Looks like Simulation Mechanical is Being Shelved

[andrewdroth]

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/simulation-mechanical/learn-explore/caas/simplecontent/conten...

Any word on a replacement from Autodesk?

What are the other's here planning on trying down the road?

[laptop_geek]

That seems to be correct. I'm wondering if Fusion 360 Ultimate package will have the ability to interface with Inventor models... If they require all simulation models to be built in F360 then I could see that being a problem with our company. I also see there being an issue with having to keep everything on the cloud. A lot of companies (mine included) want to control their data and not have it on the cloud.

[andrewdroth]

Same concerns over here. 

We've invested a lot of time into workflows between inventor an simulation, and between simulation and reporting.

It will be interesting to see if these will need to be altered drastically.

It will also be interesting to see if a replacement can open old simulation files as well.

[laptop_geek]

Considering that ASIM has problems opening old ASIM files, so I'm not going to hope for too much there.

We've looked into some other packages before that were pretty tempting, the main reason we were sticking with ASIM was that we had already purchased it. We will probably look at that route again.

[jtylerbc]

The replacement from Autodesk seems to be some sort of cloud-based nonsense.  I'm certainly no authority on Fusion 360, but at a quick glance this looks to me like it requires a paid subscription, and then additionally charges per-solve using "Cloud Credits".  This sort of structure seems more appropriate for a mobile game, or possibly for occasional-use software, than for engineering software used on a regular (or even everyday) basis.  For my company, if my interpretation is correct, this could get quite expensive.  If I am wrong in this interpretation, then I would be interested in a clear explanation of exactly how this arrangement does work.

I also would have concerns about associativity to Inventor models.  For equipment design, Inventor is our primary system.  I don't see us replacing those programs with Fusion 360, so that would mean we end up with two copies of our models - the master in Inventor, and the Fusion 360 model that only exists for analysis purposes.  Will it be possible to associatively update that Fusion 360 model to changes to changes in the original Inventor model, or are they totally independent after import?  Does anyone even know at this point?

More than likely, this will cause us to look outside Autodesk's product line for a solution.  We've had a little bit of preliminary discussion on this today, and ANSYS has been mentioned as a possible candidate. 

[Keith.Orgeron]

Andrew... and others in this thread,

As a 30-year user of the original DOS-based Algor software using the SAP4 and NonSAP code released in 1982 from U.C. Berkley by Bathe, Wilson and one other professor.  They first dressed up these processors with intuitive GUI's for pre and post processing on PC's using, and then they spent millions on R&D with Carnegie-Mellon developing the Mechanical Event Simulation or MES product line... which still echoes in the claims of the new Fusion Ultimate's claims for advanced "Event Simulation".  I become somewhat of an MES expert, tested new features, wrote & presented conference papers, helped start a forum and advised Algor on various feature development efficacy.

Hooray!  Now we have the most capable CAD/FEA software developer in the world committing to this same mantra!  I firmly believe that AutoDesk will not only succeed in this effort, but excel... and whatever missteps that may occur on roll-out of the licensing configurations over these next few years, they will make it right.  I believe this because I think they "get it!"  

First, please note that I am a small player in a big field... a lone consultant and owner of Orgeron Engineering, PLLC... who financed $30,000 for a full SimMech license in 2015, then another commitment last year for a 3-year subscription... only to receive the recent AD message about dumping it in 2 years.  Now, if anyone's got a good reason to be upset, I believe I have "dibbs" on one of the top positions.

But, I have confidence in Autodesk.

[andrewdroth]

Out of curiosity I fired up fusion to see how the simulation environment performed.

It seems that it cannot handle surfaces. Does anyone know if that is correct?

I'm guessing the simulation environment it has now will not be the one that replaces Sim Mech, right?

[pier-olivier.duval]

We are kind of a strange users group of Simulation Mechanical...  10+ engineers group, having 4 AD nastran licence and 6 simulation mechanical licence.  We use Femap and NX from Siemens as our Pre/post.  We NEVER opened Simulation Mechanical...  Why?  We are old time user of Nei Nastran and we were licensed to Simulation Mechanical only for the possibility to use Nastran behind it. The advantage for us to buy SImMech is to be able to start unlimited solving runs on 1 computer with 1 licence compare to the licence of Nastran which became 1 seat = 1 solve.

Now, let say that we are very scare about this move.  We will not use Fusion, we just hop the nastran.exe application will still be improved in future and be available to those who wanted it.

Working for aerospace, we need to use a "nastran" solver and we always though Nei (Autodesk) is a better product that the others...  

[WilliamDimartino3487]

Well this is depressing. I guess I am officially a dinosaur. I have used ALGOR since 1987 and in fact taught some FEA classes for ALGOR back in the late 80's and early 90's. Since then my manufacturing company has been using it to design all of our products.

Now what are we going to do?

I can tell you with certainty, we are not going to support a pay for play model. And we are not going to be forced to put our designs in the cloud either.

So unless that changes we will look elsewhere when we can no longer run 2018 software for one reason or another.

Maybe the guys in Pittsburgh can buy it back. They did a much better job with the software anyway.

[ANTHONYMURPHY6778]

I'm not a happy customer, to say the least.

I have invested quite a lot of money and time into this product, and to see it gobbled up by AutoDesk to then turn around and shelve it!

"Not happy jan"

I simply don't see a future in the cloud credit bull **** that will carry forward, charging the customer for so called processing time?

This raises huge issues with I.P, patent development and the argument whether your product has been published? rendering any rights null in void?

Bad idea guys....

I will have to move to an alternative i can trust not a product that will be shelved or absorbed into something useless

Is there any way you guys will reverse this stupid idea?

Keep Smiling

Ant