Keqing Song
Together, we’re making it better.
We’ve heard from a lot of you that you wanted an easier way to learn Fusion 360. You’ve said that our YouTube and learning videos have been very helpful in getting you up to speed and learning Fusion 360, yet you still have to pause the video, go back to Fusion 360, replicate what the video is doing, go back to the software, and so forth. This back-and-forth experience can get pretty annoying, especially if you are working on just one monitor screen.
You’ve also told us that getting around and navigating the dashboard was a major challenge. It felt clunky and got in the way of what you really wanted to do with Fusion 360, which was designing brilliant products. You wanted a way to better organize your designs, easily pick where to save them, share your work and not be bogged down if you lose internet connection.
In terms of working on your designs, you’ve expressed concerns around graphic stability, modeling ease-of-use, and various UI elements that have caused issues or has slowed down your design process to a sub-optimal pace.
You probably already know where this is going, so here it is: we’ve captured all the challenges you’ve expressed to us and we were able to create a new iteration of the Fusion 360 experience that will significant improve the learnability, usability and performance of the software, and we can’t wait to deliver it to you.
Easier learning
In this next update we will be introducing 12 brand new in-product tutorials that will guide you through various form, function, fabricate and manage workflows. These tutorials can be accessed from the help menu dropdown, and will be displayed in a dialog box to the bottom right side of the design environment. Go through the tutorial by replicating what each page is doing, and click next to adance to the next page.
When you get to the end of a tutorial, you’ll have the option to move on to another one, or choose a different one from the launchpad. Each tutorial is independent of each other, which means you don’t have to follow a certain path to complete them. You get to choose your adventure, and pick the tutorial that interests you the most.
Revamped data and collaboration experience
Based on your feedback we have completely revamped the data and collaboration experience. If you have not already, please check it out here.
This next update will also give you ability to share designs to anyone you’d like, even if they don’t have an Autodesk account. Right-clicking on a design in the your data panel will give you an option to get a public share link for that specific design.
This share link will allow the recipient(s) to view the design in their web browsers with our free 3D viewer.
Before you share the link out, you can allow the design to be downloaded, or set a password if you choose to have some security over the design. This has been a widely requested feature, and we’re really excited to be finally delivering it in this next update!
Scripting to automate and extend your toolset
Create custom scripts using Javascript within Fusion 360. This new API functionality will enable you to automate custom tasks and have Fusion 360 do what you want it to do. Along with this feature, we’ve also included a few sample scripts such as a bolt generator, spur gear generator, simple build-of-materials (BOM) extractor, etc., so go ahead – try them out, and let us know what you think. Javascript is the current default scripting language for now, but we are looking into including other languages like Python in the near future.
Enhancements driven by your input
We have also made lot of improvements in our modeling, rendering, machining workspaces and general usability. A few key ones are…
We’ve improved our T-Spline creasing performance, where now, you can crease and uncrease edges without running into wonky intersections and throwing your model into box mode. Uncreasing hard edges will give you nice smooth surfaces to work on, and you will also be able to maintain various creases when you are invoking an extrusion. Here’s a quick video made by Paul Deyo, showing just how much creasing performance has improved in the coming update.
Graphics, rendering performance and the quality of visual materials have also been vastly improved. Users on older hardware will able to better leverage Fusion 360’s local rendering capabilities. We’ve also added a number of new materials like gemstones, jade, and transluscent, just to name a few.
CAM is also getting some great new enhancements such as a position bar at the bottom, letting you jump to a specific position within a simulated toolpath.
This position bar will also visually display areas where there are toolpath issues such as tool/part collisions, and allow you to jump to that instance and make fixes to the toolpath before you send it off to the CNC machine. Other features such as saving operations as templates for reuse and enabling surfaces as model input in your toolpath setup are also included in this up-coming update.
Every little bit adds up
On top of all the new functionality, we strive to continuously improve the usability of the software. The next update will include an abundance of UI/user experience improvements such as highlighting active manipulators and a manual offline mode toggle. These things may seem trivial at first, but these small enhancements add up and have a significant impact on the Fusion 360 experience as a whole, and again, a lot of it has been driven by your feedback.
Register to see these features in action!
On Thursday, August 28 at 1:00 PM PDT, we will be demoing these features as well as the new data sharing and collaboration experience in our product update preview webinar, so click on the registration link below and claim your spot to watch the live demo. If you can’t make it, we’ll be sure to have it recorded and posted to YouTube shortly after, and as always, your feedback has and will continue to play an integral part of how we develop Fusion 360.
Thank you for being awesome Fusion 360 users and talk to you soon!
The Fusion 360 Team
