieve goals.  The people often share what works well for them and other tools they use with fusion to get the best solution they can.  I am curious what tools you have in your toolbox related to Fusion?

Here are my tools.... so far...

Fusion 360:                Primary CAD, Primary CAM

Geomagic Design:      Sheet metal and Drawings

CorelDraw:                 Graphic Arts, Laser cutting

David 3d:                   3D scanning

Instant Meshes:         Quad Mesh Conversion

Mecway:                    FEA Simulation:  

Calculix:                     FEA solver to expand mecway capibilities

VcarvePro:                 cnc signs.

What do you use?

[PhilProcarioJr]

@TMC.Engineering

Fusion 360: Currently my primary CAD/CAM tool

Zbrush: For sculpting, Remeshing and Normal Map, Cavity Map and AO Map creation

Topogun: Remeshing and creating new comforming Meshes for CAD accuracy

Maya: My main tool for NURBS, Sub-D and polygon modeling.

Lightwave: My main tool for Animations

Substance Designer with IRAY: For creation of materials and rendering

Substance Painter: For painting materials on models

Quixel Suite 2: For Normal Map, Cavity Map and AO Map creation

Photoshop: Image Map editing

Inkscape: For SVG creation

Bitmap2Material: For creating Relief Maps

[TMC.Engineering]

@TrippyLighting, @HughesTooling, @cekuhnen

I would be curious to know what software tools you guys use in addition to fusion.

[TrippyLighting]

• I've been using Alibre/Geomagic Design prior to Fusion 360 but have not really touched it since I've started working with Fusion 360.
• Blender for subdivision modeling and form exploration and mesh creation for T-Splines.
• Indigo Renderer for truly photorealistic rendering and lighting analysis.
• Inkscape for vector graphics logos etc.
• Cadsoft Eagle (or shall we say Autodesk Eagle ?) and Altium CircuitMaker for PCB development.
• Eclipse Arduino IDE ( called Sloeber)
• GIMP and Pixelmator for general image editing.
• InstantMeshes & Meshmixer for the usual stuff.

[cekuhnen]

@TMC.Engineering

Fusion 360

Parametric Modeling

Sub-D and flat polygon to NURBS (T-Splines and Base Feature)

CNC

Flow:

Air tunnel software for our student projects in trans and drones

Blender:

Rapid concept ideation modeling

Sub-D and generative strutcure modeling

Digital Clay sculpting

Product - process animation

Rendering with Cycles

Posing human figures into needed positions

With many add-ons for architecture Grasshopper like generative modeling and such

MakeHuman:

Human figure creation

ReMake:

Photobased object 3D digitizing

InstantMesh:

Remeshing scan data into quad mesh

MOI 3D: Lightweight Rhino replacement

NURBS 2 mesh uv unwrapping

Affinity Photo and Design:

Replacement for Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator

Gravit.io:

Web based Macromedia Replacement for Vector work.

[TrippyLighting]

---

@cekuhnen wrote:

Blender:

With many add-ons for architecture Grasshopper like generative modeling and such

Sverchok ?

[cekuhnen]

@TrippyLighting Yes and animate all. Both have a different approach and concept.

[TheCADWhisperer]

In addition to Fusion 360

Inventor

SolidWorks

Creo

Meshmixer

AutoCAD

[cekuhnen]

@TMC.Engineering

I forgot:

Thea Render:

For interior design renderings and such

- since I cannot stand Keyshot hahaha.

I also teach Alias and Maya while professionally I do not use both since I do not have a commercial license for them.

[TMC.Engineering]

@cekuhnen you mention cycles and thea render.  what about thea works different/better for interior design?  

[cekuhnen]

@TMC.Engineering

The render engine Thea uses and the render modes offer in interior views faster results

while Cycles while free struggles with noise in interior spaces. Sure if you have 4 NVIDIA GPU cards

Cycles in interior space is fine yet so will Thea be.

Thea can make use of CPU and GPU at once plus you can set-up a small farm. You can even load

Thea onto Pie PCs and use the GPUs there. The Pie's are cheap and with many you can quickly

stack up a nice GPU farm that is also low in energy consumption.

Overall I think Thea for product and architecture renderings is vastly underpriced. The only advantage I see in Keyshot is the native ability to read CAD files.

Altair recently also purchased them but I cannot assume that this will have an impact on Thea plug=in for Fusion 360.