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

[Anonymous]

@araugh

Thanks for the great conversation. We are listening.

I want to encourage you all to continue with this. 

But while I'm here, I thought I'd point out that you can export STEP directly from Fusion.

Please let me know if you have questions about it.

Thanks!

(PS: how funny I did not mean to post this under my temporary test login! This is Phil.E from Fusion QA) Doh.

[araugh]

@Anonymous That is tremendously helpful for the project I'm working on right now, thanks!

I would love to get some insight on what the planned scope of Fusion is to the development team. Even just a mission statement would be helpful in figuring out what the goals of this software package really are. Thanks

[TrippyLighting]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

(PS: how funny I did not mean to post this under my temporary test login! This is Phil.E from Fusion QA) Doh.

---

Ha, @Phil.E is going rogue. Funny 😉

[Beyondforce]

Maybe you'll find this useful and it can be done parametrically as well:

[Phil.E]

@Beyondforce

You illustrate a key concept in Fusion. Time.

By dragging the sketch around in your video, you are reaching back in time to when that sketch is made. Of course all downstream operations are computed each time you drag the sketch. 

@araugh

The timeline is used to manage when things happen. There is also the concept of capturing position. This allows you to make operations that depend on model position. In your video, you moved the block after the sketch and hole were made. This is not a bug, rather it's Fusion allowing you to do position dependent modeling. What you want is time dependent modeling.

Check out this video. I'm using the timeline to roll back prior to the sketch/hole, move the component to where it should be, capturing that position, and then roll to the end of the timeline, where all the downstream features are computed correctly.

So by using either method: edit the upstream sketch or edit the upstream position of a component, all downstream features should compute correctly.

Please let me know if you have more questions.

[HughesTooling]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

@araugh

Thanks for the great conversation. We are listening.

I want to encourage you all to continue with this. 

But while I'm here, I thought I'd point out that you can export STEP directly from Fusion.

Please let me know if you have questions about it.

Thanks!

(PS: how funny I did not mean to post this under my temporary test login! This is Phil.E from Fusion QA) Doh.

---

You'll find using the export on the right click menu a lot more friendly if you want to save the file locally. The right click Export gives you the standard windows save dialog so you can see what's in the destination directory rather than saving blind using the export from the file menu.

Mark

[Phil.E]

@HughesTooling to be fair, the export dialog gives you access to file explorer, or, your cloud projects.

I tried your suggestion and it is much faster for directly going into the local file structure. Just posting this for clarity for future generations. 🙂

[HughesTooling]

Yes I did say locally, the trouble with the file explorer that opens from the file menu export is you can't see any files in the folder you're exporting to. When the export option was changed to this dialog a few years back I made the comment that it like going back to the good old days of DOS where you needed to remember all the files in a directory. Funny thing is the only time I would find it useful to export to the cloud is exporting STL files for customers but STL is not available through export.

Mark

[araugh]

Hello all, I really do appreciate the cooperative spirit here and the specific suggestions to mitigate some of my issues, but the purpose of this question was to learn what the objectives of Fusion really are. The screencasts and such have been really helpful to the specific examples, but the issues with Fusion for me are not specific but systemic and I'm trying to learn if my expectations need recalibration or if the software is just still in a public beta.

Thanks

[cekuhnen]

@araugh

As mentioned Fusion was first envisioned as a light DM tool internally.

Publicly Fusion started and was advertised as a new design tool for industrial designers, makers, as well as creative people.

But this changed through the years.

Recently the focus was put from mechanical engineering towards machine design.

My guess is was influenced by changes in the market opportunities as well as how Fusion matured and was able to be developed.

Before focusing more on MCAD and now machine design there was a bug push and suggestion by users to improve and expand

modeling tools. However this unfortunately did not lead to a desired result users wished for.

Fusion is based on technology from Inventor and this might explain the possible inability to make big changes.

My impression is that Autodesk currently rather focuses on further developing sheet metal which works quite nice in Fusion and which was also a user demand too.

As stated CAM and SIM from my own work seems to work already pretty well and are amazing areas in the Fusion environment.

A new kid on the block is ECAD with the integration of EAGLE and such.

As a reverse question: What is it that you feel you need Fusion to have an offer? What direction do you hope it will go aka be developed for?

[Beyondforce]

@araugh

I understand your question. But unfortunately, the only one who can really answer your questions is the F360 Application Manager!

[cekuhnen]

@Beyondforce @araugh

Yeah thats a good Point Eric and Daniel could maybe elaborate here.

But from what they told us Fusion is for machine design and the projection of development time till feature comparison is around the next following few years.

[MikeSmell_ADSK]

Hi @araugh and all of the others who have contributed in this thread,

I am a Product Manager on the Fusion 360 team, currently responsible for the Simulation workspace and am currently spinning up a new project around collaborative assembly design workflows. I thought I might have some commentary to add that would be relevant to the original post. 

In regard to @araugh's comments about Fusion's current capabilities for assemblies, this assessment is valid and is consistent with what we have heard from many members of our community. This type of feedback is driving the new project that I mentioned above, where we will look to improve many aspects of working in larger assemblies in multi-person teams, file reuse, and file reference management to name a few. I would be glad to engage with anyone in this thread on this topic and I encourage you to email me directly at michael.smell@autodesk.com. 

