Fusion 360: Design and Manufacturing Road Map

DANIEL GRAHAM: Hello, and welcome to our Autodesk University virtual session, the Fusion 360 Design and Manufacturing Roadmap. My name is Daniel Graham. And I lead our design and manufacturing product management organization. I'm joined today by Rob, Ben, Seth, and Al.

Before we get straight into hearing from the team with what's coming in Fusion 360, I wanted to share what I see as trends and opportunities to do better in the market. When we talk to companies today, they're manufacturing organizations are a mix of fragmented technology brands and user experiences as well as data workflows. In this example, products like SolidWorks, Altium, Mastercam operate in isolation and data is stored on local islands and passed around via email.

In contrast, Fusion 360 offers a comprehensive data platform that unifies design and engineering teams with their adjacent departments, the shop floor, the supply chain, and ultimately the customer. This will enable smaller customers who operate across multiple disciplines in the product development process to be more efficient and capable of competing with larger manufacturers. For small to medium businesses, it connects departments and delivers against the challenges of a completely connected supply chain. And for large enterprise organizations, they can unify engineering and production and offshore teams with a single source of truth to work concurrently through the product development and manufacturing process.

In pursuit of building the unified product development platform vision in Fusion 360, we know there's more to do. And that's what we're here to share with you. Today, I have four members of my team who are respective leads of each of their disciplines to share out some of the active projects under development.

Rob Cohee leads our design and documentation group and will be sharing with you the professional set of tools he and the team are delivering to change the way that you design and engineer your products. Ben Jordan, who leads product management for electronics, is going to share our advancements around electronics design and manufacturing, which put us on the path to redefining expectations of multidisciplinary mechatronics design and manufacturing. Seth Hinman will be sharing out new workflows and technology that we're developing for generative design, for modeling, and fluid domains. He will also be sharing with you what is coming in our integrated injection molding simulation capabilities. And to wrap it up, Al Whatmough leads our manufacturing teams and will share updates around multi-axis machining, fabrication, as well as additive workflows.

I appreciate the time that you're spending with us today. And with that, let me hand you over to Rob.

ROB COHEE: When we first introduced Fusion 360, the very intentionally set out to disrupt the CAD market with a new, modern approach to design, where we wanted to put professional tools in the hands of anyone that wanted to make anything. The primary target audience for the design experience was those brand new to CAD. And that focus on new users form the basis for a lot of the decisions we made around where to invest, what experience to create, and the baseline for depth of capabilities that a user needed to be successful.

Now, over the last couple of years, we've been very intentional around shifting our focus from the individual user new to CAD to experienced, multidisciplined teams of professionals that have the need to work on the same design at the same time. This has led our strategy around what we're calling design concurrency, allowing multiple users to work on the same design at the same time and building out professional modeling tool sets that provide depth of modeling capabilities so that you can make a more manufactural part the first time with process-based tools that speed the time to complete your model. We also wanted to finish what we started with our documentation capabilities.

So let's go ahead and dive into each of these individually. And we'll start with design concurrency. Prior to this year, one fusion design document could be a single part or it can be an assembly where you designate the differences between parts by designating which bodies were components. This flexibility allows for very fast conceptual modeling. Users really didn't have to worry about the CAD structure to get their designs on the table.

And for individual users, that design-- the bulk of a product without others actively contributing to design, this will and continue to be a great workflow. This is typically described rather as top-down or multi-body modeling. Now, over the last year or so, we very intentionally created an experience for you through what we're calling bottom-up or distributed modeling, where each document can be its own part.

You insert these parts or subassemblies into documents that you would then designate as assemblies. You insert those as references. This is great when you need to use the same design in multiple assemblies.

And it's also a great way to distribute work between multiple project contributors like you're seeing here in this video. Now, the three key capabilities that were introduced this year that everyone should be aware of are edit-in-place-- the ability to edit a reference file within an assembly-- assembly context-- being able to reference geometry that would only be available if you have the large assembly open, but you only have a part open. You can actually reference what's in the assembly. And then design reservation and avatar-- what you're seeing on the screen right now.

