Crashes a LOT on iMac

[Anonymous]

Hi, having a very frustrating experience with Fusion 360 on my iMac - in short, it crashes A LOT. I'm talking every 5-10 minutes when doing some pretty basic work on 3D car models i.e selecting mesh faces, extruding, splitting bodies, simply orbiting my object...

I have submitted a couple of the most recent crash reports under this account, hopefully someone can pick those up and give me some insight as to why this is so unstable. I'm on the most recent version of Fusion 360, and I don't think my computer is particularly underpowered for these tasks:

-2017 imac 5k
- 4.2 Ghz I7 
-Radeon Pro 580 8GB
- 40GB RAM 

I'd appreciate some help, this is really obstructing my work flow and business. Thanks.

[Phil.E · Accepted solution]

It's hard to say exactly what's going on based on the two crash reports you have sent. 

Both reports are for the same problem: working with complicated mesh models can overflow a memory buffer. In both reports you had converted a mesh (STL) to BREP (solid).  The crash is specifically related to very complicated mesh models (based on number of faces).

Try to reduce the number of triangles in your mesh before converting to solid.

As for the other areas of performance you mentioned such as orbit: turn off graphics effects and use a couple preference settings to reduce load on your graphics.

Help > Support and Diagnostics > Graphics DiagnosticPreferences > MeshPreferences > Graphics

And please send in every crash report if you happen to see one.

[TrippyLighting]

If your business revolves around working with triangulated mesh models then Fusion 360 isn't the proper software to do that with. .stl files are NOT CAD geometry.

[Anonymous]

This is really helpful. Thank you for taking the time to look at it. 

[Anonymous]

You're right. I just need to use 360 to optimise a few small pieces on each STL design before I can 3D print them in Chitubox. Anything you'd recommend? Thanks.

[TrippyLighting]

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@Anonymous wrote:

You're right. I just need to use 360 to optimise a few small pieces on each STL design before I can 3D print them in Chitubox. Anything you'd recommend? Thanks.

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That really depends on what these optimizations entail. Adding CAD-like features such as fillets, for example, is not really something that is trivial on a triangulated mesh. 

Autodesk Meshmixer can be helpful for many things as its main purpose is working with triangulated meshes. Blenders sculping tools can also be very helpful for certain things. Proportional modeling in Blender can also be very helpful.

The advantage of these tools is that they don't require you to lower the resolution of your .stl files.