As for the intent of the Fusion 360 development team, the "elevator pitch", while accurate, is a very high level representation of what we are pursuing with Fusion. Without stating the obvious, I apologize if you have already seen this,  I would encourage you to take a look at our public roadmap, https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/spring-2017-roadmap-update/ , which is another level of detail in what that "elevator pitch" actually translates to as a user of Fusion. To go yet another level down, the Fusion development team has been further refining our focus to address many of the foundational issues mentioned in this thread, i.e. sketching, core modeling, reliabiltiy, usability, etc. With each future release, you will continue to see improvements in these areas.

Finally, I think @cekuhnen has pointed out where Fusion 360 is today and is going in the future is slightly different than where it started and this is true. As Fusion 360 matures, it is also evolving. We monitor the needs of our community and the CAD, CAM and CAE markets very closely and are always striving to make sure we deliver the valuable solutions to our users. 

I encourage you and the others in this thread to continue to stay engaged with us and let us know when you are facing issues, as the entire Fusion development team participates in supporting our users in this forum. 

I hope this is helpful to this group and I look forward to engaging with some of you on the topic of collaborative assembly design. 

Thanks, 

Mike Smell

Product Manager, Fusion 360

michael.smell@autodesk.com

[TrippyLighting]

@MikeSmell_ADSK I would love to get involved in assembly matters! 

[Beyondforce]

@MikeSmell_ADSK,
This collaborative assembly design sounds interesting, you can count me in.

Btw, I wish there was a page with all the Active bugs. This way it will give us a Heads-Up (not to waist time on something that doesn't work) and we won't have to report the same bug over and over again.

Cheers/Ben.

[araugh]

@cekuhnen "As a reverse question: What is it that you feel you need Fusion to have an offer? What direction do you hope it will go aka be developed for?"

What I want doesn't matter so much, but it's an interesting question. In an ideal world for me Fusion would be exactly what it's being marketed as, an end to end product design and manufacturing tool for both individual components and complex assemblies.

[araugh]

Thank you for the response @MikeSmell_ADSK, I appreciate you taking the time to address this. Your response was informative and did a good job of clearing up where Fusion is headed. One thing that's not on the the road map, how long is it estimated until the product is mature? I understand that these days software is never really "done" but when is it estimated that the software capabilities will match it's marketing? Just ball park, 2018, 2024?

For what it's worth, it feels very nearly there in my work with it this weekend on an 80+ component assembly. I kept going back to Solidworks for one thing or another and getting annoyed when trying to create something as I had gotten used to the Fusion interface so quickly. Autodesk has always been great at user interfaces so I'm glad that was so well done in Fusion too.

[Anonymous]

This thread has been awesome. All of the previous posters have mentioned issues that I've noticed in my work with F360.

I've been a SolidWorks users since v94. A long, long time......

I've been recommending F360 to a lot of folks who have come to loggerheads with SketchUp. F360 is a significantly better and more robust 3d modeler than SketchUp.

Unfortunately, I could not in good conscience recommend F360 to anyone to do production level design.  It's great for building wood working prototypes, or shapes to print on your 3D printer, but attempting to manage a large scale mechanical assembly would be excruciatingly painful. 

The lack of things like the ability to create fastener catalogs, hole wizards with selections for standard fastener sizes are but a fraction of the issues. Large scale mechanical assemblies live and die by part catalogs. Dragging and dropping parts from sources like McMasterCarr, GrabCAD, Festo, etc are crucial to efficient design practices. The ability to create meta data which is then used for drawing and BoM management are huge.  I've got literally thousands of part models in SolidWorks that I've collected over the years. All of the parts have mate references so I drag and drop them into an assembly onto the appropriate mating surface and boom, they are mated.  Done and done.

None of this exist in F360.

Saying all that, I'm a huge fan and will continue my journey in mastering F360.

Thanks all, 

[cekuhnen]

@Anonymous

Fusion is so much more than SketchUp - it always amazes me why people like SketchUp. Yes it is easy to learn and thats basically it.

Otherwise it is utterly under-powered.

I have no experience with large scale assemblies but judging by the general amount of bugs Fusion already has I can see this being even

more problematic as an area.

This week I helped a client on a design project and features in the timeline broke on multiple occasions even while a feature I adjusted

had no influence on the data other features which broke.

I feel before going into assemblies the timeline and general stability needs to be improved to (among the massive issues the sketch engine has

as well as other bugs such as in the joint system).

I noticed that in the past Fusion videos that show industrial design examples often actually T-Splines is nearly exclusively used. Now I am not sure if

that is the case because it was easier to visually show changes in geometry (push n pull TS edges vs changing values in a sketch that changes surface features).

It really puts an emphasis on we can easily with T-Splines explore an idea fast but then that's all.

[Beyondforce]

@cekuhnen,

I couldn't agree more! I can't imagine the number of bugs they have in their backlog (I reports only half of the bugs that I find). It's growing faster than they can fix them! and on top of that, the need for performance improvement.

I love working with F360, but I haven't yet see clear goals with deadlines and to which direction F360 is going. Investing so much time and resources on a new environment like SheetMetal before fixing the underline performance problems and bugs doesn't make much sense to me. I'm still waiting for the NURBS.

Cheers / Ben.