The combination of these capabilities allows you to more efficiently model between multiple contributors to a design. The active real-time feedback as to who's working on what is done automatically without a manual check in or check out. And each team member gets real-time feedback and updates and are incredibly easy to distribute. There's no upload download, detach, or reattach design updates. Design concurrency is something everybody should be aware of.

Moving from team productivity to individual productivity is where we had three areas of focus this year-- performance and stability, modeling depth capability, and the introduction of what we're calling it manufacturing driven design. But we're applying it, in this example, the plastics and laticing. Now, in the area of performance and such, you told us about the issues around performance related to patterning. And we took action, reducing the preview and cancel commands from seconds down to incident response. Execution of the command was also dramatically improved.

The work that we did run joints has improved overall assembly performance. And we'll be introducing new join type soon, with the newest being tangent joints. So with modeling depth of capabilities, we saw the introduction of a number of new features for solid and surface modeling.

What we're showing here on the screen is one of the things we're really excited about. This is what we're calling manufacturing-driven design. The idea here is to bring more of the manufacturing process awareness into a set of design features that are aware of how a part is going to be manufactured. With our emphasis on consumer products, we chose to apply this principle to plastics [INAUDIBLE].

Now, when this concept is applied plastics, you can apply enough repeatable rules-- think sheet metal rules but applied to plastics. These are a repeatable set of rules, like for shell, and thicken, and rib, emboss, and others-- things like material thickness, and drafting, and those types of things. Having access to those set of rules will dramatically speed the time to complete because you're spending less time typing in the same dimensions to multiple commands.

We've identified a airplane the next obvious command and applied it to newly created geometry, like draft and fill it. So when you create a rib, you would, of course, need a draft and would, of course, need a fill it where it intersects with the body. Why not just include that in the same command?

Now, let's also not forget about our new geometric pattern feature as well. You are going to love this one. What's next? Well, we talk about tangent joints. We've got a big project coming with configurations.

And when it comes to volumetric modeling, a really cool project here-- volumetric modeling continues the amazing work that the team did last year on graduating the mesh workspace from preview. And the introduction of parametric modeling was phenomenal and very well received. Volumetric modeling is going to take additive design to another level.

To wrap things up with design and documentation, last year, we delivered an incredible amount of long-awaited drawing features-- broken views, weld symbols, or key highlights of that effort. Now, going into next year, the theme of finish what we started continues. You'll see auxiliary views, breakout views, the highly requested hole tables, and expanded support for DIN and JIS. And as more customers adopt Fusion for professional use, more requirements to make a drawing have an organization's unique signature are heard loud and clear.

We'll work in introduce a styles and standards manager that is both easy to configure and to roll out to the rest of your teams. Next, let me hand you over to Ben to talk a little bit about electronics.

BEN JORDAN: Thank you. So let's talk about electronics. Some of you may not know this, but Fusion 360 is also a world-class cross-platform electronics design tool. And it gives you the ability to go from concept to manufacture for the entire array of smart products from start to finish.

So in the coming year, you can expect to see some really significant enhancements to electronics design in Fusion, making it more discoverable, personalized, and productive for a multi-disciplined and specialized engineers alike. In the near-term, we've got a really nice system of panels and docking coming with easier, clearer controls that will enable designers to maximize your workspace for schematic and 2D and 3D design.

And so that includes things like collapse, expand, stacking, and so on, as you're looking at here. You'll be able to tabulate panels off to the side. So you get the full working space. And this also paves the way for what we want to do in the future, adding more capability, more powerful editing functions that give you access to the data in the design by means of the panels and docking system.

And, of course, whichever side you're on, you can do all the same things. But we can drag and drop these panels out of the workspace as well. And they'll track with Fusion. You can even put them on a separate monitor. And this is the whole point of having them floating.

