Is there any hope for Fusion? It crashes so much.

[pj5FMSC]

Our shop is a long time user of Fusion. Generally, I like the features and improvements, but I have two huge issues that cause me to constantly consider looking for new 3D CAD software.

First and most pressing is that simple, everyday actions crash Fusion frequently. For example, if I copy and paste an assembly, I have a 75% chance of a crash or a lockup. Usually, if I try the same operation again, Fusion crashes again, so then I have to come up with a workaround. For example, saving the file as a new file, then deleting everything but the assembly I want to copy and paste, then inserting the new assembly into my drawing, then break the link to the external file, then delete the workaround file. Wow, what a waste of time.

Second is that Fusion is often just plain and painfully slow. It does OK for simple designs, but, for example, if I import a STEP file with a PCB design, Fusion nearly grinds to a halt. Some operations perform OK, but then I interact something that involves the PCB design assembly and I have to wait minutes for Fusion to figure itself out. In another example, we have some CAD we imported from a vendor. It causes the same problem. Yes, we have learned to work around these issues by dramatically simplifying the imported CAD data. For the PCBs, we replace the real design with simple 3D objects like boxes with holes. For the OEM CAD data, we cut it into the smallest useful parts. That makes Fusion somewhat usable but it is super annoying and time consuming to go through the process of removing objects and surfaces and there are times where it would be nice to have more of the data in one drawing.

Of course, I have the fastest computer with the most memory I can reasonably use. I have upgraded computers multiple times hoping for an improvment. I have learned to save my work every few minutes (like the old days with mainframe computers!). But still, dealing with Fusion's BS means that I end up spending more time working around Fusion bugs and waiting on it than I do creating cool 3D CAD. I love the idea of the new features, but I personally would rather have a core 3D CAD feature set that is fast and reliable than whatever Fusion is right now with lots of cool new features but basically unreliable for professional work.

I know the problem is not just me or my computer. Other users in my office have the same problems. Maybe it is our CAD data? We have been using Fusion a long time. Maybe somehow our drawings got corrupted along the way?

Basically, I want to know if other full time Fusion users are having the same problems with crashing and slowness. If it is just me, maybe I can somehow change things. If this is a general problemm after this last week of non-stop crashing, I'm ready to give another CAD program a try.

[RajkumarIlanchelian]

@pj5FMSC Would like to certainly understand the crash and performance issues you have here and see how we can help. 

1. If you are a commercial customer you do have access to our support. Have you filed any cases with them that I can reference internally?

2. Are you crashes mostly in the design and electronics space? When you crash do you get a report to send to Autodesk? If so can you continue to send those reports? All I need is one report ID to find all the crashes you have submitted or your email and I can search of the reports too (if you have corporate email I can search with your company domain for all the other users that are crashing). This will give us an idea of which are the areas you are crashing. 

3. Is export/import the areas that you are having the most performance problems? Are there specific files that you will be able to share with us to investigate? 

Once again if you are commercial customer our support team can take these cases too and that can speed things up in terms of visibility to the engineering team. 

[pj5FMSC]

Thanks for your response. 

1) Do you mean do I pay for licenses? Yes, we have paid licenses. If I were to take additional steps to file a case every time Fusion crashed, I would accomplish nothing but crashing Fusion and filing reports.

2) We are not using the Fusion electronics features at this time. I am importing the PCB geometry we receive from our PCB designer (created in a different program) as a STEP file. However, this case where I am importing PCB CAD is just one example where Fusion crashes. Yes, I have submitted maybe 10 Fusion crash reports this week. You should be able to find them as I use the same login here as I use to login to Fusion. Not all the crashes are from importing the STEP files. As I mentioned, just basic copy and paste of assemblies or bodies regularly results in crashes. 

3) It is not the importing that is performing poorly (it does but I can live with that one time). It is the use of Fusion after importing basically any 3D geometry with even a bit of complexity (like a PCB design). Attached is a STEP file with the PCB design I've been working with this week. I can get it imported, but then, Fusion chokes on this when trying to design anything that uses the resulting assembly. I can't copy and paste or Save As any assembly containing this PCB geometry. As a workaround, I just spent 30 minutes deleting all the components off the PCB (capacitors, resistors, fuses, mosfets, heatsinks, etc.) and now I can at least copy and paste assemblies without Fusion crashing or getting stuck for longer than I am willing to wait (15+ minutes).

