Fusion
"I am working on a complex project, basically designing a custom water loop for my desktop, and there are many elements, and fusion 360 is having a very hard time."
This is likely to be related to the project you are currently working on. Can you share it here? What operations in specific are you doing that are slow (be specific - editing a sketch, adding a line to a sketch, adding a joint, adding an extrude feature, etc).
The GPU being idle is expected. Fusion today does not utilize the GPU very much (that is under development). Using all 12 cores is an important bit of evidence. Not that much in Fusion is multi-threaded, but a few operations are (faceting the model for display or export to STL, for instance).
If you have access to more than one computer, do you see similar performance on all of them?
But, in general, we need more information to help. There may be modeling techniques you can use (or avoid) that will help. In general, keep your sketches small. Don't pattern in a sketch, pattern faces or features instead.
Jeff Strater
Engineering Director
if you are willing to share it here publicly, just Export it as a "Fusion Archive (F3D/F3Z)", and attach it to your next post.
Jeff Strater
Engineering Director
A few observations.
1. as a beginner you should definitely not be working with the timeline disabled, because it makes it very difficult for us to analyse problems.
2. This is not a complex project. I frequently work in models containing hundreds or even thousands of components.
3. The reason the model opens so slowly is likely the enormous amount of geometry present in the two radiators.
4. Before embarking on such a project you should educate yourself on how to use the software properly. You should be working with the timeline enabled and components, rather than bodies only.
Then this project can be completed on my almost 12 year old iMac.
As I am building a PC at the moment myself (not custom water cooling though!) I am interested in this project. If you give me some time - a couple of days - I'll demonstrate what tremendous effects on performance these suggestions above have and how to do it right.
I'll demosntrate this with your data!!
@martyz242 wrote:
Thanks for the feedback, I really do appreciate it. I will try your suggestions.
Have some patience and wait until I have time to demonstrate 😉
Working on the radiator now!
will be interesting to see what @TrippyLighting recommends. I can, however, add that it does appear that my theory of the slowness on open is almost certainly time spent generating graphics. I'm on vacation this week, but when I get back, I will send this model to the faceting team for analysis. Perhaps there is some room for improvement here.
I suspect a big part of the time is spent on the radiator fins. In your current model, you are not using components. Instead, everything is a body. That is not a great method for many reasons, but performance is one of them. Every place where you have duplicate geometry (e.g. the fins in the radiator), Fusion is required to generate the graphics for them multiple times (each body gets its own set of graphics). However, if you used components and component instances, those graphics would only have to be generated once, and would then be shared by all instances. Similarly for the fan components.
Another suggestion: Do you really need all that geometry for the fins of the radiator? What is the purpose of modeling to that level of detail? Will you be manufacturing those fins yourself, or doing a fluid dynamic simulation of the flow through the radiator? If not, then perhaps there is no reason to carry that complex geometry along. Just model it using a simple representation, and apply a texture or a decal to indicate the fins.
All of modeling/design is a question of how detailed to go. I created a model of a log cabin recently, and had to answer the same kinds of questions: Do I try to model things down to the individual nail/bracket/roof tile, or is there some point at which that kind of detail just adds weight, and no benefit? Same question applies to all designs: Should I model each screw/nut/bolt in my machine, to full level of detail, including threads? What does modeling the threads add to the design?
Jeff Strater
Engineering Director
Sorry for the delay! First I forgot this thread and ten I had to find my way back here.
If the purpose of this model would be purely to arrange all the individual components and see how they fit together, I would follow Jeff's advise and not model all the internal fin geometry of those radiators.
However, just to demonstrate what impact proper modeling with components and component patterns can have I modeled one radiator close enough to the original.
I exported the original with "save copy as" into its own file in the data panel and then saved that to my local disk.
Then I re-designed the radiator from scratch.
The original design has a file size of 11 MB, the new design has 578 KB. The old file is almost 20 times larger!
After creating the fin components and the geometry, I also set all the fins to "unselectable" so they donlt intefere wit viewport performance.
If you follow this component based workflow, this design will respond very snappy to edits.