And these floating options, you can have them floating over your workspace or away from it. And that way, you can more easily work with multiple windows, multiple monitors, which is kind of become the industry standard for electronics. You really want to have your schematic on one screen, your PCB 2D on another, and still be able to have the panels out of the way somewhere, but yet be able to interact with the design workspace and all the objects you're selecting and working on.

So, likewise, when floating panels, we can actually have them float within the workspace. So in other words, if you actually want to just use a really high resolution-- maybe a 4K monitor or an 8K-- you can maximize Fusion and just have one really big monitor. And then in that case, you may want to float your panels over the workspace. So that's what we're looking at here.

And we have this ability to keep them floating in the corner, and yet not interfere or not be interfered with when you actually launch editing commands. So what we're looking at here is selecting some specific objects, changing the views around, running a command. And you can see the command dialog appears in the side as it does today. Only now, it's shown stacked with your floating panels so. So it doesn't take up too much horizontal space there-- just a lot of really nice usability enhancements in the UI coming with this panels and docking.

We've just released, as some of you may have seen, new schematic updates for wiring for orthogonal dragging. This is going to be a massive productivity improvement for electrical engineers who do the front end of the design or those who do the schematic before doing the PCB, which is pretty much everyone. And there's more automation coming in this.

But as you would probably know, in earlier versions if you were to drag components like I'm dragging these capacitors right here, or even groups select and drag, you'd have a pretty tough time keeping the wiring neat and tidy and organized. In this case, we're keeping everything sensibly orthogonal. And we're actually refactoring the entire schematic engine in future that's going to make the process of actually doing the front-end engineering a lot faster and more efficient.

Also, we've got another big piece of feedback that came back to us in Fusion is in general, we need better ways of managing libraries and managing components and finding parts to place in the design. And so you can look forward pretty soon to a new way of placing parts. These are just mock ups here. So it may not look exactly like this.

But it's going to be very, very productive. We've already done most of the engineering work on this. So this will also be coming up here pretty soon-- to be able to very rapidly search for and place components from a nice user-friendly panel that can be docked and floated just like the other ones we were looking at. Once you've got your set of libraries installed and available in the workspace, finding the part you want is a matter of searching for it and getting it. And you'll also be able to preview variants, and technologies, and have a much easier time deciding on, yes, this is the right component, before dragging it and drop bring it into your schematic or PCB layout. So you can look forward to that.

And in the coming year, we're going to be focusing on doing some pretty significant additional enhancements to the entire library system within Fusion 360 electronics-- better migration tools for coming from your old EAGLE libraries upgrading into Fusion and migrating all your data and deciding where you should manage it, how you should manage it. Do you do it in team? Do you stick with library.io and managed libraries? We're going to make that whole process and the decision making process around that a lot clearer and easier.

And also in doing that, we're refactoring the entire workflow and user interface around library creation and the processes and workflows around copying parts from other libraries, making them your own, modifying them, and then managing them from there-- PIN mapping, automatic symbol creation, and much higher performance in editors as we go through the entirety of Fusion 360 electronics and we're profiling and refactoring to make things faster and more performant. And, of course, additional capabilities that have been long sought after-- some of these will be coming even in the nearer term as well-- things like slotted holes and slots, design blocks have been requested by a lot of EAGLE users who want those reusable capabilities that wasn't yet implemented in Fusion.

And, finally, just something to look forward to as well is some electrical parameter insights-- so being able to do impedance-driven design and routing and maintain your impedance even when changing lasers, for example-- being able to select a net and analyze it to see, is it crossing any plane splits? Are we going to get unintentional radiation? That's the final thing we have coming soon in Fusion 360 for electronics. So stay tuned. And now I'll hand it back to you.

SETH HINDMAN: All righty. Jumping into a look on generative design and simulation-- the first thing that I want to cover is the investment we're making to connect intentionally Inventor and Fusion 360 from a data and workflow perspective. For our existing product design in manufacturing customers that have access to both of these solutions, we want to make more intentional workflows, where it's seamless and transparent of what's going on.

