Changes to Fusion 360 for Personal Use
autodesk.com
autodesk.com
I always had the impression that Autodesk had positioned Fusion 360 as their gateway drug into AutoCAD or some other Autodesk software, but that it was remarkably full featured for that purpose.
Last year (or was it the year before?), they added some restrictions to their free version. No biggie, I thought. Most of the cool hobbyist functionalities remained intact.
Now, they have taken more away. The file export limitations in particular are crippling. No .step? .dxf? No extensions??? I can't even buy stress simulation credits?
...yikes.
US$495 a year to subscribe to the "full" version (they have "generously" granted a 40% discount until Oct, hurry before it's too late!). No cheap versions for hobbyists like me who just like to dabble and for whom a yearly sub is out of the budget.
Any suggestions for free/cheap and functional local-install alternatives to Fusion 360? Parametric modelling has really saved my butt, and motion joint functionality is very useful too.
EDIT: was wrong, it's still under dev.
But the 3.0 prereleases can be easily built from the Github repo or you can get it from the Snap store. See the related Reddit thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SolveSpace/comments/iun270/heads_up...
With FreeCAD being closer to Fusion than OpenSCAD.
[0] http://www.formz.com/fzsite1219/products/formz/formz_free.ht...
The scripting makes making technical parts often much easier, and more maintainable. I for instance wanted to replace a metal rod in an antenna with a smaller diameter, and changing several mounting parts for the rods became changing a single variable. Plus, being eble to comment scad files makes it much easier to meaningful share parts (the STL files on Thingiverse are hard to modify).
The usual caveats apply: people tend to either shy away from the few days it takes to learn OpenScad, or, once they invest the time, there's a tendency to over-engineer scripts and not focus on tasks at hand ;)_
One big caveat, which I've experienced on several past versions is that it freezes up completely (like freeze freeze) for 3 - 15 seconds whenever you open it, saves files etc.
I have a 2017 MacBook Pro 16 GB, with MacOS 10.14, so I don't think it should be any problems, but.
I'm just attributing it to "these are quirks you accept when going full open source and not paying for it"
> Fast forward to now, and there are 645,000 of you actively using Fusion 360 every month. You’ve shown us how much it has become a part of your lives...
The perfect opportunity for them to start tightening the screws.
We've used it internally for some fun demo/hack projects and have had a good experience with it.
That doesn't go. Otherwise they could have scrubbed any free package altogether.
Parametric modelling is something F360 is really good at, and then I could do useful things with the model.
Now that I can't do useful things with the model (they removed all those features), it doesn't make sense to use F360, no matter how good the parametric modelling is.
> Hi Shannon,
> I thought for some years that Autodesk was a smart company.
> Most people I know in the makers community were using Fusion 360 because it was free, and when you are a hobbyist this makes a big difference, you are not gonna to spend hundreds of dollars for simple side projects. Your previous approach of allowing people to use Fusion 360 for free unless they made money out of their project was really smart. These people were anyway not going to be your clients so you (almost) did not "lose" money, and on the other side they got used to your product so when moving to a professional environment they would push for Fusion 360. It was kind of a win-win approach, with the additional effect that Autodesk looked like a hobbyist-friendly company.
> Today you did not just break the main use-case for hobbyists by disabling the export in DXF, but you also showed that you prefer to spend money to block existing features of your software instead of improving it with new paid features. That's an indicator that you don't care about the product itself anymore, but that you are just trying to extract the maximum money out of your current users instead.
> I don't see the point to support a company like that anymore, so I deleted my account. It is now useless anyway.
> You did not only lose a user, you lost my trust. And probably not only mine.
Hobby users often show up later in the workplace, where they'll naturally lean toward tools they're familiar with there's an option.
Hobby users also tend to form communities, where they share what they build and learned, more free advertising and more new users.
Plenty of companies would die for a curated new user stream like this.
The dependencies between sketches break when you change anything earlier in the chain (like drawing a circle for a hole in a wall that was 6 polygons and now that wall is 8 polygons and the circle jumps to another corner or somewhere) because automatic naming of stuff isn't consistent.
You can work around this by always using datum planes as the basis for each sketch but it's very inconvenient and makes editing sketches hard because datum planes occlude other stuff on the sketch. There's a display mode that renders only lines, but the planes remain semi-transparent and mess with selecting points behind them.
Parametric modeling is possible but it also breaks very easily if you edit anything up the chain because of the above problems, to the point it's almost useless.
You also can't export to anything used by 3d printers other than .stl, and the tesselation configuration is weird (you have to change configuration of minimal angle between faces generated from round surfaces in totally unrelated configuration tab - it took me a long time to find it).
I haven't tested 90% of the features, including the motion joints.
Also it crashes sometimes (like once a day) - you have to save often.
But it's free and it mostly works and I didn't had to deal with the licencing and registration, and it runs locally and I can use git for backups, so that's good.
