Usability, sketch and timeline issues

[Anonymous]

A few issues I have noticed after the last bigger update:

• Look At function stopped working properly. It only looks at surfaces, not points or other sketch objects. This was already fixed in a previous update (I was able to Look At more or less anything), but stopped working again a few weeks ago.
• In sketch mode, when trying to edit a spline tangent handle, grabbing the handle end for moving the tangent is very "fiddly" now, mouse needs to be exactly at the right position, one pixel aside and the whole tangent handle is selected and moved (along with the according spline fit point). Why would I want to move the whole tangent handle anyway...? This was also good before the latest bigger update a few weeks ago.

Also, not necessarily related to the update:

• There seems to be a problem using sketch lines which are intersected/projected from a surface (the maroon colored ones) as part of the sketch drawing. For example, when I use the maroon line as a tangent line to another normal sketch line/spline, it works, but after exiting the sketch or doing something else, this tangency commonly fails on its own giving an error message for that sketch which I think is just "compute failed", and the tangency symbol becomes red. The same kind of problem comes up when using maroon lines as targets for coincidents for normal sketch splines, the coincident just disappears or the tangency handle becomes unusable (last time half of it disappered).
• I seem to be losing components randomly that I have created at some point of the timeline, when I go back and forth in the timeline using the "roll marker here"-function. Even if I go all the way back to end, a component may be missing from my project. I have seen it pop up again after closing and opening F360 again, but not necessarily. This is a bit worrying as the behavior is very random. I have confirmed it happens when using the history roll feature.
• When going back and forth using the history roll feature in the timeline: when making an edit to a history sketch for example, when I roll the history back to end, F360 recalculates all the steps after that edit, which is all good and a very nice feature but sometimes very slow to complete. I have noticed that my CPU utilization is very low during the recalculation, on all CPU cores. I have an 8-core CPU and the task manager indicator barely comes over a few %. Could there be a scope to optimize multi-processor usage to speeden up the recalculation process? Same goes for other time-consuming tasks like fillets on more complicated objects etc. 

All the issues reported are in parametric mode, i.e. when the history collection is on. These issues are collected after using F360 for a few months. Some may be related to me doing something wrong or "unclean", but hopefully someone can catch some of these for future updates.

[karina.harper]

Hi @Anonymous 

I'm going to go through and try and answer these one by one. In the future, if you have a suggestion or an issue to report, it is helpful if you include screenshots/screencasts and try and post about one issue at a time. That way we can better track and understand the issues.

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• Look At function stopped working properly. It only looks at surfaces, not points or other sketch objects. This was already fixed in a previous update (I was able to Look At more or less anything), but stopped working again a few weeks ago.

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This seems to be working correctly for me. I don't believe that the look at function is supposed to be able to look at points or lines, as they are not oriented in a particular direction. You can select a sketch from the browser tree which works for editing particular sketches.

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• In sketch mode, when trying to edit a spline tangent handle, grabbing the handle end for moving the tangent is very "fiddly" now, mouse needs to be exactly at the right position, one pixel aside and the whole tangent handle is selected and moved (along with the according spline fit point). Why would I want to move the whole tangent handle anyway...? This was also good before the latest bigger update a few weeks ago.

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I just played with it, and found it pretty similar to the previous behavior. Grabbing the arm itself and pulling looks to be intended behavior here.

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• There seems to be a problem using sketch lines which are intersected/projected from a surface (the maroon colored ones) as part of the sketch drawing. For example, when I use the maroon line as a tangent line to another normal sketch line/spline, it works, but after exiting the sketch or doing something else, this tangency commonly fails on its own giving an error message for that sketch which I think is just "compute failed", and the tangency symbol becomes red. The same kind of problem comes up when using maroon lines as targets for coincidents for normal sketch splines, the coincident just disappears or the tangency handle becomes unusable (last time half of it disappered).

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This is a fairly common issue, and is a symptom of parametric modeling. Those maroon lines rely on their projections. When the original body or sketch is changed or move, those may fail. If you have an example of this that is particularly bothersome, feel free to share it and I can take a look.

• I seem to be losing components randomly that I have created at some point of the timeline, when I go back and forth in the timeline using the "roll marker here"-function. Even if I go all the way back to end, a component may be missing from my project. I have seen it pop up again after closing and opening F360 again, but not necessarily. This is a bit worrying as the behavior is very random. I have confirmed it happens when using the history roll feature.

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That is strange. If you have an example of this, that would be great. Otherwise we have no way to diagnose it.

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• When going back and forth using the history roll feature in the timeline: when making an edit to a history sketch for example, when I roll the history back to end, F360 recalculates all the steps after that edit, which is all good and a very nice feature but sometimes very slow to complete. I have noticed that my CPU utilization is very low during the recalculation, on all CPU cores. I have an 8-core CPU and the task manager indicator barely comes over a few %. Could there be a scope to optimize multi-processor usage to speeden up the recalculation process? Same goes for other time-consuming tasks like fillets on more complicated objects etc. 

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From what I understand, Fusion, like most other modeling programs, is only able to use a single core. Here's an article I found after a quick google that talks about why.

Cheers!

Karina

[Anonymous]

Hi,

thanks for the response! F360 has been a useful tool so far, especially the parametric model is really good as long as it's used with care. It does still have some features and bugs that make certain tasks very complicated and slow to accomplish. I'll take screenshots etc next time I run into these issues for better reports.

A few additional comments in response:

• Look At definitely worked for at least sketch points, because I was very happy when I realized that feature was added/fixed a few months ago. Now it doesn't work again. I'm sure of this, it didn't necessarily look at the point as you say, but it did center the camera "look at" point to whatever was selected when I pressed the look at button. This was very very useful to roll the camera around the point when trying to resolve issues...
• Tangent handle issue is just about the fidelity, it has definitely changed as I never had an issue before where I would move the whole tangent by accident, now it happens almost every time instead of just moving the handle. I have used that feature a lot so I noticed the change.
• Regarding the maroon lines, the tangents and coincidents go bad even without remodelling anything, I have had the tangent turn red just by getting out of the sketch and opening it again. But yes, if the surface used for the projection/intersection changes, it will go wrong and I understand that's a fairly difficult thing to keep track in parametric mode as F360 has to change the affected line/spline too. But on the other hand, that's what happens when you change a normal sketch line, it has an effect on the ones tangent to the changed one... so I guess it's doable in theory.
• Regarding CPU, I meant that even the one core is generally barely occupied when doing the recalculations of the timeline, let alone all 8. There are ways to distribute the tasks between cpus, but yes, I understand it's not easy in certain applications. But not impossible 🙂