A case example could be you have been doing your design work inside of Inventor today. You have all that context and assembly and now you want, in the context of that, to actually generate a new component. You should be able to start that generative study inside of Inventor, continue it into Fusion, which has all the controls and capabilities and, in that particular case, actually bring that component back and insert it into your Inventor assembly.

Now, this could be true of other workflows that may not necessarily flow back into Inventor, like simulation or manufacturing, where you want to take the data from Inventor and then just use Fusion 360 as basically an extension of workspace access for you for more advanced analysis or perhaps tool pathing or something like that. So more to come on this, but coming soon, we're going to be delivering upgraded capabilities to make these two solutions work together much more seamlessly. Now, an investment in really expanding our generative design universe is with generative design for modeling. This is really about creating an additional value stream, not necessarily replacing what we already have, for really upfront productivity, get all of the benefits of having the system as a collaborator, a co-creator-- being able to select different kinds of faces inside the solution, inside the design workspace, and have it actually come up with different design alternatives for you, different ideas of how it could connect the geometry influenced by different manufacturing types, or at least constructs in terms of more prismatic or faceted shapes versus those that are smooth.

This would be minimal definition because we're not getting into performance. We're not getting into specific objectives you have. At this point, you're just saying, I want to be able to connect these things. What's even possible? Let me continue my thought, give you additional definition as I go forward, and make something of that.

Just like generative design though, as you can see in the image here, it's creating a native recipe for that file. So features are being created which can be edited. This is all happening in the design workspace. It's also going to create an intentional on ramp between the design workspace with these kinds of designs and other workspaces.

You could take this onto the simulation workspace to actually punish that design. You could take it into manufacturing for tool pathing. You could, of course, stay in design and continue to edit it.

But you could also take it over to generative and use it as basically a seed so you could start adding additional definition about different manufacturing processes you like to explore, objectives, performance loads, and so forth. So this is something that you're going to start seeing more of. We're excited to be able to bring this to you in the near future so that you can start to get early values from the power of generative design.

Now, with this, you can imagine that there are a bunch of different use cases. So one of the things that we'll be interested in getting feedback on is, how well have we anticipated the different kinds of behavior of selecting different kinds of faces? As we mature the solution and we give you additional controls, you'll see how the behavior relative to that face is going to do. But we actually think that we've anticipated a bunch of different cases. So this thing should be nice and robust. And you'll be able to give it a good test.

In terms of a more traditional generative design workflow, we're looking at expanding the applicability now shown in the video here. You actually see that there's more of a study selector when you enter into generative design. So this is-- traditionally, we've been focused on structural workflows. Now we're actually going to allow you to take on fluid paths.

So this is new capabilities, new insights, new visualizations and data that you get to base your decision on. As you can see in the video here, it's about to show you that you're going to be able to actually look at the trace of the particles inside of-- or the flow lines inside of the design. It's initially going to be focused on fluid path design.

So, how can we actually optimize that based on a prescribed flow rate and minimizing pressure drop? Much more capabilities are planned for the future. But really, this is a new entire space of capability that we're going to open up within generative design. And it's going to produce this fluid path.

Now, as you can imagine, initially it'll have really good support for things like ducting. I want to go from here to here. I have an existing design, or I don't. But I know something about my inlets and outlets. You will be able to select multiple inlets and multiple outlets.

Initially, it doesn't necessarily have manifold balancing. But that is something that you could expect is going to come. So we're going to have some flow balancing in the future. And, of course, they're going to be existing flow control type devices where you're trying to understand, is there a way that I could make this even more stable.

Could I reduce material and achieve the same effect? The different ways to actually get outcomes-- and think about how you want to consume those back in your design. Are you going to [INAUDIBLE] it? Are you going to want to thicken something? More capabilities on this-- this is actually going to be in public preview very shortly. We're excited for our generative design customers to get out and start exploring using this and giving us some feedback.

