説明
主な学習内容
- Gain insight into the scope of Fusion development across all domains and workspaces.
- See first-hand how to start leveraging new capabilities in your business.
- Discover how Fusion is solving a industry challenges in 2024.
スピーカー
- Kieran GillCustomer Advocacy Manager for the Customer Engagement Organization. I currently help by Educating, Demonstrate, Innovate and Validating our processes for customers to make sure our customers can truly "Make Anything" using Fusion360.
- Peter ChampneysPeter is a mechanical engineer with over 7 years of experience working with generative design. Based out of the Autodesk Technology Center in Birmingham, UK, he has worked on a projects from a wide variety of industries including automotive, aerospace, consumer products and construction.
- Spencer HardcastleSpencer graduated from the Loughborough University with a Master’s degree in Automotive Engineering and began his career with Delcam on the graduate scheme. This led to a role as an Applications Engineer in the International Support department, which involved training and supporting customers and resellers worldwide, in both pre and post-sales activities. Following the acquisition of Delcam by Autodesk, he now works as the manager of customer advocacy, in the Customer Engagement Organisation, working to close the gap between customer success and Fusion success. In his spare time, Spencer likes to keep active, enjoying golf, football, tennis and more.
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SPENCER HARDCASTLE: Hello,, everybody, and welcome to the year in review for Autodesk Fusion. Super excited to be here. Run through the latest and greatest of what we've added to the product this year for Autodesk Fusion. So joining me on stage, I'm Spencer Hardcastle, manager of customer advocacy.
And we've got Kieran Gill, who's going to take us through manufacturing today. We have Peter Champneys, who's doing a double shift. He's on design, documentation, but simulation and generative design as well. And then the one and only Edwin Robledo. He's going to be our electronics guru today.
And like I said, what we're going to do is we're going to take a bit of a reflection on the features and functionalities and workflows we've added to the software this year. Really look at the highlights and let the experts take us through the details. As we're going through, we're also going to spotlight some customer success stories, those customers that have taken advantage of all of this new functionality.
But before we dive into it, it's time to just have a little look at the year by the numbers. So this year, we've had 15 releases. That's a mixture of major releases and what we call minor releases as well, and in those releases, a whopping 159 new features. That's going to be net new workflows, net new capabilities to empower our customers and over 6,500 improvements focused on existing capabilities in the product as well.
And if you dive a little deeper, the numbers really tell their own story. Over 3.85 million new designs created this year, over 150,000 electronics users in the software too, and over on the manufacturing side, 2.2 million NC programs and over 118 million toolpaths and not to forget the community with over 5,000 new insiders. And if you don't know what insiders means, I'd recommend heading over to the Expo to learn a little bit more about our insider program. And over 3.85 million unique visitors to our forums.
So before we dive in to the functionality we've added this year, I wanted to take a look at our strategy for 2024. And it's split up into three pillars. The first pillar is all about data and how enhancing our capabilities when it comes to data management not only promotes collaboration, but it brings together every element and every stage of the product development life cycle.
The second pillar for 2024, is arguably the most visible in terms of features and functionality, and that's going to be enhancing our core software capabilities. At the center of that pillar is you guys, the customers with most of our initiatives based on direct user feedback. And then the third and final pillar for 2024 was focused on AI with a core focus on minimizing time-consuming tasks and allowing you, the user, to focus on the areas that really matter most.
We want Autodesk AI to make it easier for your teams to streamline the product development process and bring your ideas to life faster. And so with that, for the first time today, I'm going to hand over to Pete. He's going to kick us off with January this year with design and documentation.
PETER CHAMPNEYS: Thank you, Spencer. So starting us off in January, we had a huge release for design infusion as automated drawings was made available in the product for the first time. Now, creating professional engineering drawings remains a critical part of the product development workflow and has been a major focus of our development efforts in Fusion for a number of years. Now automated drawings takes this to the next level by creating or the opportunity for either the partial or complete automation of creating professional engineering drawings.
Automated drawings will automatically take all the components part of a model layout and create set up drawing sheets for each of those. It will automatically create center marks and center lines, hole and thread notes, parts lists for assemblies. It will automatically orient parts correctly on the page, auto break long components, and for sheet metal parts, it will create bend tables and flat patterns.
It will also provide a generative style dimensioning approach to creating dimensions automatically to let you choose between a number of pre-templated strategies and adjust dimension density with a simple slider. And it will do all of this with a single click. Now, since automated drawings was released in January, we have created over 7 million automated dimensions and saved hundreds of hours worth of time.
I think this is a fantastic example of the value that automation can provide. Another key focus for us with Fusion design has been on performance. And I'll share a couple of the significant performance enhancements we've made throughout Fusion starting off in January with a number of improved parts to assembly process where processes like computing joints, for example, were made 45% faster.
