What is the scope of operations for Fusion 360?

[araugh]

Hello, I'm looking for some clarification on what the targeted scope of operations is for Fusion 360.

Based on the elevator pitch on the fusion website of "Fusion 360 is the first 3D CAD, CAM, and CAE tool of its kind. It connects your entire product development process in a single cloud-based platform that works on both Mac and PC." I was greatly intrigued and started working with it. This single product, end to end design philosophy seems ideal for my company where collaborative mechanical design is key.

In working much deeper with Fusion 360 I'm discovering that it's unparalleled when it comes to collaborative design for single parts or very small assemblies and the CAM is tremendous, but it doesn't seem built for assemblies or production environments. Lots of little issues like references between parts, how fusion handles libraries, joint organization, exporting of solid models, very slow operation in assemblies and the many weaknesses of it's drawing tools make it unsustainable for anything but single parts and the most basic of assemblies.

What I'm trying to learn here is if this is the intent of the Fusion 360 team. I get that there's merit in a less feature rich program and I should not waste time trying to force a program optimized for very small projects to handle mid size assemblies. The marketing for Fusion 360 though is positioning it as a lighter, redesigned from the ground up, replacement for Solidworks and Inventor. Is this a case of the software still being young, or is this a case of the marketing not really matching up with the true scope of the product? 

Thanks

[cekuhnen]

@Beyondforce Yeah cv curve ...

but besides all doom and gloom as far as I know they focus more on bug fixing now after so many user concerns with the bug mania.

[Beyondforce]

We heard that before many times. But I hope you are right!

I have just learned about a new bug with the joints. It happened to me last week. At first, I thought it was me (crazy) who is doing something wrong. But today I saw a post with the exact same problem and it turns out to be a bug. 

I got to a point where I sometimes don't trust myself anymore. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong or maybe it is a bug. This is really sucks!

I wish there was page with all the active bugs filtered by categories. This way, we can track what works and what doesn't. It will save us a lot of time and for some people also a lot of money.

[daniel_lyall]

I had to drop a unit from a course I am doing because of the bugs in joints.

[cekuhnen]

@Beyondforce

That list would be very long but I agree it can be useful. Before I do s demo with my students I always build parts Atome to double check where s problem could be.

. @daniel_lyall I have the same issues too - so frustrating

lets see what will come the next week month and year. It also needs time to get things worked out.

[TrippyLighting]

@daniel_lyall 

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@daniel_lyall wrote:

I had to drop a unit from a course I am doing because of the bugs in joints.

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I am contemplating about delaying or dropping the entire course for larger assemblies I am in process of writing the proposal for, for Pluralsight.

There are too many bugs that are related to joints that a user would have to navigate that I am not sure I can in good conscience make a tutorial suggesting that larger assemblies can be done reliably in Fusion 360. The emphasis here is really on "reliability". It's of no use to a user to be able to complete a design initially using functionality that seems to work but then discover upon changing things that his assembly "blows up".

[cekuhnen]

@TrippyLighting

"The emphasis here is really on "reliability". It's of no use to a user to be able to complete a design initially using functionality that seems to work but then discover upon changing things that his assembly "blows up"."

I fully agree on that assessment! At this point Fusion has a great set of tools (sketch model cam sim sheet metal collaboration web presentation) which need now a strong focus on stability

so when you work you know what the end result will be without having to face unexpected behaviors and doing an exercise in workaround workarounds (which often also all lead to other issues).

[daniel_lyall]

The model I had to do is 74 parts.

I could set one part of it so it was working what was hard, go to do the next bit and the origins of the revolute joints would move to a random position what had nothing to do with the 2 parts, I tried many away to do it, it was the same thing each time the part's joint origin was moving to a random position sometimes it was any joint type doing it.

My wheelchair tablet mount what is 13 parts seems to be fine even with changeing how parts look.

So there it is 13 seems to be ok 74 nup.

@TrippyLighting You cant put your name to something that you're not a 100% sure will work all the time, If pluralsight don't like it that to bad for them, it is your name that will get muded.