Transitioning to Fusion 360 and render engines

[systembolaget]

Dear forum participants,

we may have to transition around 30 seats to Fusion 360 (or a similar competitor) for high-end product design (from contemporary furniture to bicycles and electronic consumer products). If one of the great renderers does not work well or at all, then we need to look elsewhere.

Does Fusion 360 work well with high-end render applications like Arnold, Maxwell, Corona, V-Ray and Octane? Some better than others? What is your experience with Fusion 360 and the top 5 render engines?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts!

[TrippyLighting]

At this point sadly there are no plugins available for any of these.

It's not that we haven't asked 😉

[systembolaget]

Hej Peter,

ok, that's rather odd, no? So for external and internal design studios who want to transition to Fusion 360 there is none of the usual high-quality rendering engines available? We don't really want to expose designers to SolidWorks or Onshape; Fusion 360 has good features for designers.

An idea: Would it at least be possible to export OBJ files of each part with UV co-ordinates, like from Autodesk Alias and Maya? Some rendering engines can import OBJ files; that would be an intermediate solution until some of the top 10 render engines become directly available.

Thanks for your input!

[TrippyLighting]

Let me ask you a question, before I answer ?

Why are you interested in Fusion 360 and what features does it have your current solution (I am assuming you have one) does not provide you with ?

If you really do high end product design would you not have to model things before you can render them ?

Are you not putting the cart before the horse ?

I would first evaluate Fusion 360's modeling abilities for high end product design.

Yes, you can export a number of formats. .obj coming from a CAD application outputs triangulated meshes.

If that also outputs UV's I don't know, but you cannot really UV unwrap in Fusion 360 like you can in most Sub-D modelers.

[systembolaget]

Thanks,

currently having installed Rhino 3D, which primarily lacks parametric solid modeling capabilities, has too many G1 and G2 surface continuity filleting problems, features an old style user interface, and has many other issues.

Why evaluate Fusion 360? Several larger studios use SolidWorks, which seems overkill and complicated to use for designers, Onshape is better there, but does not work without an internet connection, so there is that.

Before rendering or letting one of the many render companies render the jobs, one has to have a model. That is always the case.

As long as Fusion 360 outputs OBJ files where one can select mesh density and basic UVs are output with each surface, important for isotropic materials (wood, fabric, patterns, certain types of labels), that could be a working stop-gap solution. The thing is to avoid another software in between. If unwrapping is really needed, one would have to use a proper unwrapping software anyway, no matter which CAD package is used.

[TrippyLighting]

Fusion 360 is subscription based. That means if you pay monthly you can cancel monthly.

That in turn makes it incredibly easy to evaluate it's capabilities.

As such I'd assign a project to the designer with the most/broadest CAD experience and have him design a project in parallel to a real "production" project so all functions needed throughout a project can be evaluated across a complete project.

If your projects vary a lot, maybe you'll determine that for some it's of great use. Rhino certainly has more modeling functionality (e.g. there is nothing that can really compare with Grasshopper) and may prove valuable for other uses.

For other projects Alias might be the tool, because frankly none of the others have the control over surface quality that  Alias offers.

[schneik-adsk]

There are plugins to send data directly to Keyshot and Thea. You can share to 3DStudio and Maya where you can use any of the plugins you mentioned using FBX.  I work with many customers that get amazing results using these render workflows.  By plugins I'm assuming you mean interop between Fusion and a dedicated render app. I think @TrippyLighting was assuming you meant in-window plugins.

[TrippyLighting]

The Thea plugin has been pulled from the App Store a long time ago because:
1. It's written in Python and updates to the API broken the plugin repeatedly (I talked to the developer).

2. Thea was bought by Altair and is now the render workhorse in Solid Thinking Evolve.

In other words it's unlikely to come back.

[systembolaget]

Thanks both,

I will try Fusion 360 of course, particularly to see how it handles G1 and G2 fillets and surface transitions, and to see how easy to use it is; designers today want everything "easy" (whatever that really means). Keyshot is no option, because it lacks realism, has no physically correct material definition, and no fur, grass, upholstery or speaker grille fabrics, etc. like all other high-end renderers have; I think it's an engineer's renderer from what I have seen. Today, renderings need to tell stories, like a good product photo; for example scattering vegetation, dust or water drops is common in good renderers.

So if Fusion 360 outputs OBJ, it could be a way forward. To inject another software into the workflow like Maya or 3DS Max is not efficient in terms of client billing and would necessitate additional training for all 30, a no-go. Best are plug-ins or OBJ export/import. As you say, a Fusion -> OBJ trial is required.

[erikGL3ZZ]

We need Fusion 360 to team up with internal connection to some of the absolute best render engines. I am giving up too much designing architecture and automotive models, and being restricted to very limited rendering. For example it is way too heavy to make even few trees or like in post above, water drops... Also attaching custom HDRi sceneries is very stupid, you can attach only one, not adjust horisont level and you always loose your settings in one scene after changing to other. Same with custom materials, attaching only one 4000x4000 seamless pattern surface to part will make the whole app extremely unstable and slow.

[systembolaget]

We have Fusion 360 now, and exporting OBJs of each body for Maya and high-end Maxwell Render rendering works well.

[erikGL3ZZ]

Interesting to know. but when I design a building it easily has about thousand bodies. it would get super tiresome to try and adjust all of those to line again.

[TrippyLighting]

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@erikGL3ZZ wrote:

Interesting to know. but when I design a building it easily has about thousand bodies. it would get super tiresome to try and adjust all of those to line again.

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Use .fbx! Conversion happens in the cloud  (so is .obj) and sometimes it takes a few minutes, but it maintains the same structure you have in the browser.

You don't have UV mapping or displacement mapping, which makes a CAD application pretty unusable for ArchVIZ. That is not what the render engine in FUiosn 360 was designed for.

[barry9UDQ6]

Export as .fbx and use the new Blender 3.0. A steep learning curve but Blender is free 😀

[stiller.design]

I can recommend Keyshot Pro. Use can use LIVE linking , and still edit for 3d model in fusion 360. 

[systembolaget]

I see, we use Fusion 360 for product design, product development and product engineering, so I cannot comment on the use for architecture. All I can say is that the combination of Fusion 360 and Maxwell Render (equally good are Lumion and Vray) is very straightforward and results in quality images without the artificial rendered look of Keyshot. If your Fusion 360 OBJ output is low-poly, you can easily UV-unwrap in Maya or 3DS Max, in case UV-unwrapping is necessary for certain texturing applications.

[stiller.design]

if you learn how to use Keyshot you can get great results. Vray is everything else but straight forward IMHO

[hclmed]

Does Keyshot recognize motion studies or joint definitions from Fusion360? It doesn't go into much detail for that on their site. Or does anyone know of any animation applications that recognize the joints defined in Fusion?

[stiller.design]

no it doesn't...unfortunately

[TrippyLighting]

I would export into .fbx, as that format will maintain the assembly hierarchy you used in Fusion 360.

then import into Blender and use Blenders animation tools. You will have to  rig your assembly with bones so you can animate, but once you get the hang of that (it isn't all that difficult, you can animate things much more fluently than in Fusion 360.

The Eevee render engine in Blender is very good for preview and for a many final renders . It is a real time GPU render engine!

An cycles is a photorealistic PBR render engine and also fully GPU supported.

Both of them are magnitudes faster than the render engine in Fusion 360.