KIERAN GILL: Let's move on to the manufacturing environment. And we introduced in January a stand-alone groove roughing strategy for internal, external and face grooving operations. Now, it incorporated all those elements you guys loved about the old groove roughing algorithm, but it had superior results by way of an improved UI, a improved set of boundary handling, as well as a set of brand new improved tangential extensions.
What this meant is a set of safer lead in and lead out tools, ultimately leading in a reduced cycle time and a much improved surface finish. It also had the option to define the entry point on the groove with relation to the center or the side of the groove, helping you to minimize tool deflection and help maintain and control that swarf coming off the part.
We also introduced an advanced swarf strategy. Now, unlike other toolpaths in Fusion, this actually cuts with the side of the tool rather than the tip. This, in many cases, reduces the cycle time and in many instances improves the surface finish. This new toolpath also provided greater flexibility about the input geometry that was being used, whether geometry or surfaces and allowed the user to de-gouge those machine surfaces.
It also gave users greater control over the tool access and about the blend and control and the synchronization between those top and bottom curves of the advanced swarf toolpath. Now the advanced swarf toolpath is not just a three-axis toolpath. It is a three, four and five axis toolpath. It can do three axis for things like vertical walls, four axis for things like wrapped cylinders and five axis for things like complicated undercut machining.
We also introduced collision detection for machine simulation. We now check the machine, the model, the entire assembly and all the components in the machine. If an issue is flagged and raised, you'll see the components turn red inside the model. It'll also highlight not only in the browser but in the toolpath timeline as well. This just gives users that confidence that they can take what they see on the screen and safely run it on their machines.
EDWIN ROBLEDO: The design capabilities, the electronic design capabilities in Fusion continue to grow and January was absolutely no exception. What we've done is that we've improved the selection capabilities in electronics. Traditionally, you actually had to move a component from the actual origin. Now, that's no longer necessary. Each component has a boundary. Therefore, you could just select that component from any part of that boundary and move it.
On the circuit board design side, you'll notice that we've also introduced that as you move the mouse cursor throughout, depending of your selection folder, a selection filter, those assets are the ones that are going to actually be highlighted. We also have adopted the marquee selection box. In other words, if you define a box from left to right, it will only include those assets that are enclosed in the box. If you select from right to left, it will select only all the ones that it actually touches.
Now, we also have added that you can press and hold and actually get a list of components that are going to be selectable. Now, the capabilities and the schematic editor in Fusion allow you to do what's called Spice Simulation. Spice allows you to verify the parameters that you've been assigned to the different components. That way you could simulate and get the graphics for that particular component.
What we've done in this version is that now we're compatible with NG Spice version 41 with TI and LT Spice as well.
KIERAN GILL: January was also a huge release for generative design, where we released a suite of capabilities for advanced physics, starting off with modal frequencies. Modal frequency analysis allows generative design to take into account vibration and cyclic loading and create designs where a first modal frequency falls above a certain threshold.
We also added remove rigid body modes. This allows you to create generative design setups without the simplification of constraints and will automatically apply inertial relief to ensure all forces on the part are balanced. And lastly, we added buckling constraints. These are additional failure mechanisms that generative design can take into account on top of plastic stress deformation and will automatically identify the critical load case for buckling in each generative design setup and ensure that that setup is improved to avoid buckling cases.
We were also extremely excited to release the Generative Design Cloud Previewer. This will automatically run the first couple of iterations of your generative design study live in the Canvas without consuming any tokens, allowing you to ensure that everything is set up perfectly before generating potentially hundreds of potential outcomes with a full generative design solve.
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: Great. So Photocentric is our first customer highlight. Now Photocentric are a UK-based company. And they have this vision of bringing 3D printing to mass manufacturing. And they actually hold the crown for developing the world's largest LCD 3D printer. Now the center of their product development is Autodesk Fusion. And in particular, automated drawings helps them generate many, many complex sheets and drawings in a really short space of time.
Now, as you can imagine, developing these printers requires advanced and integrated electronics. And Fusion gives them the ability to converge their electrical design and mechanical design in a single platform. And just like that, January is behind us, and we're on to the next release, which is March. And once again, Pete's going to kick us off with design.
PETER CHAMPNEYS: So their Fusion fastener library is a cloud-based library that is automatically shared between all members of a project and provides access to a huge range of standard fasteners, so nuts, bolts and washers. These can be quickly inserted into any design. And we made a number of productivity enhancements to the fastener library in March, starting with the ability to add favorites so that users can create a smaller subset of frequently used fasteners.
We also added replace fastener, allowing one or multiple fasteners to very quickly be replaced by a different fastener of the same type. Replace fastener will also automatically recompute all the joints associated with the fastener, ensuring seamless switching out of standard components.
