Fusion 360 Personal Use 10 Saves

[Anonymous]

I am a retired electronics technician who started using AutoCAD in the early DOS days.  I love using Fusion 360 to develop printouts for my 3D printer, but I would also like to get a small low end CNC wood router to use in my shop.  I am concerned that I will run out of "saves" before the year is up and be forced to stop using Fusion 360, or worse yet, be forced to go to another free CAD Program.  I acknowledge that Fusion 360 is a very powerful program that is well worth your asking price, however, the Fusion 360 cost in my retired, hobby filled world is not feasible.  I would like to see Autodesk offer more "saves" in Fusion 360 Personal Use at a price hobbyist could afford. This will allow some hobbyist to grow into full blown Fusion 360 pro's, which will be good for Autodesk.

[TrippyLighting]

The free subscription of Fusion 360 offers you to create an unlimited amount of models.

Only 10 of them can be active for editing at any given time. You can change which ones are active and which ones are not.

[Anonymous]

Okay, I confess to being the new guy here and a very good chance I don't understand the Fusion 360 limits.  I thought the limitations on Fusion 360 were you could save as many drawings to the cloud as you wanted to, but could only save 10 files per year to your local computer.  To print something on my 3D printer requires me to do the 3D CAD work, save the file to my computer, run the file through Ultimaker Cura to generate the G-Code, and then use the G-Code to do the actual printing.  To 3D print something I draw, I must have access to that saved file, which limits me to being able to print only 10 items per year.  What don't I understand here?  Thanks for your time helping me to understand. 

[TrippyLighting · Accepted solution]

I think you are confusing a number of things!

The geometry you are creating in Fusion 360 is  BRep and NURBS data. Those are mathematically precise representations of geomerty.

What you save onto the SSD or the hard drive of your computer for 3D printing are meshes, I would assume in .stl format. Those are triangulated meshes.

I am not aware of any restrictions in saving .stl files. As you hopefully know, you can export those directly from Fusion 360, by right-clicking on the component, or body in the browser and selecting Export mesh, and then selecting the appropriate mesh format. I believe there is no limit to storing such files.

You can also save the Fusion 360 native file format .f3d to your local hard drive. Again, I don't think there is any limit to the number of files.

If you have a specific case where you ran across that "10 saves" limit I'd like to know.

YOu can also 

[jhackney1972 · Accepted solution]

Let me take a try at trying to explain the 10 Editable Documents to you.  First of all, you need to get your terminology correct.  You will be creating "Models" and then saving them as Mesh object to use in your Cura application.  From what you have said so far, you probably will never make a 2D Drawing.

I used my Fusion 360 Personal license to create a Screencast to try and explain what @TrippyLighting has already told you.  Please do not let it worry you, it will suit your needs and as I point out, there are a few tricks to get even more out of the application outside the 10 Editable documents at one time.  By the way, as I mention in the Screencast, that is 10 Editable documents not in one year, one day or one week, it is 10 at any given instance and it is totally up to you to make them editable or not. 

[Anonymous]

Thank you Trippy Lighting for your very detailed answer.  I have done several Fusion 360 3D Drawings but am still very much in the beginner category.  Thanks again for your kind help and I will try to watch lots more tutorials before I post a problem again.

[Anonymous]

Thank you John for your very thorough video showing me how the 10 file restriction works.  I am very new to Fusion 360 and have only drawn 2 or 3  3-D drawings.  I was very surprised at how fast my modest AutoCAD knowledge transferred to Fusion 360 and how little time to took to do some very powerful drawings. I was very impressed with the power and time savings of the shell command, it saved so much work.  YouTube Videos help me learn and are also very high quality, but since I haven't dreamed up many projects yet, my experience level is low.  I really like your (steam engine drawing?), you did a nice job on it

[Anonymous]

I am glad that this was asked and answered... If we had only 10 edits that were "one time use" items, then I think I would quit Fusion360... The 10 edits are "petty", unnecessary and inconvenient. But it is not a killer... It is something that the programmers decided to add to the software to annoy the free users into getting a yearly expensive subscription.

[TrippyLighting]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

…. It is something that the programmers decided to add to the software to annoy the free users into getting a yearly expensive subscription.

---

Or, it is something that Autodesk Management added to avoid illegal commercial use of the free version. That is something a lot of hobby users seems to ignore.

[Anonymous]

I am running into an issue where I can not save any files. I get this notice when I log into my account online

I can not find any information on Fusion 360 Personal license and how long Autodesk A360 Team will allow you have your account.

In Fusion 360 when I attempt to start a project, I get this icon.

Those blue circles never stop. 

I also get an error when trying to export to STL.

I think the key to this issue is shown when I try to do anything with my admin folder.  It says, "Not Authorized", like my account is locked.

Example of me trying to create a new folder in my Admin Project

I get a blue message at the top.

I just downloaded Fusion 360 for the first time today.  Any ideas on how to fix my A360 team account so I can use Fusion 360?