Mesh workspace & the Design Hostory

[chris]

Today is the second time I fell into, then crawled out of, the "Mesh Workspace is not accessible if you're capturing Design History" hole. I fell in before, researched it, found the answer, fixed it, went away, forgot it all, then came back and did it all again.

So I know what the solution is, but I'd like to understand what the problem is. Specifically:

1. Why can't the Mesh workspace exist with the design history?

2. The conventional worldwide accepted way to do this would be to grey out the Mesh workspace.

    This shows us it exists, but isn't available. Hover over it and a help text pops up saying "You can't use the Mesh workspace with design history enabled. Disable it to use the Mesh wqorkspace".

My question here is: Why doesn't Fusion 360 do that? What is the upside to leaving the world in the dark like this?

3. Given the number of times htis has come u pbefore, why doesn't someone see the problem and fix it?

This kind of UI misery is what turns a happy loyal customer into a frustrated and potentially hostile one.

It's the kind of UI misery which gives Fusion 360 it's "treacherous learning curve" reputation.

It's dumb - isn't it?

[HughesTooling]

You can access the mesh workspace with history enabled. From the create menu create a mesh feature and you will enter the mesh workspace. While active you can insert a mesh. Another option if you want to convert an existing body into a mesh is create a Base Feature, select the body and convert to mesh. This will create a mesh feature in the timeline containing the mesh. Not the Finish Mesh and Finish Base Future option on the top toolbar when you want to finish.

Mark

[HughesTooling]

Forgot, if you want to import a mesh and convert to a Brep. First import the mesh, create a base feature then convert. See screencast.

Mark

[chris]

Thanks for the time you gave me and others in uploading your solution, Mark.
As I mentioned, I was able to work around it, but I really should not need to.

The UI should guide the user to the user's desired destination.

Leanring endless point solutions from online forums is an astonsihingly poor way of doing it.

Especially since F360 is do rapidly changing and thes eoinline solutions faced from usefulness.

I really want some F360 staffer to see the light asnd start making changes at the top.

But, as I said, many thanks for your kindness here today.

[HughesTooling]

Doesn't help that there's so much misinformation out there telling people you need to disable history. If only people would look in the help.

http://help.autodesk.com/view/fusion360/ENU/?guid=GUID-FC78B102-4C36-47DB-9061-8D01826865A9

Mark

[chris]

I confess I gave up trying to use F360 help long ago, because it was relentlessly useless.

Maybe I should revisit that. I just searched "mesh units" and the second item hits the spot.

But really, in my view, when a user reaches for HELP then the UI has already failed them.

The UI is the place at which the user meets rthe product and it the place where customer experience is made.
This example is a good one, as I tried to explain earlier.

F360 hides MESH when you have the timeline on, with no explanation and no guidance as to where F460 hid it or why. Wrong answer.

If you import in another way, from another part of the UI, it does it, but makes a silent assumption about units. Another wrong answer.

Of course the F360 programmers are very smart people, and that;s why F360's capabilities re there. But a friendly, useab;le tool also needs to be more than that, and that is where I think F360 is sorely lacking, and has been for a long time.