Configurations in Fusion are a really powerful tool for creating either a family of parts or an entire product line. They can manage changes in everything from different properties or materials all the way through to complex different geometries. Again, in March, we made some really significant enhancements, including the ability to reorder rows and columns, search for the specific configuration you want upon insert and providing full API support, so that scripts can be created to automate repetitive configuration workflows.
And last but not least, we again made significant performance improvements across Fusion, including in modeling on tools like Mirror or creating sketches, as well as increasing the speed with which we open, close and switch tabs all across Fusion.
KIERAN GILL: Let's jump into the manufacturing workspace. And we'll start off with additive component priority. Now, arranging parts within the kind of 3D printer volume is a key part of the print preparation process. Now, when working with multiple parts of different sizes, it's important to help you prioritize these parts within the build volume. You now have two options to do that. You can do it either by volume or by component-specific priority.
Volume priority essentially interrogates the individual components you have and then automatically arranges those components based on the volume of each of those components. Component-specific priority actually enables you to individually assign a priority to each of those components, starting from very low ranging all the way to very high. Here you can see on screen just one of those component priority arrangements.
Now, it's no secret that probe geometry has already been supported in Fusion for some time, all the way from supporting probing of planes and circles. One of the kind of downsides thereof is that CNC controllers have really kind of been limited in their support for the most common of orientation probing vectors, so orthogonal x, y and z. Now, if you did want a different orientation, you had to create a new setup. This was laborious and painstaking.
So what we've done under the hood is we've stripped out probe geometry, and we've replaced it with inspect surface. This now effectively gives you the capability to probe angled faces, holes, bosses that you simply were not able to do with probing cycles. We also introduced toolpath modifications to advanced swarf and rotary contour. Essentially what this does is it helps us to optimize these two new toolpaths by the ability to apply things like trim, delete passes, as well as move entry positions to these new toolpaths.
In many ways, this brings it in line with some of the other toolpaths we already that have modifications. Think of GD burr, think of geodesic, think of steep and shallow. And then one of the last key things here on your screen is you'll notice what I'm doing is I'm swapping out a very short tool for a very longer tool to get into that little pocket area.
What this means with inside modifications, is I can switch out tooling whilst keeping the cutting geometry the same without taking the hit on a calculation time. So with these modifications, we're able to give you that capability to modify with the ability to speed up your workflows.
EDWIN ROBLEDO: In Fusion electronics we continue as well. Remember I told you earlier about the selection capabilities being improved? What we've done now is that we have cross probing. In other words, I could actually select components in the schematic which will highlight on the circuit board. Fusion electronics actually has true synchronization. In other words, any asset that is changed in the schematic updates the circuit board, and the circuit board actually updates the schematic as well.
So having a cross probe capabilities, lets me really troubleshoot what's going on if I need to find an asset easier on the schematic or I might be able to find it easier on the circuit board. I can do this per asset, or I could do this as a group of components as well. Now we have a capabilities in Fusion to be able to easily define power planes. Power planes are very useful or ground planes. That way all the signals reach the components exactly at the same time.
We take this same technology and we've added it for VIA. It's called VIA stitching. VIA stitching allows me to define a particular area of my circuit board. That way I could have a group of VIAs. Why do I need this? Because I may need to transfer heat from one layer to another layer to dissipate the components as well. So it's very, very useful because it has the same behavior. So modify it is pretty easy.
Now, last but not least, with the power of access and the signal integrity extension that we have capable in Fusion, we're able to now have cross talk. What is cross talk? When you have signals on the circuit board that are running at really high speeds, they get affected easily by the EMI forces by other assets on the circuit board.
Now you'll be able to use the cross coupling capabilities and find out who is the victim and who is the aggressor affecting that trace. That way you could actually do the modifications that are necessary during the design time. This is something that is usually done afterwards. Thank you.
KIERAN GILL: In generative design, we added a brand new car manufacturing constraint, which is casting. Manufacturing constraints in Fusion apply intelligent optimization to each stage of the iterative process to create a design that is suitable for specific manufacturing methods. Generative design for casting will consider a range of factors that make a design suitable for manufacturing with that method.
So for example, every generative design for casting outcome will automatically have an intelligent parting plane identified, and draft angles will be applied to make the design easily removable from a mold. We will also think about the flow of material through the mold by limiting the max and minimum thickness according to user specifications. Generative design for casting allows you to create design outcomes that are cost-effective as well as complex.
We also added a brand new way of setting up generative design studies, which is remove only starting shape. This lets you use generative design like a traditional topology optimization tool, where we only remove and take away material from a specific starting shape. This can also significantly speed up the time it takes to set up generative design studies and reduces technical expertise as we don't need to use obstacle geometry at all when setting up generative design studies.
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: OK, time for our second customer highlight and on to a company that really embodies the vision of what Autodesk Fusion is trying to do and that's a company called Evolve. Now they're another UK-based business. And they really specialize in engineering high quality, bespoke systems and products across various different sectors, from motorsport to aerospace, medical, industrial equipment and many more.
