Fusion 360 - Cloud solving will be the only option available for all simulation

[hmortim]

In the latest update notes of Fusion360 there is a notice:

https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/august-2022-product-update-whats-new/

"Simulation

Update to Fusion 360 Simulation Extension Local Solve Capabilities 

In the up-coming September update for Fusion 360, local solving for Linear Static stress, Modal, Thermal, and Thermal stress study types will be no longer be available.  Cloud solving will be the only option available for all simulation study types as a part of the Simulation Extension.  Going forward, we are focusing on the availability and overall experience that is provided. We are doing this in order to focus on performance, availably, and experience delivered as a part of the simulation workflows. "

Does this mean I will now have to start using cloud credits for the features I used to have access to locally? If that's the case, it's very frustrating because I have invested in an expensive computer to be able to handle this program with ease. I use the Linear Static stress simulation quite often as I make frequent changes to my designs as I R&D. It is not going to make financial sense for me to use this feature on the cloud. My system is quite capable doing it locally without issue.

Please keep the local simulation features available! In fact, I would love to see an expansion of the other simulations to be done locally. Thank you.

[rokusho]

Absolutely ridiculous. This makes Fusion much less desirable

[TMC.Engineering]

This is indeed unfortunate as I use static and modal.  Are people using other options?  I have been using Mecway since 2014 for some simulation work.  @$350 for a perpetual license it may be a good option for people with budget constraints.  it is more of a pain having to flip back and forth.

[slaughlin79]

i know this is old but i just now read that tokens expire after a year even though fusion gives you no choice to pay another way. i mean why take your hard earned money at 3 times what the price of a cloud credit use to be when they can sell you an unreal object and then if you dont use them quick enough they come and take them from you so you need to spend more money.  ive never and neither have any of you heard of a product inflating to 3 x the cost over night.  not even gold or even more so rhodium ever trippled in value over night.  cloud credits were 1 each hunerd for a hunerd but now a hundred will set you back 300. ive had my credits taken from my account twice mistakenly and i had to buy an extension for two months. well i was repaid the credits but wasnt refunded for the money spent on that extension twice. they did give me about twice the amount of tokens back but it took 5 months. And now well 2 months later 1126 tokens have gone missing from my account again and im waiting to be reinstated.

now all that money being taken in for something to get worse there is some serious problems inside that fusion 360 ownership.

We cant do anything about the price of tokens but the expiration of those tokens just so you have to purchase more of the exact same thing might be illegal. maybe im wrong bc im sure fusion had lwyers looking at these unethical practices or  maybe they just thought we would sit by quietly, letting them do the equivalent of bu nuh ner nuh ner nuh ner, you know the movie deliverance to us but i wont. i work too **** hard for my greens to tell me my money has an expiration date. the usa has standard business practices and wonder if this falls into some kind of monopoly. this is all just very disrespectful to the anyone whether paying monthly or years up front.

[phillipJSCHJ]

Bump

[jeffrbeyer]

@jeffrbeyer - this post has been edited due to Community Rules & Etiquette violation.

I just wanted to add that the company I ended up working for (Keeping their name hidden to prevent backlash) left Autodesk for another software about a year and a half ago, mainly due to this local simulation issues, and we can't be happier. Anyone looking to leave for another software company, DO IT. The more people who leave, hopefully the more people involved with making decisions at Autodesk will change their ways (Or get fired due to loss of profit). 

[tomas.baborsky]

And which software they started to use as replacement? 

[phillipJSCHJ]

Which is a dang shame as the software itself is good, but Autodesk's business practices have gotten so incredibly toxic. 

[jeffrbeyer]

@tomas.baborsky Solidworks and SimScale have been the main ones, and have been excellent in working with us and others in making their systems work with us to do what we need, and not us having to change everything just to work with them

[rokusho]

Interesting. Will look into them. Maybe switching to Solidworks for their
simulations is worth it.

[phillipJSCHJ]

Ansys is great, and Fusion has some tools to import studies. You can setup, trouble shoot if needed, and run simulations with results before Fusion even begins to finish uploading and processing a study. It's INSANE that they removed local processing for studies, we have invested into a decent PC and have more than enough power for these sims.

But Autodesk don't give a flyin' funk, they're happy to leverage us for every dime and dollar by removing features and forcing us into their cloud-based buckets. Shiesty behavior.

[khokeson]

How much does entry level Ansys cost?

Base Solidworks + Sim will cost you about $6k + another I think $1750/year for subscription. Basic Solidworks is $4k, but almost everyone gets the $6k mid-tier version. Basic simulation is I think $2k, but I might be wrong on that, and the subs are I think $750 or $1k a year, again I might be wrong on that. You don't get as many simulation types with Solidworks entry-level simulation as Fusion provides, but you have MUCH more control, inquiry, and output options. You can even export deformed bodies post simulation (thermal expansion, bending etc.)

It would be interesting to see an ROI breakdown of Solidworks or other similarly price sim software VS what Autodregs is making you do. The others will surely be more upfront but considering not only are cloud credits not cheap, even basic simulations take forever. I've had ultrabasic cantilever bending simulations, which you could do by hand, take like 20 minutes to complete. Solving locally this took literally 2minutes or so - that's another huge added cost. Not enough time to go do something else, delays results and making progress, costs expensive man hours etc.

[Ron_Young]

It's not an either or situation. You present a false dichotomy while attempting to pass it off as "the only way".  You can leave the existing local solve codebase as is while you continue to develop your cloud version, hell, you could even sell that as a value add once it becomes markedly better.

I develop software as well, that story is bollocks and we both know it.

[phillipJSCHJ]

Your OS excuse is absolute bullshat. 

Numerous competitors, even some legacy software, runs just fine today as it did years ago. Only your cloud-based software has gotten progressively worse with time with even worse value as you REMOVE AND THEN CHARGE FOR FEATURES that were previously included with users' licenses, on top of handicapping Fusion to your unreliable and slow servers. And it does nothing to free up productivity as Fusion freezes for most all of the uploads and cloud solves still! 

Two years later, we all universally disagree with the move. 

[phillipJSCHJ]

The ROI flips pretty fast when work can't be done because your software is now 100-percent dependent on an uncaring corporation's servers. What takes Fusion 10s of minutes or more happens in <5 minutes with Ansys, and when there's errors, Ansys gives you details instead of waiting a half-hour to tell you the sim has failed with zero details as to why -- even thought that sim worked just one revision ago with no changes to the setup's variables. 

[jeffrbeyer]

Exactly this. When I have a user that needs to do a quick simulation, why should they have to wait for the cloud to catch up with their workflow. We had a user use a stopwatch as a test for a day at work. They found that they spent around 1 1/2 hours just waiting around for the cloud to handle simulations that used to take around 5-10 minutes on their own machines. At $50+/hour, that user was just sitting around while they waited for results. That is not okay in any business situation

[phillipJSCHJ]

It's almost like Autodesk employees don't use this software daily and have no clue what's vital to users!

It's such a shame that something as capable as Fusion has been so knee-capped by greed these past few years. At this point, if it weren't for things like how much quicker it is for sheet metal stuff, it'd be uninstalled. 

[rahul.patil]

Hello Everyone,
I wanted to reiterate that the main reason for moving Fusion Simulation solves to the cloud is to reduce the dependency of our solvers on different OS and hardware and the level of effort involved in maintaining it. You can read more about this in the link below:
https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/heres-why-were-moving-all-simulation-solves-to-the...

By reducing the overhead of supporting simulation solvers on multiple OS and hardware, we have been able to refocus our efforts on adding more capabilities to Simulation as well as many other parts of Fusion, which you can find in the What’s new documents for our releases, as well as substantially improve our cloud performance over the past couple of years. We know that we can never match the speed of local solve, since there is always the added time for uploading and downloading data with a cloud solve. However, in the past couple of years we have made some major improvements in our cloud performance by making the cloud solve pipeline much more efficient, utilizing more powerful cloud machines, reducing latency in data transfer etc., where a simple simulation solve that used to take 6-7 minutes on the cloud, now takes less than 2 minutes. We are continuing to identify and improve areas of cloud solve to reduce the solve times even further.

For users who have concerns about cost, I would like to reiterate that the Linear Static Stress Simulation Study, which is used by majority of our users, is included in your Fusion subscription, and does not cost any additional money. For users who use other simulation study types very frequently, I would highly recommend evaluating the Fusion Simulation Extension, which now includes the Generative Design studies as well, and also has a 14-day trial option. By subscribing to the Fusion Simulation Extension, users will no longer have to pay per simulation job using tokens and can submit as many jobs as they would like.

Best regards,

[hmortim]

Rahul, Thank you for the reply. Since I originally posted this, how many customers have been displeased versus happy with the changes? I stopped using the simulation function since this was implemented due to it being time restrictive. It's a feature that has minimal value to me anymore, unless I absolutely need to test a new design for my product.

[phillipJSCHJ]

That's a whole lot of damage control and lies, this has not resulted in faster simulations and there's numerous other pieces of software, even in Autodesk's portfolio, that don't have problems offering local solve. Ansys is faster EVERY SINGLE TIME, even including the time to import vs. just clicking "Solve" and waiting for just the cloud to return results. I run into Fusion server issues every single week, and still have zero options when your servers are down, which is multiple times a month. You goofs do not understand that this DOES NOT BENEFIT USERS. This was just easier and cheaper to develop, as you mention.

Lastly, you STILL REMOVED FEATURES FROM PAID SUBSCRIPTIONS AND BURIED THEM BEHIND OTHER PAYWALLS, which is highly unethical. Trying to play off the current packages as a positive is wild to me while ignoring previous packages were more comprehensive.

And why continue to invest into Autodesk products when we can't be sure, ever, that the offering will be consistent?

Nobody here cares about your claims, our reports aren't tied to pleasing our bosses at Autodesk. Our experiences are universally negative, this has been a long-discussed negative in the forums and the greater CAD community, and y'all continue to ignore the people who fund your paychecks about what we want out of this software. And there's plenty of examples of people leaving Fusion for other platforms.

"Oh, well, it's just a few people in the forums," some corpo suit will surely say. 

The reality is that most people just don't take the time to report these views, they just leave the platform - as many others here have. 

Been using this software for more than a decade, it is excellent at its tasks for the most part, but y'all continually refuse to admit that your all-cloud vision isn't what we're wanting and isn't working. 

[wmhazzard]

@rahul.patil What do you mean "reduce the dependency of our solvers on different OS"? You only support two operating systems and as far as I know, you have no intention of supporting any others. Those two operating systems were already working with the simulations and should only have needed to be updated to continue working. 

Or, are you talking about the operating system of your servers which is probably Linux, so you don't want to include Windows and Mac. 

You removed a feature in order to make more money and now you are putting a corporate BS spin on it.