Tell me how to file support cases and I will do it. I like Fusion. We have a ton of time invested in it. I sincerely want it work for us, but it feels like stability is getting worse instead of better to the point where it has become unusable.

[RajkumarIlanchelian]

Can you please direct message me your email? I do. It have direct access to your email for the forums. I can look i to all the crashes you submitted and see what we can do.

[pj5FMSC]

After deleting enough geometry from the PCB design to be able to copy and paste my assembly, I ran into another bug which I have seen before: When I move the assembly, it didn't move all the assembly's subassemblies. Last time I ran into this bug, I was working on a deadline and had to workaround it by fixing the assembly everytime I moved it. I'm sure it made a disaster of my timeline... move assembly 5 inches, move subassembly 5 inches, etc.. It is bugs in basic CAD operations like this that linger and make me question how much people really use Fusion for professional work. 

[RajkumarIlanchelian]

@pj5FMSC Thank you for the email. I am able to get all the crashes you sent to you. Please continue to send in these crashes as you get them. It seems like most of your crashes are coming in from various actions after you import the step file. We can certainly investigate on this one. 

@dsouzasujay @Phil.E I will send the crash query to both. It would be good if we can use the file that is attached and import it and see if we can reproduce the crashes reported. 

@pj5FMSC If there are any specific steps that you have for crashes that happens repeatedly it would be good to know. 
Also, for reaching our support since you are a paying customer, you can go to Fusion Help - support and diagnostics- get support and it will guide you to how to log support cases for which our support team also responds. We from the engineering team will also look at the crash reports. 

[pj5FMSC]

Oh joy, more and more bugs for what is a simple model. In the picture below, can you see the assembly that is below the others? This assembly just decided to move on its own after I went back and forth from Render to Design. I know it is not my imagination that it moved on its own. I have a STEP file I exported before it was moved that shows the correct position and there is no move/position showing in the timeline. Having been down this road with similar Fusion bugs in the past, it is not just a rendering glitch and the assembly will have to be moved back into position manually to continue working. Just another waste of time on an unsettling Fusion bug. I opened a case for it. FYI, the Get Support link in Fusion doesn't do anything special. It just takes to you to generic Autodesk page where, if you dig around a bit you can open a support case. The open a support case page isn't aware that Fusion is a cloud based program, so it isn't obvious if I should export the design to file then upload it to the create support case page (which is a waste considering Fusion is cloud based) or type out the name of the design or something else.

[pj5FMSC]

I finally finished my project. I got about 5 hours of work accomplished and spent about 10 hours working around Fusion bugs. This is not good. Not only am I here working late on Sunday night because of this, my work product isn't as good as it could be because I have to spend so much time dealing with Fusion bugs. Sure, I will open support cases, but that adds more time!

[pj5FMSC]

Just so you are aware of what happens when a paid customer turns in a support ticket:

"From the case description, I understand that “You have the STEP file, exported before the assembly was moved. It can't see the move in the timeline”.

Can we first if the "Design History" is turned on?

How to turn on the timeline to capture design history in Fusion

I hope this helps you in resolving the problem. Please feel free to write back to me if you need any further help with this or Kindly confirm if it's ok to close the case.

I included a screenshot showing the timeline indicating that Design History is turned on. I'm not really even sure what this reply means. I don't see how this support ticket could ever reach a resolution starting from this point, but I'll keep on sending emails. 

What I think is going to happen is that everybody at Autodesk is going to decide that these problems are just too hard to solve, leaving me with what is basically an unusable product. I suspect that very few people are able to use Fusion for professional work. Yes, if I create a toy project from scratch in Fusion and keep everything nice and simple, it only crashes occasionally, but as soon as I import data from an external source or try to do something that truly that adds complexity, Fusion will start crashing and/or running so slow as to be unusable. Add to that just the garden variety of bugs like I find constantly, even in Fusion created geometry. I am truly discouraged about Fusion.