Now, we heard Pete talk to the addition of casting constraints in the March release, and that coupled with the foundational automation of generative design, allowed Evolve to achieve a 40% weight reduction on electric hypercar components, a fantastic achievement. But the use of Fusion doesn't stop there. With Evolve taking advantage of our advanced manufacturing capabilities that Kieran was talking about to bring their designs to reality.
And with that, we're on to May. And once again, Pete, over to you for design.
PETER CHAMPNEYS: Thank you. So kicking us off in May, we have a bunch of modeling tools added to Fusion, starting off with Solid Sweep. Solid Sweep is a powerful and versatile modeling tool that lets us sweep a solid body across a path. It has a number of fantastic applications, and it's also great in many applications in design for manufacturing. For example, we can use it to create the negative of a part in work holding that will automatically remove any undercuts.
Behind the scenes in Fusion, whenever you make any kind of modeling or user modeling commands, there are algorithms that are used to calculate the changes in geometry. And we continue to work to improve these. A great example of this is the improvement we made to the shell algorithm. This will be significantly more robust than the previous shell algorithm able to solve much more complex shells.
It also allows for what we call a partial success, where we're dealing with extremely complex geometry, where it will provide a huge range of surfaces that can be manually stitched together afterwards. And lastly, we added a fantastic tool in assembly modeling, which is ground parent. Ground parent streamlines the process of fixing parts in place and connecting them together, enabling faster processes when building large assemblies in Fusion and ensuring that our assembly process is clear cut, capable and robust.
KIERAN GILL: OK, back into the manufacturing environment. And again, it's no secret that surface inspection has been in Fusion for quite some time. One of the side of that, however, is that you have to take your machine-generated results file in a manual fashion, all the way from the controller directly into Fusion to be evaluated, analyzed and reported upon.
This new live data connection allows that machine-generated file to be sent directly and automatically into Fusion so it can be analyzed more quickly. Additionally, this new functionality also has the benefit that it's able to stop the machine if a problem is detected. So think of something like a broken tool. Think of something like under machined or undersized machined geometries. And this new capability also allows the machines to effectively now to be run as a lights-out operation.
We also introduced the ability to move the machine within the part positioning tab. Imagine a situation where you wanted to check with your part fitted within the envelope of the machine. Now you can. You can simply open up the position tab within the Setup dialog, and jog the individual axis of the machine. You can even select the individual elements or the axes or the bodies of your machine, and jog them, and drag them around individually within the machine limits.
This basically helps you to identify and make sure that you have positioned the part optimally in the machine. Onto the turning and thread turning front. We've provided more flexibility and a more consistent experience to threading operations on turning toolpaths by incorporating z-axis confinement boundaries. Now, this previously was only confined on a per-thread support basis, and this often meant that a lot of trial and error was involved to get the correct toolpath outcome.
Now what we've also done is we've aligned the turning confinement options for threading with other turning strategies. This makes it more purposeful, and it now gives you clear evidence where you're turning thread is going to beginning and ending. We also added a thread face selection option, especially in the situations where you have multiple threads to machine.
EDWIN ROBLEDO: In Fusion electronics, we do have a signal integrity extension, which was powered by Ansys. And as I told you earlier, we actually added coupling and cross-talk. Well, in this update, we actually took that to the next level. You see right now we get resistance, inductance, capacitance and all the other properties that each signal needs to carry in which you're in full control during the design time.
Now, what we've done now is we've taken care of differential pair routing. Many of you already have worked with USBs. Well, USB, they're routed on a circuit board. You have to have the exact same length on both traces. Well, this is what the differential pair capabilities now on the extension does, and lets me know exactly the integrity of that line is actually a correct that it has the exact same impedance and if there's any aggressor affecting the line, that way I can make the appropriate modifications to that.
So the coupling coefficient against the aggressor and the signals, which is a critical factor in understanding what the signal integrity actually is going to do. The nice thing is that we could do this during the design process. This is usually a process which is done after the design is completed. Now we could do it during the design. Now the other thing we did was in the signal source.
You see, it's quite often in electronics that we actually take technology that's already used in the design, and we use a copy and paste it many times. So if you have a single source channel, you could use that eight times. Well, what's happening was that everything would be renamed every time I would actually try to reproduce that exact same circuit already. Now you have the capability of telling it to update the naming or use the same naming that is already available.
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: OK, another customer highlight and a customer that's really benefited from Fusion and the capabilities we've added this time around is Guinn Partners. They're our third customer highlight. They help evaluate, develop and engineer their customer's projects, and they've been instrumental in bringing a whole range of exciting and groundbreaking products to market.
