Elevate your design and manufacturing processes with Autodesk Fusion

Get a 30-Day Free Trial See Plans and Pricing

May is here and the team is working round the clock to deliver the next update in about a week driven by your feedback from direct conversations, forums, and the Idea Station.  Thank you for all your ideas and please keep the conversation going.

An integrated form, function and now fabrication with CAM

An integrated form, function and fabrication experience has been the vision for Fusion.  We started with form and function with only a little fabrication, the 3D print utility.  Now we are adding CAM to that experience with this update.  We are very excited about it.  So what does this all mean?

Users of our Windows based clients will now get Fusion 360 design and the tech preview of our integrated CAM tool.  We weren’t able to get all of the CAM software finished on the Mac (sorry) but we are targeting this capability for the Mac clients end of June.

In the Cam environment you will be able to create toolpaths from any design by using the new actions button.  These toolpaths are associative to the design from which they were created.  Users working on these toolpaths will be notified when the design has changed and have the choice on whether to update. You can switch between designs and CAM toolpaths using the related data button or using the new related data “tab” shown in the dashboard.  Designs and toolpaths are managed separately in your dashboard.

With this integrated CAD/CAM experience in Fusion 360 we will be ending the CAM 360 beta.

Data and Collaboration in the Dashboard

Based on your feedback, we know we need to do much more with the dashboard.  In this release, we have made significant improvements in the online viewer and added the ability to search into your models from the dashboard or even the item detail page.

Other improvements include simplifying the sharing workflow by enabling you to invite anyone to collaborate on a design without having to add them to the project first. Now they will automatically get added to the project where the design lives. On similar lines, guests in a project can now invite more guests, as long as the project owner approves the invitation.

We have also made the insert component workflows easier by allowing you to search or navigate your projects to find the right component to insert.

Modeling usability and workflow improvements

The focus in modeling has been to address usability and finish incomplete workflows based on your feedback in the IdeaStation.  Below are a few of highly requested modeling features in the May update. 

• Timeline grouping.  A consistent feedback from the community has been that as models got bigger or in the case of imported models managing the timeline started to get difficult and unusable at times.

• Timeline enabled Stitch and boundary fill command in the patch workspace
• Ability to set a default model orientation
• Create patterns in both directions in the center pattern options
• Web command 

We are also adding support to a few more highly requested import/export options. 

• Export design as an obj
• Save As DXF
• Support for Inventor 2015 Files 

High quality rendering and simplified material UI

A nicely rendered model isn’t just about eye candy and making people say OOO and AHH; it’s an important way for designers to accurately communicate their design intent as realistically as possible. In this coming update:

• Dedicated space for rendering – All the tools for rendering in one dedicate window
• New and enhanced rendering environments for more choices in rendering results
• Easier to use UI for materials with drag and drop assignment
• Enhanced selection of render materials (now called appearance).  Materials now work with Fusion360 Real-time Ray Tracer and the cloud rendering service

And get realistic renderings a very short amount of time, all staying in Fusion 360.  And yes, this is included functionality!

Simplified UI for access to materials and appearance.

We still have more work to do on materials but hopefully this release will really help.

Stability

We have heard loud and clear from many of you that stability or crashes is a major issue.  We are taking it very seriously and working very hard on the problem.  One pattern we have seen is large number of the stability issues is MAC related.  For the May update we have addressed most of the known stability issues with MAC.

The other area of instability is data upload and translation.  We have identified issues in our network topology and the translation pipeline and are working thru the issues. 

We are squarely focused on the stability issues and continue to do so until we wrestle it to the ground.

Again, we want to continue to get your feedback and ideas as you use Fusion. Please let me know what you think of this update (best to do it via comments so everyone can see).  We’re just starting on the next release which we’re targeting for the end of June. Please let us know how we can make the Fusion experience better for you.

Thanks

Prabakar and the Fusion 360 team