Visualization of your design is important in many parts of your product development process – be it to communicate design intent, for design reviews with teams or clients, to illustrate assembly, or produce high quality images for marketing. The Fusion 360 visualization team has been hard at work to improve the rendering and visualization capabilities in Fusion 360 to better suit your needs.

The Rendering workspace in Fusion 360 has come a long way since the introduction of the software.  In the last year, we have added functionality for camera editing, adding new translucent and emissive materials, enabled downloadable materials from the Autodesk cloud, and greatly improved the user interface for creating cloud renderings.

In Fusion 360 as a whole, there has been a lot of effort getting a consistent look between all of our visualization technologies – desktop ray tracing, cloud ray tracing and the A360 3D viewer.

With all that work behind us there is still a lot of functionality that we want to add to Fusion 360.  Here is a list of some of the features that will be appearing over the next few releases:

• Improved decals in local render
• Improved ground plane controls
• Custom HDRI / IBL environments
• Desktop background ray tracing
• • Desktop turntable and motion study rendering
  • Consolidation of desktop and cloud rendering workflows
  • Ray tracing of exploded views, animations and section analysis
  • Downloadable environments and textures
  • 3D Materials – wood, fabric and 3D printed materials
  • Pantone® color palettes
  • Light objects (spot, ambient, linear, etc.)
  • Continued improvement to user interface and workflows
  • New material editor user interface
  • Image backdrop camera matching
  • Improved camera workflow and effects (vignette, bloom, etc)
  • Creation, storage and management of cloud materials
  • Web-based visualization workflows
    • Generate renderings from 3D mobile viewer
    • Apply rendering effects in the web (background, DOF, bloom, exposure)
    • Share and comment on individual objects in a rendering or on specific material in a rendering
    • Examine the materials, colors used in a rendering via the web.

Here are two beautiful examples of the 3D wood texture that the team is working on.

                                                                                           Cherry 3D Wood Material

                                                                                           Walnut 3D Wood Material

As you can see the best is still yet to come and there are some great features coming your way.

As always, if you have a request for a feature that is not on this list, please submit it in the Idea Station.

Happy rendering,

Colin