Now Fusion allows them to move from concept to mechanical and electrical design all the way to advanced five axis manufacturing very quickly. And as we continue to develop capabilities like advanced shell that Pete was mentioning, multi-region patch and ground to parent, we allow Guinn Partners to develop consumer products quicker than ever before.
Fusion's cloud-based and integrated approach also allows them to collaborate not only internally, but also with their customers to ensure transparency at every stage of the product development life cycle. That takes us to July and to Pete.
PETER CHAMPNEYS: So kicking us off in July for design, we have a number of improvements to configurations, starting with the ability to choose exactly how those are named. So under Preferences, users come in, and they can choose between showing the configured design, the specific name of the configuration, the part number or some combination of these. This ensures that you know exactly which configuration you have inserted into your design at any point.
We also increased our support for exporting nested configurations, making it easier to share files externally outside of your user hub with suppliers or for example, with Autodesk support staff. And also in whichever month we're in now, we also added some capabilities for manufacturing.
So this is something that you've heard Kieran talk about, some of our investments in turning. And Spun Profile is a tool we added, which is a really powerful sketch projector. So what this is going to do is it's going to take a body, rotate it around an axis and give you a projection of how that body will interface with the selected plane. So this can be used for example, if I want to create a stock model for a turning process or just to see how a body is going to interface with a plane.
And lastly but not least at all, we made significant improvements to drawings where we added a much loved capability to easily create dimensions between curved and concentric arcs, and we also significantly increased the performance of uploading in Fusion, making it two and a half times faster.
Back onto manufacturing and probably my favorite of the year. Multi-axis finishing. What this does is it machines walls and floors of pocket-shaped geometries, walls that are not flat, not swappable and don't have tight internal corners. That's the first strategy to support circle segment tools. Now circle segment tools are slightly different to ball-nosed tools in that they've got a ginormous arc on them.
So we're able to have larger stepovers, larger step downs yet maintain that same surface finish you would otherwise get from a regular ball-nosed tool. There's going to be four sets of circle segment tool supported right off the bat-- barrel, oval, lens and taper. Barrel, taper and oval will be preferred for the walls, and then lens-- because that ginormous arc is on the bottom of the tool-- that will be preferred for machining the floors.
Now, when it comes to actually the pastor side of things, how we machine it, you'll have two options. You'll have the ability to utilize a scallop or a blend style strategy for this. For the walls, you'll have blend or scallop. For the floors, you'll only have scallop. Now it has also a multitude of multi-axis options, including a automatic tilting mode but also allows the users to have a user-defined mode with the ability to specify a lead angle but also define the minimum and maximum contact points on the tool where that tool contacts the surface.
We also introduced heights tab enhancements. Effectively what this does is it allows users to auto-define the heights based on the highest and lowest points of either the stock, the model or the fixture. This is really kind of crucial in setting clearances and retract heights for things like rapid moves during machining. Additionally, it also has the capability to make non-model aware toolpaths smarter. By using simply the highest or lowest of a given argument, it'll automatically be more smarter and update accordingly.
We also introduced template library favorites. Cam templates are now marked as favorites and will result and will reside in the Favorites folder. You also will have the option to automatically add new templates into the ribbon yourself, and operations created directly from them will be used without the need to enter the library dialog itself. And last but not least, as you can see, there was a multitude of color-coded options that you can apply to your templates.
EDWIN ROBLEDO: Well, in Fusion Electronics, we've added a highly coveted feature, which allows you to assign colors to the different traces on the circuit board. Why is this important? Because right now, traditionally, we only have one color per layer. So now I can take those critical traces that may have to have a special type of routing capability, change that color. That way I could easily identify it. But not only I could do it to traces, I could do it to net classes.
In other words, if I have a net class, which is defining a set of traces, I could assign it. So all those traces that I planned to route for that particular line will have that particular color, and I could easily switch between the regular mode and the color mode by just hitting the Shift-A which allows me to easily identify what's going on on the circuit board.
Now, traditionally on the schematic side of electronics, we only work one sheet at a time. You see, we can handle up to 1,000 sheets per every circuit board. But what happened at times is that I needed to switch a particular component, which was throughout different sheets. Now with this version, I could actually select components-- let's say all my resistors that are carrying 10 kOhm's-- I could easily switch them from one brand to another brand, or I could increase their impedance as a group instead of having to do it individually.
PETER CHAMPNEYS: So we haven't talked too much up to this point about the numerous improvements we made in the last year to the simulation workspace. So I wanted to talk about a couple of those now, and in particular some of the improvements we made to the Results Viewer. Synchronized results will let you synchronize the legends of two different studies in a comparison, letting you see how the differences in the two designs affects things.
In March, we extended this capability to the injection molding simulation in Fusion that you can see here, letting you understand how different studies will affect things like potential warpage or how easily a part will fill in injection molding. Another thing that we update in every single Fusion release is our comprehensive injection molding materials library. We have over 11,000 materials in this library that, as you can see, is extremely extensive.
This is updated every single Fusion release, making sure you always have a fully up-to-date Fusion Injection molding materials library out of the box. In July, we extended that synchronized results capability also to electronics cooling simulation. This lets you simulate your electronic circuit board and identifies the potential heat buildup of the different components, taking into account things like the ambient air temperature.
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: Our next customer highlight is none other than Rivian. Now, for those that aren't aware, Rivian is an automotive electric vehicle manufacturer, but they also work in automotive technology and outdoor recreation. Now, Rivian's rapid prototyping process is powered by Fusion, and they take advantage of Fusion's advanced manufacturing capabilities to quickly and easily develop new and exciting ideas.
Now, the July release was huge for Rivian. As Kieran was mentioning, barrel tool support was made available for the very first time, a much requested piece of functionality from the community. But the use of Fusion doesn't stop there. They leverage configurations as well, which Pete mentioned earlier, to streamline their work holding setup. And if you'd like to check this out more, I'd highly recommend going and checking out their presentation, which is later on this week on that exact topic.
And just like that, we've rolled through the entire year. And we find ourselves in September. And for one final time, Pete, take us away on design.
PETER CHAMPNEYS: Thanks, Spencer. So September saw a number of fantastic improvements to sketching in Fusion, starting off with the ability to add linked or unlinked two-way offset, as well as offset of an offset, where we can create a series of offsets from a single parent curve. We also made some really nice improvements to the ability to share parameters between multiple different distributed designs with import and export user parameters.
This lets you export a set of user parameters from one design, manage it in a CSV, for example, and import that into a new or existing or multiple Fusion designs to share user parameters across multiple designs. Lastly, in the assembly workflow, we added a-- or before that, we'll talk about an enhancement to configurations, and we added the ability to configure joint snaps.
So we talked earlier about configurations in Fusion. Configuring joint snaps lets you have complete control over how components are assembled together from one configuration to the next, significantly enhancing the ease with which you can create complex different configurations with different assemblies between each of them and ensuring that the joints remain completely intact between them.
And then lastly, again, our relentless process of improving performance did not slow down, where, for example, selecting enormous numbers of faces or large numbers of faces in Fusion was made 15 times faster.
KIERAN GILL: OK on to manufacturing for one final time. Probably my second favorite release. This is advanced machine ignore functionality. And this pretty much revolutionizes the way you use surfaces within toolpaths. It replaces the previous touch and avoid functionality which was only touch or avoid. Now you can use touch and avoid simultaneously together within a toolpath. Groups of sets of surfaces can be created, and each of those groups of sets can be defined as either machine, ignore or avoid.
Furthermore, you can also incorporate additional axial and radial clearances to these individual groups, giving you all the flexibility in the world to control those surfaces for your toolpath. Now just a bit of a heads up there. Previous toolpaths would happily gouge your fixture, even though those fixtures were defined within the setup. Now within the toolpath we automatically consume them, flag them up as yellow and automatically avoid those fixtures for you.
All of the 3D toolbars are now supported with this functionality except for rotary pocket, rotary contour, horizontal and swarf. Those of you that use reference design will know that Cam data was previously not accessible in the manufacturing workspace. Now it is. It's now possible to consume that Cam data in an assembly of Cam programs. That imported Cam data is only read-only.
However, you can make some small modifications in terms of the tool orientation as well as changing the work piece coordinate system. Toolpaths can also be suppressed as well. And like reference designs, you can also go ahead and break that link to gain full control.
Penultimately, we on to automated arrange. Now automated arrange brings with it significant enhancements to the arrange functionality. You have part and part arrangements, which essentially improves the material usage across create copies and the move component commands. You also have arrangement nodes, which when selected flag up across the browser, the canvas and the timeline.
You also have multiple manufacturing setups which enhance the associativity between the model arrangements, setups and toolpaths themselves. And last but not least, if you are a manufacturing extension user, you get additional capabilities all the way in multi-edit capabilities, all the way to the ability to apply individual overrides, grain control and orientation control as well as the ability to apply multiple envelopes along with filler parts.
And then last but not least, we aimed to solve the air cutting problem. Air cutting is simply where a tool is cutting little to no material. You often have a situation where that has lengthy cycle times and can often break the cutter. We've reworked 3D adaptive clearing to take this into account. So cycle time should be reduced, and you should have a far more safer 3D adaptive toolpath going forwards.
EDWIN ROBLEDO: I'm really excited about this update that we had in September. You see, when you're working on a circuit board, you have to define design constraints. Well, we had one global setting of design constraints. In other words, you only set up a type of clearance or how far assets are going to be between assets and so forth. It was only one source of truth.
Now we've actually taken it to the next level and take the Fusion electronic design capabilities to allow you to have a lot more customizable constraints. This allows you now or empowers you now to be able to define constraints between signals, between components, between the component and the signals and so much more. Why is this important? Because the more constraints that you define during the design process or before the design process means that you're going to comply with the manufacturing as well as the capabilities of the circuit board for its performance.
You want to keep that clearance. That way that signal will actually perform correctly. So I could have a signal having properties on one layer while it has different properties on a different layer and have other properties on other layers. This is really powerful stuff for us that we've been able to implement in the design constraints for the circuit boards in Fusion.
The next thing I want to talk about is the input capabilities have been improved vastly. KICAD is a program. It's an open source program which contains circuit boards, schematics and PCB libraries. And it's been around for a while. Now Autodesk Fusion Electronics is 100% compatible with all the files. Therefore, any user that's actually using KICAD at this moment could just go ahead and load those files and continue to work. And now you're empowered to use all of the circuit board and electromechanical design capabilities that are now available in Fusion as well.
PETER CHAMPNEYS: So wrapping things up with generative design and simulation. And in September, we made some really significant improvements to our support for configurations in both of these products. So copy, configure, design will let you copy the simulation or generative design setup from one configuration of a design to another one. Whereas previously you'd have had to create that simulation from scratch, copy, configure, design lets you quickly copy simulations across multiple different configurations to understand how the changes will affect things.
It will also automatically copy across any changes made in the simplify or edit mode or workspace. And in generative design, we added global loads. This will let you take into account global accelerations-- so a linear acceleration-- as well as angular velocities and accelerations. So for example, if we have a part that is spinning at a very high speed, we can take into account the centrifugal forces.
If there is a linear acceleration or angular acceleration, we can take into account the forces applied by that process, and we can create designs in generative design that are perfectly suited to withstanding being optimized for those forces and loading conditions.
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: OK, our final customer spotlight comes in the way of Conturo Prototyping. They specialize in small batch production runs for aerospace, automotive, medical sectors to help shorten the product development times and bring products to market much faster. Now, we heard Kieran talk to the range of new capabilities in the September release when it comes to manufacturing.
And Conturo Prototyping put all this to hard work immediately to further streamline their manufacturing processes and ultimately to manufacture more advanced components. In other words, Conturo prototyping are growing as Fusion's capabilities are growing as well.
And that's a wrap. We're back to today. And that's a little look at what's happened in the year so far. So as we reflect and revisit the overarching strategy for the year for 2024, hopefully you saw how these capabilities aligned to the high level strategy of developing core capabilities to enhance your everyday workflows, with UI and automation to assist and streamline your entire product development life cycle.
All underpinned, most importantly, by developing a foundational, robust cloud data structure to aid collaboration at every stage. So we've talked about what's happened this year so far, but what about a look to the future and a look to the rest of this year and on to the next? And for that, I would strongly recommend checking out these two classes.
The classes on the right is going to focus on design, engineering and manufacturing. And it's the Fusion roadmap. That's going to be in this exact room on Thursday at 12:00 PM. So if you want to scan that QR code there, that's going to take you to the registration page. The QR code on the left is the Fusion roadmap for data management. They're going to take a look not only at what's coming in the future when it comes to data, but also take a reflective look at what's happened this year so far.
And if you're interested in data management-- and I strongly recommend you check it out-- that's going to be tomorrow at 3:00 PM. That's going to be room 33C. I'll make sure to put this back up when we conclude the presentation. But with that, we want to open it up to any questions from in the room and of course online as well.
There's got to be one question.
AUDIENCE: So last year you talked about Moldflow being multiple being merged into Fusion. There have been a lot of work at Moldflow advisor being merged into Fusion. So it all means Moldflow insight is available--
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: Repeat the question.
AUDIENCE: You were very interested in we don't use Fusion [INAUDIBLE]. We use Moldflow, and we had [INAUDIBLE]. We talked about that. Once it's actually merged fully into the Fusion, it'll probably bring Fusion.
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: Got it. So for those online, the question was around the integration between Moldflow in Fusion and bringing that functionality across. Pete, is that something that you want to tackle on the simulation side?
PETER CHAMPNEYS: Sure. So there hasn't been any huge change that I'm aware of in the past year to the injection molding capabilities in Fusion, specifically in this past year. So we do have, as I said, injection molding simulation available in Fusion that is less extensive than what's available in Moldflow. As far as I'm aware, there hasn't been any major change to that in the past year, but I can double check that for you.
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: Thanks for the question. Any other questions? Any questions online?
PHIL: Yeah, right here we have from Miguel. Working for San Diego-based sheet metal company who does a lot of metal and ACM fascia panel systems, how can Fusion help in improving the production process?
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: The design side. Pete, it's you again, I think.
PETER CHAMPNEYS: Yes. Is that a design or manufacturing question, Phil? Or maybe a bit of both?
PHIL: I mean, it sounds like fabrication to me. The production process would be from design to make, I would imagine.
KIERAN GILL: Well great question. Just for those in the online room, the question was how can sheet metal manufacturing really help me inside of Fusion? Well, Fusion manufacturing already supports that. It's got toolpaths to support sheet metal manufacturing. We support laser, waterjet as well. So those are options you can certainly use. And the toolpaths are supported across those different types of manufacturing methods as well.
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: Thanks for the question.
PHIL: Doug asks, will a handout summary of these enhancements and features be available?
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: Yep, we can make that available. Absolutely. That was an easy one.
PETER CHAMPNEYS: It's also worth pointing out, we've just been sharing some of the highlights from each release. There's more that we didn't have a chance to go into in detail. You can also see a full release on the Fusion blog. We release a comprehensive list of what's new every single Fusion release that's available as I said on the Fusion blog.
EDWIN ROBLEDO: Yeah, on the electronic side, the same thing. I only brought up what was the main highlights for this year for electronics, but we did a lot more to make the capabilities a lot easier to use and accessible to you as well. So there's a lot more than what was mentioned today.
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: A question over there.
AUDIENCE: So we're mainly a inventor Vault House. We've been to a lot push from our younger engineers to bring on Fusion. But since we're in a better Vault House, what has been the work of being able to design in Fusion yet bring that part down from the Vault? I know it's always been you can get it from Vault or from Fusion, but it comes down to double solid. So you don't have the District 3 and the Model 3.
Is that still there or is there ever going to be a workflow again from Fusion back down so it's an actual work of a bottle of a dump solid that comes in and you can put in your Vault?
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: Yeah, it's a great question. I think, as you said, the integration between Fusion and Vault is there, and it's something that we will continue to develop to make it more robust moving forward. And again, I would 100% recommend checking out those roadmap classes later on in the week for a little bit more clarity on that.
PETER CHAMPNEYS: Is there a look back class for data, Spencer?
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: There is. The look back class on the data side is going to be integrated into the roadmap session. So if you want to look back at the work that we've done on the data side, that's going to include enhancements to the Manage extension and bill of materials, I'd check that out too.
AUDIENCE: A vendor roadmap at the same time.
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: Brilliant.
AUDIENCE: It's like you guys keep fighting with each other.
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: It's not intentional. I promise. Any other questions from anybody? One in the middle.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: Yeah, great question. For those online, the question was all around automated drawings and the fact that we have the density slider to control the number of dimensions being added. But is there a way to have critical dimensions added first? And Pete, is that something you want to tackle?
PETER CHAMPNEYS: Yeah. So we have these different styles of creating dimensions basically, and those will also consist of different templated strategies. So for example, we have ordinate dimensions and then a couple of other different dimensioning kind of styles. So those will have an absolute impact on which are the kind of key faces you use.
So for example, choosing your zero point for the drawing right in a different location, for example. So there's a number of things that are used. I'm not sure off the top of my head if we did add a critical dimension-- ability to add kind of critical dimensions in. I'd have to double check that for you.
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: I think you can. If you create a normal view, add the dimension first and then hit the automated drawings button, that's going to use that as the driver, as the critical dimension and work around that.
PETER CHAMPNEYS: Yeah. That is a great point as well is this automated drawings tool. So I talked there about how you can create an entire drawing with a single click. And you absolutely can do that, but you can also use it in simpler ways as well. So we have a tool. First of all, when you first create a drawing, you have your part in Fusion. You say, create drawing. You can select automatic.
And that will-- if you've got an assembly, it will attempt to do everything for you in one go. Well, we also have inside of the drawings environment is a tool called auto-dimension. So that lets you create your drawing set up, bring things in, work with it's software that Spencer said. You could start, add some dimensions already. And then you can press auto-dimension to bring in that kind of templating process later on as well.
So there's some flexibility in how that automation is used and applied to let you make the best use of it if that kind of helps as well.
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: Great question. Thank you. We've got probably one more.
AUDIENCE: I just want to clarify on the schedule question about Inventor roadmap. That's at 1:30 tomorrow, and then the Fusion Data roadmap is at 3:00 tomorrow. And then the Fusion roadmap, not data, is at 12:00 PM. So you can go to all those no conflicts between Inventor.
SPENCER HARDCASTLE: Again, just to clarify for the guys online, the data management roadmap is going to be in room 33C, and that's going to be at 3:00 PM on Wednesday. And for design, engineering and manufacturing, that's going to be at 12:00 PM in this room right here on Thursday.
And with that, I want to thank everybody for coming. Thanks, everybody, as well. For those that joined online and on behalf of myself and all the other presenters, Pete, Karen and Edwin, I like to say thanks so much, and I hope you enjoy the rest of AU.
EDWIN ROBLEDO: Thank you.
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