More Mature Software

[Anonymous]

I my name is Mario Belanger senior mecanical engineer and beta tester for inventor since the begining, listen guys you have a diamond in your hand with FUSION 360 bring that software to another level PLEASE you NEED SHEET METAL, PROFESSIONAL DRAWING i dont no when you will make dose improovement but it is hard to use your software for professional engineering and my goal its to work with that software not in 2, 5, or 10 years you have to understand that Engineers need software like yours cause your are the future of CAD hope i will have awnsers to my question have a good weekend

[roambotics_scott]

Agreed on all counts but please, AD, don't release sheet metal in the same state drawings was (or still is) in (or at least clearly call it a «beta»)

[WyzeOwl]

Patience is a virtue. Fusion will become the defacto cad platform in a few years. We just need to wait a little longer for all the neat things the community is bombarding the Fusion team with. Just a matter of time.

[Anonymous]

Sheet metal! Yeah ok. What about making f360 bug free first? 

Invetor costs what £1300 a year. You got sheet metal in that correct? 

Solid works costs £4000 + £1200 a year. You got sheet metal In that too. 

Qestion is here. 

If you have inventor. Why do you use fusion? HSM perhaps! 

I'm not sugesting that sheet metal not being there. But it's in the road map at least. 

[Anonymous]

I agree.  I do shop drawings primarily for stone shops.  They love the 3D rendering that can be done, but I need to be able to modify the title block in drawings to put it in the form they want.  I am transition from SolidWorks.  I like the Fusion 360 and see the potential, but I need things to functioning now, not years from now.  The other option is to move on to another software.

[roambotics_scott]

What concerns me isn't even the «eventually» so much as that there still isn't any sign of it converging.

Patience is a virtue, but it's already been years and there is every indication that there will just be a lot of half finished potentially but not quite cool things like drawings.

Being agile and continuously improving is great but (even if only for the psychological wellbeing of the team and users) there needs to be a point where (drawings|sheet metal|simulation|whatever) is at least minimally feature complete and fully usable.

There is still the impression that things are driven by marketing bullet points rather than fully working bits. I hate to keep going back to drawings but it's a great example because what it'd take to make that fully usable in some minimal sense (and not just a nice thing for the evangelists to demo and simulate that) isn't years worth or work. It's more order of months. That wouldn't include all the bells and whistles but it'd be a fully usable product.

That might be a symptom of the continuous integration / rapid deployment / major version less model because each release is a clear improvement and occasionally includes significant new features, but there is never a «drawings will be usable in 4.0 no matter what» moment. That's got a lot of nice advantages but it also means almost everything is left feeling half done with a perpetual «we'll get to that eventually» attitude

[Anonymous]

IMHO

Fusion 360 feels like it is targetted directly at beating SolidWorks. They've been losing college students to them for years, so now with the birth of addidtive manufacturing the time for a new Inventor product is ripe. Fusion 360 is a great product since it combines CAD, CAE and CAM into one very cool product. The licensing model is consumer in order to grow the user base, and with the influx of more hobbyists from the Maker movement AutoDesk is playing it right.

I do hope sheet metal support makes it into the product via mature plugin updates from Inventor, but I have a feeling the 3D printing, laser cutters, wood and metal CNC machines (Shopbot, Tormach, etc) as well as WaterJets are going to create some very interesting market dynamics as to whether a "Photoshop" like product will emerge as a winner, or whether the market will stay niche and fragmented.

[roambotics_scott]

Generally agreed @Anonymous except that there are still lots of things that make cool demos, but aren't fully fleshed out.

As cool and useful as sheet metal would be*, my complaint about the [now ~5 year old] product's maturity is that so many basic things aren't fully fleshed out. Stability is finally getting more reasonable**, but there's still almost nothing in there that's complete. It's not just things like Drawings which still seem like a poorly considered afterthought***, but just basic stuff like having consistent / usable symmetries and patterning is so broken that it might as well not exist at all.

Just for fun, try placing an embossed logo so it fits in a defined rectangle without doing any calculations. Try the same with text. Even being careful not to use one of the many fonts that won't render in the application. This idea to fix that (http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/ideastation-request-a-feature-or/make-the-text-in-sketch-more-robust/idc-p/6203144#M13974) just got archived due to lack of votes, but you shouldn't need votes to see that that's a good idea.

Drafted extrusions aren't usable. Ditto parametrics / timeline (sure both demo well, but even with a lot of forethought I've still not been able to use them to make nontrivial changes to moderately complex designs)

Maturity isn't about having a kitchen sink of features, it's about having features that work and don't break when users do reasonable things with them.

* As cool as 3D printing is, sheet metal is fantastic for makers. Building 3D things with 2D bits covers LASER cut plastic, cardboard, cloth, waterjet cut metal, etc. It's not just some esoteric / antiquated way of building things, and if the goal really is to compete with Solidworks, it's in there.

** though I still see people complaining about it so it's definitely not there yet

*** those are particularly annoying to me because I spent a fair number of hours getting interviewed and talking with the drawings team before the product was released and a lot of the most basic / obvious / «no-brainer» stuff I asked for / recommended still isn't there

[TimeraAutodesk]

@Anonymous, thanks for your post and your constructive comments. I'm archiving this because it contains multiple ideas. Please post your specific ideas individually so that the community can vote specifically and we can best communicate the state of new ideas back to you as they move through our production pipeline. 

Best,

Timera

[O.Tan]

I wish I can +1 Kudos all of @roambotics_scott posts here, basically said all I kept telling and got tired of doing. :thumbsup: