F360 Engineering Drawings can't handle large parts, when will this be possible, why no more Inventor LT?

[jam3ssnyder]

I'm not exactly sure where is best to post this (after reading the suggestions on where to post topics, still not sure in this case), so apologies if this is not the correct place.

A while back I had posted asking for help identifying why Fusion360 struggles/freezes when dropping views into engineering drawings for complex parts with many faces. That post can be found here for reference. And thanks to @leowarren34 for the help on that one. Never found out why exactly, but that other products like Inventor can do the job much much faster. For the job I had at the time it was an acceptable work around to export large files out of F360, import them into Inventor LT, and then create a drawing there. Still a pretty ugly/inefficient workflow, but hey, at least it was doable.

Since then I discontinued my LT subscription (since I was using Inventor LT for one task), only to find now that Inventor LT is no longer being supported 😞 and subscriptions can't be reinstated. I suppose the main question is this:

When will Fusion 360 be able to handle engineering drawings for complex parts without freezing/hanging for many (10+) minutes? Robust engineering drawing environments are a critical part of many workflows and a fundamental inclusion in any robust 3D CAD program.

As I'm writing this, I'm downloading the Inventor 2021 trial to get this time sensitive job done over the weekend, but will not be able to justify the much more expensive subscription cost in the long run. 

As the Jonas Brothers would say, 'What a man gotta do?'

Fusion 360 has been an incredible piece of software to use for the last few years! These edge cases can be a pretty critical hang-up sometimes though. It would just be nice to not be left hanging by Autodesk in situations like this.

Thanks in advance for any recommendations and/or information on what to expect. And sorry if I've missed something - I live under a rock and my limited searching didn't turn up any results.

[jodom4]

Hey jam3ssnyder,

We know normal performance on complex models is critical for many of our customers, and this year our engineering and product teams will be putting substantial effort into improving handling of larger models than currently possible. "Large" is subjective though, how many components are we talking about here?

[jam3ssnyder]

Hey @jodom4 thanks for getting back to me and apologies for the delay.

I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for in terms of size, but they are single part files with a large quantity of faces. (production mold masters) A sample 'average' sized file is linked in my previous post mentioned above, but here's the link again if you are interested. Files around this size will typically hang for 5 or so minutes for me but eventually drop into the drawing ok. Mold master designs that have more faces than the linked one - often due to fillets or sometimes custom surface modeling shenanigans - seem to hang indefinitely. As such, I need to export files out of F360 and import them into something like Inventor. It's a cumbersome process but takes, on average, less time to do so. Currently I can't even do that because of InventorLT being discontinued. Inventor takes a few moments to drop in the same part file, but is many many times faster.

Is there a time frame we can expect to see these improvements happen? My end of first quarter, end of second quarter?

Do you have a recommendation for a work-around to this problem for the time being?

Can you still issue licenses to InventorLT in the meantime until this problem is fixed?

Thanks!

[jodom4]

Hey jam3ssnyder,

If the complexity of the model geometry is the issue causing the lag in performance, I'm afraid we don't have a solution right now to help. There are certain best practices that can help in some cases, but I think the workflow you're using now is probably the best option.

I wish I could provide an ETA for improvements on this issue, but we don't have that information yet. Keep an eye on the blog for product updates, any changes will be presented there. https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/

[jam3ssnyder]

😞Pretty disappointed tbh