Introducing Strength Testing and Simulation

As a valuable member of the Fusion 360 community, we want to make sure you’re always in the loop of our latest and greatest. After all, these updates exist thanks to your feedback and requests! The major focus for this update is around testing and simulation of your designs. You will soon find a workspace labeled “SIM” under the workspace switcher where you will be able to choose from two types of simulation studies: Static Stress and Modal Frequencies. Check out this preview video to get a sneek peak at what to expect.

Static Stress will allow you to run single and/or multi-body linear static analysis. Constrain an area of the model, put a load on it, and see how that load will affect the design and determine what part of the design is more prone to fail.

Modal Frequencies will allow you to see the natural vibration frequencies of your design and how much deformation will occur when it is subjected to a specific frequency.

Some of the major features in the Simulation workspace will allow you to:

• Set up adaptive mesh refinement
• Define degrees of freedom and contact behavior
• Assign and override materials for testing
• Solve locally (cloud solve is in the works)
• Toggle results threshold in real-time
• Animate results to see deformation in real-time
• Generate convergence charts and reports

In addition to these features, study results that have been saved in a latest design version can also be shared, viewed, and marked up by team members within the design’s detail page on A360 via the web browser, making easier to communicate and collaborate on the go.

Expect a couple new tutorials (YouTube as well as in-product) around testing and simulation after our update goes live!

Live Review

You’ve asked for it, and we’re making it happen. Daniel touched on this in our new A360 invitation post where the 3D web viewer now gives you the ability to start a live review session with anyone and see each other’s interactions with the model in real-time. This new update will expand on this feature and allow Fusion 360 client to web live review sessions between 2 or multiple people at any given time.

Modeling edits made within Fusion 360 during a live review session will be reflected in the web session in real-time. If you are one driving the design from the client, you can give permission to reviewers to interact with the design, and you’ll see it update within your Fusion 360 design environment.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Another feature that has been highly voted on in our IdeaStation has been keyboard shortcuts. Charles discussed our ideas around how we want to implement it here, and we’re excited to release this first phase of keyboard shortcuts with a set of keys focused on basic modeling tools.

You will soon be able to trigger commands based on their respective keys, and move quickly from one command to the other. The gif below shows Line, Sketch Dimension, Press Pull, and Fillet all triggered by keyboard shortcut keys.

Drawings

In this update, we’ve improved stability and usability of the 2D drawings workspace and will also be introducing the ability to:

• Create fully associative centerlines and center-marks

• Align and renumber balloons
• Parts list reverse ordering (bottom to top)
• Restore default properties to annotations

Modeling, Sketching, Stability, and Performance

Another popular ask that we’re delivering on is the ability to pattern components.

Within the solid pattern commands such as rectangular pattern, circular pattern, and pattern on path, you’ll see the option to pattern components as one of the pattern types. Simply click that you’ll have your components patterned in no time.

We’ve also made significant strides on the stability front, especially stability within the sketching environment. Over 40+ sketch related bugs and issues have been fixed, including issues that were causing crashes, unpredictable compute behavior in Variable Fillet and Combine, and sketching performance has noticeably become faster and more stable.

We’re really excited about this update, and hope you are too. We’ll keep you posted as we gear up for the release scheduled for next Saturday. Stay tuned!

The Fusion 360 Team