[pj5FMSC]

Here is an example of a garden variety Fusion bug: The way I moved these assemblies into place is that I use Set Pivot and select a corner of the assembly. Then I initiate a move along an axis and snap to a corner on another, identical assembly. This should result in the assemblies touching, so there is no distance between them. However, when I zoom in close, it seems that the assemblies are close, but sometimes they are overlapping and sometimes there is a very small distance between them as shown in the screenshot below. Now, maybe you are thinking that the geometry is complicated and that led to the issue. But the pivot and snap points are distinct corners on simple objects extruded from rectangles drawn in Fusion sketches. This type of small error accumulates over time causing pretty much any long term Fusion design to have weird issues where things don't line up as they should or are just slightly the wrong size. I've learned my lesson, wasting time trying to fix this type of issue. If I actually try and get the assemblies to touch using the pivot point and snap tools, it just won't ever work. Whatever that bug is, it is consistent. I can manually calculate the amount to move, then manually enter that amount into a Fusion move command and that will usually fix it. This is what I mean by spending 2 hours working around fusion bugs for every 1 hour actually designing things.

[pj5FMSC]

Even this chat website has bugs:

[TrippyLighting]

That is certainly true, but this isn't one of those bugs. That is you selecting the quick-reply at the bottom of a thread instead of the reply function under a specific post 😉

Can you share such a model that causes you crashes?

Can you record a screencast?

I use Fusion 360 across a large array of different modeling tasks. Form surfacing to T-Splines to large assemblies with 20,000+ components. I see no frequent crashing whatsoever!

[pj5FMSC]

Thanks for the reply. I attached a STEP file above. I was able to import the STEP file and create an Assembly that used the imported geometry. Fusion would show the object tree and geometry. Performance wasn't great, but it was tolerable. But, every time I tried to copy and paste the Assembly that contained the objects in that STEP file, Fusion will crash. I went into the object hierarchy created by importing the STEP file and deleted a bunch of objects until I had just the objects I needed to continue working. After I did that, Fusion stopped crashing at least for this project.

Do you think 99.9% of my problems are because of imported geometry? Maybe Fusion is simply not appropriate choice when you have to work with imported data. That is what I am trying to figure out. In our case, we are an RV manufacturer. We build our RVs on chassis provided by a vendor that gives us CAD data. We have other vendors that make parts for us. Using outside CAD data has become a regular part of our business.

[pj5FMSC]

Call me crazy, but IMO, all Reply functions, even Quick Reply, should be able to properly count the number of messages in a post.

[TrippyLighting]

Ha, ha, ha, I did not even see that. 10 out of 9 LOL.

[TrippyLighting]

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@pj5FMSC wrote:

Do you think 99.9% of my problems are because of imported geometry? Maybe Fusion is simply not appropriate choice when you have to work with imported data. That is what I am trying to figure out. In our case, we are an RV manufacturer. We build our RVs on chassis provided by a vendor that gives us CAD data. We have other vendors that make parts for us. Using outside CAD data has become a regular part of our business.

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Possibly, but I'll have to check.

I work with imported STEP files all the time coming from different CAD systems, but not electronics CAD.

The latest imported assembly has 30,000+ components. I have not experienced any crashes ever when working with imported STEP files.

[TrippyLighting]

Right after import, please run the Inspect/Validate tools and see what it reports/repairs. It reports little and I don't think that is the problem here. But it's still a good idea to check.

In general, to improve performance (modeling and assembly) It is a good idea to delete all the small passives.

The "select by size" tool makes that a super quick task!

[pj5FMSC]

Thanks for taking your time to import the STEP file and check it out!

In the future,  I will definitely run the Inspect/Validate tools. 

The select by size to delete the passives, etc. is a great suggestion - thanks! I deleted them by hand in the object browser, ugh!

Your response has inspired me to continue to try Fusion and to invest more time seeking help in the future. We pay for licenses and support. I had a support call yesterday that was genuinely useful. The issue with the small gap described above is a Fusion bug, but, on the support call, I learned that the prefered way to move objects is point-to-point and it moves them without leaving random gaps and overlaps.

[TrippyLighting]

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@pj5FMSC wrote:

I learned that the prefered way to move objects is point-to-point and it moves them without leaving random gaps and overlaps.

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What exactly are you using the move tool for?

[pj5FMSC]

I created an assembly that contains our BMS PCB (which is what was in the STEP file), battery cells and a box and lid to hold the PCB and battery cells. Then, I created 7 copies of this assembly. To create a copy and move it into position, I  right click the assembly in the object browser, then select Move/Copy. In the Move/Copy dialog, I select, the make copy option  and move the assembly copy into place. You can refer to "MESSAGE 10 OF 19" to see how I was moving the objects. In this case, the boxes should all be touching each other. Now that I think about it, I could have created a rectangular pattern for the 5 boxes instead of doing a move/copy.