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.

[Anonymous]

I wonder if any of the pics Ive posted so far have been visible to other
members. If they havent that would explain why nobody addressed them.

[laughingcreek]

Hey Marty, I was responding to Jeff's video posts.  BTW, if you want to make videos you can find the autodesk utility for that at https://screencast.autodesk.com/

It works really well with several of the programs I use, but haven't tried it with CAMBAM.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the tip. I will make a part in CB tomorrow and try to get some
video posted.

[O.Tan]

Since you're going to have a few questions, probably just create a thread and have all your questions and future question in there. Maybe call it, New to CAD without prior background and I have many questions. 🙂

[cekuhnen]

where did you post them? any URL?

[keqingsong]

Hey all, videos should be fixed and embedded properly now. Go back to Jeff's post here: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/general-fusion-360-questions/what-s-your-fusion-360-performance-like/...

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@cekuhnen wrote:
where did you post them? any URL?

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[cekuhnen]

videos work - the wedge works well, I know that as a constraint test!

FreeCAD aces it 😉 Video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byzv_NlyKp_2ck0tRUVmSFcxRGM/view?usp=sharing

The solver can have here and there some hick-ups specifically like below but the artifact left I can reverse by moving the point back like in the right image.

However nevertheless I am quite amused that SolidWorks not only fails against Fusion but also FreeCAD in those simple disciplines.

[O.Tan]

 https://screencast.autodesk.com/main/details/54d71e05-47d8-4a74-9a95-c986903163bd

You mean something like this? 

This is just a hole example but it'll work for other things as well.

[kb9ydn]

It is somewhat amusing that the sketch solver in SW is less well behaved than FreeCAD or Fusion.  However I would make a supposition that the SW sketch solver is likely optimized more for speed than absolute stability, with totally unconstrained sketches.  It's generally considered bad modelling practice in SW to not fully constrain your sketches, so I'm not sure how useful this comparison really is.  Obviously we want the solver to be as stable and predictable as possible, but if absolute stability with no constraints causes a major performance hit with large complex sketches, I'm not so sure it's worth it.

I've had situations in SW where I was importing DXFs, and ended up with sketches that had literally tens of thousands of entities.  Then I had to go through and delete large groups of these to get to what I wanted.  Trying to delete 5000 sketch entities at a time would cause the solver to peg the CPU for over a minute crunching away at the data.  It was slow but it worked.  I haven't tried something like this in Fusion, but my guess is that it would totally barf.

C|

[TrippyLighting]

I would say that not fully constraing sketches is bad design practce Period. That's not limited to SW. The fact that SW shows the user when the Sketch is under constrained and fully constrined I find ver usefule and this would defuinitely ne a nice to have in Fusion.

I created the text "TrippyLighting.com" as an SVG in Inkscape and impported it into Fusion and it brought it to it's knees. It still worked but verrrrry slllooooowwwwww......

[cekuhnen]

Trippy and KB9

that I think can be quite true - I feel annoyed by having to constrain so much but then again once that is done adjusting values and having the sketch update is pretty useful as well. Well I think we call agree to rather focus on the last and be ok with the first.

This would be interesting to see and do an actual performance test F vs SW solver.
Sadly I dont own a copy - I have to see if there are some free trials to get.

Of course my FreeCAD test was more curiosity than using that as some real benchmark test.

In the end speed and predictability however for a sketch I think should be two values we want in Fusion.

[Anonymous]

It's funny, in the example you show Fusion does seem to handle being unconstrained really well.

But I actually find the way the Fusion sketch solver works to be poor.

For example, if you have an unconstrained three-point arc, the sketch solver will FIGHT to not change the radius and will instead move the rest of the model around when all you really want to do is adjust the radius. Even if you grab the radius point it still fights and will move the other two points around keeping the radius nearly identical. I end up always having to lock both end points and then drag it, and then unlock the endpoints... or place a dimension on it and adjust that numerically.

[AbdnAllHope]

In response to Jeff's post about the sketch solver.  I never thought to try this before.  But it looks like one day we could be able to do a real motion study from a single sketch.  No bodies and no components.  That woud be pretty cool.  Anyway the video shows 3 sketches that progress in difficulty.  The parallel link sketch starts to cry a little but the other 2 work pretty well.  From this it appears that a lot is possible already.

https://screencast.autodesk.com/main/details/e77faaf1-1526-448f-93d6-1ea3937fad24

phil

[jeff_strater]

Sketch mechanisms:  This is another extremely interesting topic.  We should probably move this to another thread (it's not really performance related), but I wanted to add just one comment.  Early in Fusion development, this was a topic we discussed a lot.  The problem today is that you can do some really nice simple mechanisms in sketch, but turning them into components with joints requires extra steps - you essentially have to re-apply the joints.  What we would like to do, eventually, is to be able to infer component joints from sketch constraints.  So, in all the nice 3 and 4 bar mechanisms illustrated here, Fusion should be smart enough to "promote" the point/point coincident constraint between the two arc centers into a Revolute joint when components are made from those sketches.

That's easy to say, but a bit harder to do:  At what point do the joints get created?  At some user request ("promote sketch constraints to joints")?  When the second component is created?  How should we tell which sketch constraints should get promoted to joints (should they be tagged somehow at creation time by the user as "joint constraints"?)?

Anyway, it's a fun topic to think about.  What is there today is very useful, but it would be cool to smooth out the whole workflow even further.

Jeff Strater (Fusion development)

[bverboort]

You mean the way Inventor Sketch Blocks do when using the Make Components command?

Or are we/you thinking the workflow would be different/improved in some aspects?

Best,

Brian

[Anonymous]

Fusion is one of the easiest CAD programs to understand and use.  Especially since I am a self learner.  I currently use Maya for concept projects but need a CAD program for precisions.  The only problem is getting it to stay open without it crashing on me.  It crashes whenever I play the step by step tutorials and trying to open an exist project.

[Anonymous]

So far its been totally unresponsive whenever I attempt to do anything it immediately goes UNRESPONSIVE.  I dont think that it shold work this way, I have used AutoCAD starting with release 12 and up and have never had the problems I am experiencing with this program.  I had absolute confidence that when I purchased an application from AUTODESK that it would work without any abnormalities. However with Fusion 360 I have lost that confidence.  I was hopeing to get a progam for CAD work that would be decent and have a price that a common everyday user could afford.  Apparently I have missed the boat on this application.

[O.Tan]

Well it'll be great if you could tell us a little more on what were you trying to do and what's your computer specs cause if you hang around here more, you'll see that F360 works for most people (though they're exceptions, nonetheless the ADESK employees is more then eager to solve your issue). The common issue people are having is that the software isn't that stable in a sense that it crashes A LOT; avg once a day? Though the auto-save feature seem to help most of the time.