Black screen on Mac

[jan_ekholm]

So I downloaded Fusion 360 to see if it would work for me to design some 3D print stuff. Upon first launch this is what I see.

Is this correct?  I would have assumed that I should see at least the XYZ planes, some rotation gizmo and some grids. 

This on a 2021 MacBook Pro with enough memory. From googling it seems like this bug has been present since at least 2017, so that does not give a too good first impression about the software quality of this product.

[jhackney1972]

It looks like a graphics problem.  Be sure your graphic drivers are up to date and then go to Fusion 360 Preferences and try a different Graphics Driver.  Fusion 360 has to restart between driver changes.

[jan_ekholm]

Thank you for the quick reply. Unfortunately you don't install random graphics drivers yourself on the Mac, everything comes bundled in the OS and there are rarely driver related issues like on Windows. Based on how F360 behaves it's clearly not a particularly native Mac app and probably uses something like Wine or similar to maintain a shared codebase with Windows. So no wonder there could be some rendering issues here and there.

Fortunately though I got my background working by restarting F360 a few times. Seems the initial launch after installation was somehow messed up as the whole application crashed when I exited.

[jan_ekholm]

While following the official tutorial videos and doing some simple sketching I've had this piece of garbage crash five times in maybe 15 mintes. Data loss each time. I can't believe this thing is actually sold in this shape as a commercial product meant for professionals. It crashes when adding a fillet, it crashes when tapping the "Home" button, it crashes when orbiting my box. Utter dumpster fire.

[TrippyLighting]

Please share the design and create a screencast.

I use Fusion 360 every day for many hours in a professional engineering environment in designs with thousands of components. 

I am not dismissing your experience, but I haven't seen a single crash of Fusion 360 in at least in a few in weeks and at least 100 hours of work. 

Is macOS up-to-date on your machine?

[jan_ekholm]

I submitted all the crashes to Autodesk via the crash reporter, so it should be easy for them to find and fix.

[TrippyLighting]

Well, then suit yourself!

[jan_ekholm]

I don't really see what good a video would do here. I assume you're not working on the code itself? Do you use the Mac version? It seems Windows is the primary platform and it's probably really stable there. But if you use the Mac version and have had no issues then there's still hope that my installation will be stable. I installed a new minor macOS version that I had put off for a while, perhaps that helps.

My post was mainly targeted at Mac users so that people could confirm that it's indeed unstable or let me know that it should work perfectly fine. So far I have no data from Mac users.

[TrippyLighting]

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@jan_ekholm wrote:

I don't really see what good a video would do here. I assume you're not working on the code itself? Do you use the Mac version? It seems Windows is the primary platform and it's probably really stable there.

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I've used the Mac version since 2014 across 2 different Macs. I started on a mid 2010 iMac. Then I moved to a 2017 MacBook Pro. The iMac isn't used for CAD anymore. The Intel MacBook Pro works just fine for Fusion 360. 

Nowadays I do most of my professional work on a Dell Precision notebook and peronal projects on a PC purpose built for rendering, designed around a AMD Ryzen 5950 with 64GB of memory and NVIDIA 3070ti graphics card.

From a Fusion 360 standpoint, performance wise the Dell and the the MacBook Pro are close with the Dell having a slight advantage.  I've run extensive tests! I have not seen, or do I currently see a functional difference between the MacOS version and the Windows machines.

The macOS version is as good as the Windows version. I know a good number of the Fusion 360 team members personally and through online meetings and many of them  use the macOS version of Fusion 360.

For the black screen issue a video won't do a thing.

For workflow related crashes, having a video and a a data set/design will definitely be helpful. I've not experienced a crash in Fusion  360's Sketch engine in ... heck, I don't even remember!

[jan_ekholm]

Nice, so it should be fine then. It was my (wrong) assumption that the Mac version was something someone pushed through a compiler in anger and never really tested. The weird floating UI elements and non native UI does give a slightly amateurish look.

But my crashes seem to be gone since I updated to the latest OS version! I was lagging one minor version behind just because I hate to reboot. It has been stable since that with no black screen and no crashes! Before that it would crash from things like "new project -> new component -> new sketch",  "new project -> new component -> new sketch -> rectangle -> extrude -> orbit" or simply by clicking the "home" button up in the top toolbar. The project tree on the left side would also disappear. Or not disappear, it would simply be rendered *under* the main window. These components are somehow own windows and rendered on top of the main UI, not in it as normal. This means that if I grab the F360 window and move it around parts of the UI lag behind. 🙂 Not a problem as you don't normally move the window, but still speaks of an "interesting" software architecture.

I have been able to follow along some tutorials and do stuff without crashes. Even got a first own thing 3D printed already.

[jan_ekholm]

Well, no, the "project tree" still disappears. This is what it should look like:

After I move the window it looks like this:

If I move the window I briefly see the UI elements but then they seem to disappear behind the main window. By zooming or resizing the main window they seem to find their correct place in the window hierarchy and show up again. Curious way to do UI elements. Not how I'd do things, that's for sure.