Now, something that you may have already seen inside of our preview capabilities today is injection molding for the engineer. This is all about adding in native capabilities for Fusion 360 that empower insights into the injection molding process. Manufacturability-- problems and remediations that you can take from that. Since this says engineer in the title here, I'm trying to impress that we're actually designing this for someone very specific.

So we're not trying to address the traditional challenges we've done with our mold flow technology for the analyst. This is something specifically for the engineer. We're trying to answer real pragmatic questions that the person designing plastic parts has about their design.

Will the mold even fill? Am I going to have aesthetic defects? Is this thing going to warp so badly I can't actually use it in my assembly. To do this, we've had to create lots of smart setup and defaults to make the time to result streamlined. We've also spent a lot of time thinking about this person, what expertise they'll have. And we've tried to work on interpreting the results and providing some suggestions on how you might be able to address different kinds of challenges.

Now, because this has a focus on the engineer doesn't mean that this technology is not as accurate or capable as our traditional Moldflow. This is all based off the same solver stack, the same capabilities that we've been investing in 40 years for Moldflow. The difference really is you're going to see that the workflow is streamlined to get you quickly on to getting insights.

We in some cases call this three click solve-- being able to take an existing design you've had in Fusion 360, move into the simulation environment, and very quickly accept the defaults and become a study or start to modify those. As you get results back, you're going to see the context in which the process analysis feedback is giving you information so that you can understand the context of how that's all working. So today there's quite a few things that are in preview, available to you inside of Fusion 360 for both generative design and simulation, some existing kinds of manufacturing constraints or capabilities that we have exposed.

Something new that's coming soon is going to be the fluid path study type that you will see an opt in for in public preview very soon. Generative design for modeling-- a little bit farther away but still pretty soon, where we're going to add this capability for productivity focus on just being able to figure out the form of a design inside the design workspace. Electronics cooling is still in preview, something for really being able to optimize the layout of your PCB. And then we have an active preview of injection molding.

AL WHATMOUGH: OK, let's talk manufacturing. By talk I mean I'll hide it in a square up here, a form of conversation that's become all too normal for us. So I'll say this first-- I miss the days of AU, where we can greet each other at the door, where we can talk in the hallways after a presentation. With that said, I will attempt to share with you the why behind the manufacturing roadmap.

My goal is it inspires a dialogue that continues after this presentation is over. So please reach out. And let's engage in conversation. See, connecting is that the heart of the manufacturing roadmap.

We're well into our journey of connecting CAD and CAM that started in the early days of milling with HSM. Over the past few years, you've seen us ramp up the breadth of the solution, leveraging the expertise of the broad manufacturing team of experts, from part maker, feature [INAUDIBLE], power mill, power inspect, [INAUDIBLE], true nest, and [INAUDIBLE]. I believe you'll agree we've clearly demonstrated a commitment and a passion to deliver on a vision of a connected product.

However, while each of these expert solutions serve a unique purpose in the industry, they also have overlapping tools and concepts. A measurement system has a work coordinate system. So does a CAD system. So does the CAM system. We need to combine these individual tools into one consistent tool.

And so the roadmap ahead is all about delivering on the details, connecting these tools in a consistent way. We can think about our roadmap grouped in three key focus areas, starting with the depth of manufacturing processes. Clearly stated, a manufacturing tool isn't useful if it can only make half your part. We need to be able to manufacture the complete component. We need to support all of the processes necessary to manufacture your components.

For many of you, that's the case today. And that leads us to the next bucket-- finish what we started. The reality is as users, you're generating millions upon millions of tool pads and your equipment every week. And for you, the product can make all of the parts you needed to make.

However, over the years in our race to move fast, we've left behind opportunities for refinement. We have left to find opportunities to automate your workflow and be more efficient about how you make those parts. And finally, as processes get more complex and as the workforce expands with new talent, there's an ever increasing demand to be able to simulate all machine motion before executing a job. And so support for machines is the third bucket.

