What I have learned about Fusion

[s.david.baxter]

This Forum has help me significantly, and I write this post in the hope it will help others.  I don't claim to be an expert but, I do claim to have spent hours, no years learning this software.  I create designs for HO scale model railroad buildings which are 3 D printed and I use a lot of textures.  The result is my designs have 10's of thousands of faces which stresses Fusion.  So here we go:

PERFORMANCE

Fusion is a CPU pig.  If you have a dollar to spend put it into the fastest CPU you can buy.  I have just upgraded from a CORE  2.71 GHz to CORE 4.54 GHz.  This has made a terrific difference.  Don't worry about number of cores or threads, it does not matter Fusion wants one mother of a processor and cares little about the rest.

Don't waste your money on a fancy graphics board, Fusion does most of it rendering on the CPU (did I mention get a big CPU)

Do invest in Solid State Disk technology, the fastest you can get. Why, because I operate "off-line" most of the time.  Fusion wants to connect with the "Mother Ship" on a regular basis (user defined) for among other things scheduled backups.  I have a 20 x 5 fiber connection ($$$) and backups go much faster to the Solid State Disk than to the cloud over a 5 bps connection.

DESIGN

First, don't use textures if you can help it but, if you are like me and you have to paste the little tiny bricks on to walls do it as the very last functions before production.  Make sure you have a FULL pot of coffee going to take time even with an 4.54 Gig  Mud box may have a better way of bringing textures into Fusion, I am looking into that.

Never "Delete" a component or "Body" always, always use "Remove".  Even if you think you know that a body has never been used somewhere else, Fusion does not know that and will churn for awhile if you delete, a remove is almost instant.  I am sure there is some overhead to tracking the "Removed" body but, in my experience it can't be as long as executing a delete.

Engage Windows "Task Manager" or whatever the equivalent is for you poor Apple users (no bias here!) Because when Fusion goes to it's happy place and starts grinding it's nice to know it's still alive and a spinning circle does not do it.  Look at the resources used, don't be surprised to see that your CPU is running close to 100% most of the time.

I'm not sure if this really make a difference or not but, I turn the visibility of components I am not working on OFF.  It seems to me that there is a performance improvement when doing this.

Anyway, for what it's worth this is a few things I have found out, or think I have found out.  Like I said no expert, so feel free to comment, correct or enhance.  I am not interested in criticism.

[ryan.bales · Accepted solution]

This is a well thought out list and even if one disagrees there is always room for other opinions. I did move this post from Support as its best suited here in the Design Validate, document board. 

[TrippyLighting]

The advice is generally correct. If you do need more performance a higher clock speed is more important than to go for a higher number of cores.

However, that isn't the case if you do a lot of local rendering, because rendering, while also not the fastest in Fusion 360 generally uses all of your CPU resources.

The GPU is not used for photorealistic rendering but still should have at least 2GB of memory so it can cope with the other on-screen gimmicks Fusion 360 uses to make the viewport more attractive. 

Generally, however, I believe for the models you are trying to create, which include 3D textures Fusion 360 is simply the wrong sort of software. You can create 3D textures in the form of meshes in other software such as Mudbox, ZBrush or also Blender. Blender's procedural textures in combination with Displacement mapping can be powerful. But the problem is that these tools create an enormous amount of geometry and CAD software generally does not deal with that very well.

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[s.david.baxter]

Thanks