What's your Fusion 360 performance like?

[promm]

Hello,

My name is Mike Prom and I am a product manager on the Fusion 360 team.  We are looking for feedback on what is slow performance.  Specifically we would like to know what operations you are doing when you feel that Fusion is performing slow.  For example editing a feature, selecting a component for a joint, rotating the model…  We are aware of the time it can take to open or save in certain situations and work is being done to improve this.  If you can provide an archive model .f3d and give us the steps to repeat the process in which you notice the performance change it would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you for your continued engagement with the team.

[cekuhnen]

oh what I meant to say is that Fusion even while the UI is easy can be hard to start with alone when you are new to 3D which is why I think it is not good for beginners to learn it alone. Fusion follows a principle that requires a certain level of understanding already. And thats fine because Fusion is a pretty fantastic / powerful software!

123D is what I would consider good for starters.

However I agree with you Trippy with a good introduction Fusion can quickly become second nature to you.

[laughingcreek]

And back to the subject at hand...

Now that I've learned that the crease command in Tsplines behaves so much nicer, I find my self using it more.  I usually have a lot of topology in place before applying creases.  Once the command is invoked there is a noticeable delay (and the dreaded circle thing) between each selection.  Gets to be a bit time consuming.

[cekuhnen]

I wish Fusion TS crease would be like in Modo or Blender 0 to 100% crease and not only sharp or no crease!

[TrippyLighting]

Edge weihgts or weighted creases mathematically seem to be a very difficult thing to do with T-Splines. I had briefly read about this before.

Just gooling "T-Spline edge weight" brought up a few interesting links/discussions. 

[cekuhnen]

yep sadly - down side of mathematically more correct surfaces ;(

But we can work with edge loops to hand sculpt creases of various degrees.

[O.Tan]

I gotta say, you're getting quite a good deal of support here with cekuhnen willing to even guide you through the process of understanding F360 and he teaches F360 for a living! 🙂

Well, we're not jumping on you, it's just that what you're doing is basically a thread hijack, as this post is for those who have used F360 long enough to understand what is its shortcoming when it comes to performance. Feel free to create a new thread with your questions and I'm sure some people will get into it.

Slightly off topic, understanding how SolidEdge works is even harder as there's a certain degree of inconsistencies in how some features work and you gotta "debug" yourself to understand how this specific function work and its quirks. Though I'll admit that it's one super stable software (rarely crash when heavy calculation is involved) and very powerful for an engineer/designer once he/she understand how thing works. 

But I'm placing my hopes on F360 as they seem to listen to the community more, constantly improving things and likely to implement or try things that is not available in other CAD softwares.

[cekuhnen]

Just dl a trial of Autodesk Inventor and compare that with Fusion. Fusion is such a pleasure to look at the UI also seems more logical and cleaner.

[Anonymous]

You'll have to forgive my impatience. I had no idea it would be this
difficult to learn. Im a new user surrounded by people with years or
decades of experience. Im even having trouble figuring out what questions
to ask. The program just seems so unpredictable. I feel like I should be
taking a month-long course instead of simply asking questions every time I
hit a snag.

[TrippyLighting]

Ive you've got time an skype account. Share your skype name and I'll skype with you.

[cekuhnen]

Welcome to CAD - even my student think this is easy and will require only a weekend - or some people think because it is CAD you don't have skills.

Learning CAD is like learning a language - it still has a steep learning curve and thats unfortunate but the way you feel is also quite normal.

[Anonymous]

I've counted three of us that are willing to put in time to help but I'm not willing to get in depth until you start a thread. Start a thread showing the types of parts you create with bobcam and I'll make a video showing you how I'd do it in Fusion

[Anonymous]

Where should I start this thread? Ive started a few so far but what would
be an appropriate place to put it?

[jeff_strater]

This is all great feedback, everyone.  I'm glad to see that this many folks are interested enough in Fusion to comment.

I would like to discuss one of the early sub-threads:  Sketch performance.  The points raised here about sketch solve performance when the sketch is "large" (not everyone will agree about what defines a "large" sketch) are completely valid.  We in the Fusion team agree that improving sketch performance is a high priority, and we will work hard to improve it.  So, don't give up on us just yet!

If you're interested in some history, read on...

When Fusion first started focused on direct modeling, we first thought we could get away without a sketch solver at all!  Because we were exploring the Direct Modeling paradigm (no timeline, no history), we thought that we could extend this paradigm even into sketching.  AutoCAD went for 25+ years without a sketch solver.  So, we built a sketch system that did not have constraints and dimensions in the way that other CAD products had them.  We soon became convinced (when we tried to use it ourselves) that this route was not going anywhere good.  So, we started over and started building a more traditional sketcher.

Most of us in the team have come from a parametric Mechanical CAD background.  Most products in that market have separate 2D and 3D sketch environments.  Some of that is historical, some is because of the solvers used.  But, the idea of not being able to constrain 2D and 3D sketch geometry together, or to convert sketch geometry from one to the other, we saw as limiting.  We also wanted to have a more wireframe modeling like experience that you might find in conceptual design and surfacing tools So, we made a somewhat risky decision:  Because we wanted to someday deliver a unified 2D/3D sketch environment, we would leverage an internal 3D solver as our sketch solver (it's also the same solver that is used as our assembly/joint solver).

While this solver is proven as an assembly solver, it had never really been used in a sketch environment.  The solver team put a lot of work into it over the past couple of years to make it handle geometry and constraints it had never had to deal with before.  Here are some videos showing Fusion 360 solving as compared to other CAD tools:

Wedge Videos

The video below show Fusion drag behavior on a sketch with some lines and tangent circles

The video below shows Solidworks dragging the same sketch. Notice that the circles show some undesirable behavior

Arc Videos:

The video below show Fusion drag behavior on a sketch with tangent arcs

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The video below shows Solidworks dragging the same sketch. Again, notice the behavior

We've been pleasantly surprised so far.  The technology has held up well.  However, as this thread points out, it is not yet perfect.  The team is working hard every release to improve it.  Hopefully you can see this improvement over the past several releases.

Now, what about that unified 2D/3D sketch environment?  Unfortunately, we have not yet been able to completely realize it just yet.  We have been focusing on getting the basics to be right, stable, and performant (that last one is the source of this thread).  You can see hints of what we hope to accomplish in the fact that you can take a 2D sketch, use the Move command, and drag a sketch point or a line out of the sketch plane.  It's all still the same sketch.  This is not possible in some other MCAD parametric systems.  Anyway, we are excited about the future in this area.  We think we can come up with a pretty unique approach.

That's probably more than you all really cared to know, but hopefully some folks found it interesting.

Jeff Strater (Fusion development)

[TrippyLighting]

That in fact was very interesting. As a user one oes not often see what goes on behind the scenes. Thanks for sharing!

[schneik-adsk]

Marty, can you direct message me and I'll set up a time and a gotmeeting link? I think we can help you but a little virtual face to face is probable the fastest way to get a better understanding of what you are trying to do.

[laughingcreek]

I'm having trouble viewing the videos.  They each start with the line "Access denied Request has expired."  Is the trouble on my end or yours?

[Anonymous]

Videos? I posted some pictures but have no idea how to record video of me
using CAMBAM. It would be rather boring anyway since im learning as I go
and end up going back and forth quite a bit.

[cekuhnen]

same here nothing works

[cekuhnen]

Actually I really care to know these things! Thank you for the insight!

[cekuhnen]

I teach university there is a lot of again and again 😉