So with these three themes framing our discussion, let's look at what's happening in each of the domain areas, starting with milling. We can already see a tension that exists between control and automation. On one hand, users want to optimize new details about machining strategies while on the other hand, users expect more and more strategies that require little to no input.

Over the past year, you've seen us add tool path editing as well as delivering an automated strategies like handling of flat surfaces. We've started to introduce 5-axis control and tool paths like steep and shallow. And you can look forward to us adding 5-axis control to all relevant strategies. You can expect us to continue to expand on the type of edits and, of course, deliver on more automated strategies.

Turning tool paths are foundational to any CAM software. Lathes, they're seen in every shop. It's why we put so much focus into the details of our turning tool paths over the past few years. This year you saw us ad grooving tools and profile strategies, grooving tools and threading strategies, and more robust ways of calculating material removal, like even depths of cuts and randomized geometry.

We focused on general details like section view during simulation and can control over compensation points. Again, as the roadmap continues, we'll be relentless about the details that turning experts required while expanding into part handling for machines with multiple spindles. Additive brings a whole new set of manufacturing processes. It isn't just a single process.

When we first released the first additive manufacturing capabilities for metals with powder-based Fusion, we knew we were just starting a long journey. Since then we rolled out additional support for desktop and industrial machines. Again, we've set a broad vision. And here comes the reoccurring theme. The focus over the year to come is delivering on the details.

At this point, I may be starting to sound like a broken record-- finish what we started, the details matter, connect the tools in a consistent way. For fabrication, those details include things such as support for grain autodirection, control over lead-ins and lead-outs. However, if we stopped at just thinking about fabrication as a vertical and not through the lens of focusing on fusing the technologies together, we'd missed the rich opportunity to generalize that fabrication-- those things that the fabrication industry has mastered in the optimization use of materials in space.

So as we continue on this journey, you'll see us make the fabrication concepts accessible to more and more personas. You'll find value in optimizing material. For example, an additive user packing parts on the bed of a 3D printer. So again, we work back to this theme of finish what we started, get the details right, connect the pieces together in a consistent way in one tool.

On the metrology front over the past few years, we've rapidly expanded the number of inspection processes we support, from modern machine probes to things like Bluetooth calipers. You've seen us work hard to consolidate the way we report on captured measurements regardless of how they are captured. And you've also seen us drive consistency on things as simple as the meaning of colors between measurement and machine workflows.

As we look ahead, expect us to further refine the metrology processes and begin to incorporate the use of model-based dimensioning and inspection workflows going as far as to directly import this data from Inventor and other solutions. Finally, simulation is fundamental to CAM programming. It gives users the ability to detect any potential issue that may arise when running their program.

This year we gave you the ability to create and run a 3D representation of your machine inside of Fusion 360. But animation is just the first step in our simulation journey. Our teams are now focused on delivering automated collision checking in these simulations. As we progress along the path of machine support, we'll begin to connect directly to machines-- first automating the initial setup and then actively monitoring what's happening on the machine.

The future's bright. It's exciting. And we're happy to have you with us on this journey.

As I close, I should mention, our work extends beyond extending functionality to the software. In parallel, we'll continue to partner with companies across the globe to deliver a digital catalog of content so you can focus on making quality parts. This content comes in the form of machine simulation models and post processors, work holdings, such as vises and chucks, and tools and tool holders-- all the critical pieces to actually use the software we build.

We're committed on delivering on the details and providing a tool that's a joy to use every day. Thank you.

DANIEL GRAHAM: So to wrap things up, I hope that you're as excited as I am to hear about some of the projects that we're working on in design and engineering, electronics, generative and simulation, as well as all of our disciplines of manufacturing. I would really encourage you to stay connected and get more details around the roadmap. You'll be seeing us make posts on our Fusion 360 blog with further details around some of the projects that we've shared today as well as ways for you to engage directly with our product development organization and teams to give you our feedback and help shape the product.

So thank you very much for the time that you've spent with us today. And I hope you have a great rest of your Autodesk University virtual experience.