Community
The goal of the Branch & Merge preview is to allow our community to provide valuable initial feedback, allowing us time to make the necessary changes, while the team continues to work on the rest of the features that will be in our first release. In this forum we will discuss your workflows, capture feedback and provide instructions.
Excerpt from Jan 19, 2017 Update - What's New:
The concept of branch and merge is common in the software development world, but is pretty new when it comes to product design. Why do all this? Because of two awesome reasons:
1. You can explore design variations without consequence.
We’ve all been there. You’re working on a project and you’re on version 85 and you think to yourself: “man...I really shoulda sketched that circle instead of using the cylinder tool…”, and you’re too lazy to go back and find the right version to promote so you stick through it and suffer the consequences. Hours later your eyes are bloodshot and you need a drink.
Branch and merge gets rid of all that because you can create multiple branches and explore different workflows, without the side-effects! If you screw up on one branch, go back to a milestone that you had set, or ditch the branch and move on to another. The master will remain untouched until you decide to merge to it. This introduces levels of stability to your designs, where you can multiple branches as multiple levels of stability (master, pre-production, prototype, sandbox).
2. You can manage changes like a pro.
It’s true. The only thing that is constant in this world is change, especially in the world of design. Whether you’re on your own or working a global design team, the last thing you want is seeing changes being made to designs where you have no idea what they are, what they replaced, and who is doing it.
Branch and merge let’s you not only create branches, but you can also create milestones for significant events that have taken place, worthy of capturing. Give them code names. Include details that are meaningful for you and your team. Every milestone made captures a snapshot of the entire project and everything related to it (subassemblies, related drawings, etc). Showing a visual tree of all your design decisions to your customers can take your project and relationship to with your customers to the next level.
Bryce and Aaron does a great overview of how to do this in their latest What's New Video.
We look forward to hearing from you!
I think the Branch & Merge functionality seems very promising.
From my short initial testing, It seems to work very well where you have a design with linked Components. Excellent, I love it!
But what about when you have a Project containing just one design file, which in turn contains maybe hundreds of individual Components? (the Fusion workflow many people seems to recommend and use, at least last time I checked). I'm able to push/pull changes between branches on a file-level only. Maybe I'm missing something. But is it possible to break down this to compare changes also on an internal Component-Level instead of just on file-level?
If this is not possible, then I think the Branch & Merge funcionality will not fully Reach it's potential, at least in teams where several designers will work in parallell on different Components which is internal to the same Fusion design-file.
Example of workflow to illustrate the problem (refer Picture above, this is one Project, and only one design-file with various internal Components):
Branch is created for material study of several parts according to compliance with Chemicals and/or environment. At the same time/location, a different branch is also created from master, to look into replacing a standard part with a different variant. Also at the same time/location, a branch is created from master, which will focus on redesigning a Component. This last branch gets two sub-branches for looking into two different solutions. At the time when you are ready to start mergning, you will get problems when trying to merge and keep all the desired changes from the different branches (this gets marked as a conflict in the merge dialouge).
Please correct me if I'm wrong, have misunderstood anything, or if I need to look at a different workflow. Thanks.
This is also super promising, but one minor issue i've noticed is..
If you perform a merge that alters the master, but have the master open.. when you close the master, it's auto-saved, and will not have been updated from the merge.. saving the old version over the new.
This isn't such a big deal, you can promote the correct version fairly easily.. but there should be something that checks if files are open and prompts to close them, or something, to avoid that confusion.
pretty cool new start!
I would add a warning/reminder to users if they really want to use this function because currently you cannot undo this.
Claas Kuhnen
Faculty Industrial Design – Wayne State Universit
Chair Interior Design – Wayne State University
Owner studioKuhnen – product : interface : design
Hi,
open project history dialog, click on milestone you are interested in, bottom window shows data/versions according this milestone. Notice your drawing version for selected milestone was for instance v5. So from data panel, expand file details, show all file versions and open/promote version you are interested in. For instance version 5. See image please.
Regards
Jan Priban, team Fusion 360
http://help.autodesk.com/view/fusion360/ENU/?guid=GUID-1B2D377C-2ED9-478A-BDB2-E4B1B2D3FB4C
Hey guys - closing this thread. Please refer to the new one: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/preview-functionality/branch-amp-merge-getting-started/td-p/6932665
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