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====== Fusion 360 ======

===== About =====

Fusion 360 is Autodesk's streamlined design to manufacture CAD/CAM package. It has an affordable license and (sometimes) intuitive interface.

===== Thoughts =====

Sometimes I feel like Autodesk is confused about the market they are serving and that really shows with Fusion 360. That isn't to say that it isn't pretty well made and easy to use, but some of the feature sets and lack of features seem to conflict with common use cases. Fusion 360 is their cheapest software suite and truly covers just about anything you could want to do. It is great in small CNC shops where you need to do design work and manufacturing. The built in CAM solutions are very competent. What makes significantly less sense to me is all of the web/collaboration features. While the combined design and manufacture features make sense for smaller groups, the analysis tools are just inferior to what is available in Inventor, and those are the tools I would expect big teams to be using. This connected first approach really gets in the way of how small entities tend to manage their data, but the cheap licenses and integrated manufacturing make this the likely tool of choice for those small entities. 

I my personal experience is that most smaller shops would prefer a local first or only setup. A lot of shops run jobs for bigger entities and one of the major ways you get better contracts is compliance. Certainly not the only major compliance scheme, but one of the desirable ones is ITAR. Fusion is not ITAR compliant. What I find frustrating about this is that it would be relatively easy to make their collaboration and sync functionalities opt-in. I personally contributed to the awesome tool [[https://github.com/aconz2/Fusion360Exporter|Fusion360Exporter]] by aconz2 because [[about:cust:idl|IDL Industries]] needed to have backups of their files and exports in a more general format, like .step files, in case they needed to switch CAD and CAM packages for compliance. Even their collaboration tools could be made compliant if they would put effort into their hosting. They have previously discussed it and even some larger players in manufacturing have asked for it, but they have made no moves toward it and even expressed that they have no plans to implement it.

This basically means they are relying on their tool being cheaper rather than actually improving it in ways that make sense or even just not adding anti-features. Most shops only option is to move to something like MasterCAM at nearly 10x the yearly cost for a single seat. Basically, Autodesk could gut MasterCAM's desireability in smaller shops if they wanted simply by adding a single compliance feature, but refuse to because they apparently don't grasp why someone is forced to switch to MasterCAM. I admit, my experience with MasterCAM is very outdated, but they seemed about on par then with where Fusion is at now as far as CAM goes a decade ago while being nowhere close to as good on the CAD side. That said, I am sure their CAM is better than Fusion in a lot of ways, especially a decade later, but it isn't going to be 10x as good. MasterCAM is going to be better at crazy multi-axis setups, but that is exactly the sort of machine a company is going to own if they can afford the seat. They are in a niche that is required if you have to have support for offline work and that is exactly where Fusion fails for no reason. Autodesk's other tools allow offline file management so they have teams that are experienced and knowledgeable, but they somehow refuse to do anything about it. Even adding self-hosting for the syncing features would be trivial compared to their total technical overhead.

This is not my only gripe with Fusion. They also have a tendency to release half-baked changes that break things, especially in CAM, and even delete useful features to force more unnecessary and inferior cloud interactions like when they removed their local solving agent for FEA analysis. Again this flies in the face of the big team/big collaboration model they are trying to push. Big teams hate breaking changes. So do small teams, but it makes no sense in both their target and actual demographic. Big teams also want to be able to scale a tool to whatever hardware they need, not just hope the tokens they have are enough to solve it. Fusion's cloud platform and solver have been absolutely lackluster. With the local solver I could get a solution in 5 minutes essentially for free, and now it is going to take a couple of minutes and require me to pay for tokens if I run anything but the most rudimentary study.

I still carry a Fusion license just so I can play around with it and still be able to use it for business if it comes up, but I usually do my design work in [[kb:sw:open:freecad:start|FreeCAD]] or [[kb:sw:open:cadquery:start|cadquery]] and use [[kb:sw:open:calculix|Calculix]] for FEA. Read my [[:kb:topics:software:open_vs_closed|Open vs Closed Source]] rant if that decision seems odd.

{{tag>cad cam software}}
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