Has fusion changed the way materials display in the recent update?

[paul.jefferies.0]

Hello, today I reloaded Fusion 360 and all my designs have quite radically changed appearance in the design and other workspaces. Now it looks crappy! before materials looked quite realistic, and now they look much flatter, like a CAD program from 20yrs ago would display them. I have not changed any graphics drivers, and I have a Nvidia A400 with 24GB VRAM and the latest drivers. I tried manually selecting DriectX 11 in the graphics driver tab and nothing changed. Has anyone else experienced this? Has Fusion changed the graphics engine, or the material library in the most recent update?

In general I just want to say that recently every update of fusion 360 has progressively made the product worse! Now it is so buggy it is a real pain to work with and I feel I am fighting against it all the time rather than it helping me! It's a shame, it used to be a really good product.

[davesvo]

I have noticed the same thing with appearances, what I had in my design looked good, now it looks terrible. I would assume the same issue with the materials? 

[karina.harper]

Hi @paul.jefferies.0 @davesvo 

Yes - there have been adjustments to the tone mapping in most of the environments. There was a big difference in how appearances would be rendered in canvas between environments before the July update. Which environment are you using? 

See July 2025 Product Update – What’s New - Fusion Blog for more details. This forum post has some more info as well: Solved: Re: Better modeling viewport rendering - Autodesk Community

Cheers,

Karina

[paul.jefferies.0]

Many thanks for your reply Karina. I see the update text you're referring to :

"We’ve adjusted the tone mapping of the modeling canvas to enhance your visual experience. Now, you’ll notice improved edge visibility and increased brightness of materials in all environments. This means clearer and more vibrant models."

I think the terms 'enhance' 'improved' 'clearer' must be very subjective! To me it looks like a freeware CAD package from the 1990s now! Could you please look into a way for users to be able to choose the old appearance model? I am using the dark theme, but all the themes seem to have suffered the same fate with this update.