Also, when you're working on a sketch you can go back to the object tree and use SPACE to disappear objects temporarily if you are having trouble selecting.
I don't know what you mean by tesselation configuration- ah, well that explains why I had undersized holes (I print a lot of parts with shaft holes, or holes for bearings).
v0.19 is a lot more stable than any previous version I've used- I still have a crash a day too.
Thanks, I'll try it. It still kinda defeats the purpose of parametric modelling when you have to do additional steps after you changed the parameters :)
> I don't know what you mean by tesselation configuration
CAD can represent continuous curves, .stl format only has flat polygons (triangles?), so they need to tesselate the curves somehow when exporting.
The defaults are such that on a pot for a plant I've printed you can see the "faces" of the cylinder - like on these pipes in Super Mario https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/4BUAAOSwj69ZdDw8/s-l400.jpg
To fix that I had to increase details, and to do that I had to select completely different task and go to configuration of some other (non-stl) format and change maximal angle error or sth like that. I don't remember but I remember it was far from obvious.
Though it would be wonderful if Blender was eventually able to add this. It is probably not currently a priority for their financial sponsors though - CGI/game industry doesn't use parametric much.
Some work was done in Feb 2020 to start bringing them up to speed, and there is a patch set for review:
https://developer.blender.org/D6807
It doesn't seem to have received the needed reviewing though. Until that's done, there's not much hope. :( :( :(
Note - this is just my understanding of it, as I was wondering similar about the state of solid modelling in Blender last week.
No, that was the gateway into being able to pull this whole load of bullshit to extract money from the hobbyist market.
This is disappointing because I just started to pick up Fusion360 for woodworking projects. I guess it's good I haven't put more than a week or so into studying it.
The upside for a ROI seems like it would be enormous, and pretty easy to make happen. Industrial seat licensing for products like Solidworks, CATIA, Inventor, and (now) Fusion are enormously expensive. It's not just private organizations either--CAD proficiency is such a basic skill that every serious engineering school has an organizational license for their students too, which I'd imagine also costs a bundle. It's not as if the tools themselves are expanding functionality at some sort of rapid rate, either; I haven't done much CAD in the last two years (so maybe I somehow missed some sort of feature explosion), but while a regular user between 2013-2018, I saw basically no change in the vast majority of my most-used tools for several different CAD programs, with the exception of some improvement in out-of-the-box simulation capability.
The existing FOSS alternatives just aren't at par. I've tried FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, etc., and most mechanical engineers/CAD specialists wouldn't touch a code-based editor. They're certainly better than before, but the rough edges exist and some of them appear in areas that need to Just Work (like assembly and drawings). From my understanding of their contribution graphs, private organizations putting even two or three full-time developers working on those projects could push them much, much closer to being a drop-in replacement for a lot work that gets done, and potentially even save those orgs some money in the short-term by reducing the total number of seat licenses they need in to function.
Edit: Added mention of KiCad, bc that's kind of important too
I suppose some large-ish entity that relies on CAD will need to take the same view. I have less faith in academia there, however -- I suspect many of those sitewide licenses are heavily discounted in order to cultivate the addiction, to profit from it later. That's just speculation, though.
This is where we really need good software bounties. I'm sure a whole lot of scorned F360 users would throw a few bucks a month into a Patreon or something to advance the state of FreeCAD. I'm not even directly impacted by this; I have a F360 license through my employer, but I'm offended enough on principle to contribute if there's a place to do so.
I've worked in national labs, and the bigger concern is how to guarantee the ability to open or update the current files in one or two decades.
(It was common to see foot-high printouts that faded over the years and became illegibile, to give an example of the time scale we're talking about.)
Hobbyists have a similar problem in that they want to be able to "hibernate" a project and update drawings in 5 years, but without thinking about monthly cloud fees. So free or perpetual licenses also make more sense for that use case.
Storing drawing files long-term in a vendor's cloud is undesirable if you really want local files for archival or distribution purposes.
Unigraphics was owned by McDonnell Douglas and then sold to EDS, which was a subsidiary of General Motors. As far as I know, GM still uses Unigraphics as their primary CAD system.
Salome is supported by EDF (French national energy) and BRL-CAD by the US Army.
Both are pretty good.
But - $495 for a CAD program as fully featured as Fusion 360 is a steal compared to $$$$ Solidworks & competitors. Plus it's cross platform which you don't typically find in the world of CAD.
Is FreeCAD a viable alternative? Not even close.
Should there be a usable FOSS CAD program? hell yes!
Unfortunately the FOSS foundations required to build a real CAD program haven't materialized in cohesive way. There are so many pieces, with many requiring teams of PhDs to produce: CAD kernels, constraint solvers, file format interop, sketching tools, assembly support (mating), simulation, etc... There are some advanced projects out there like the OPENCASCADE kernel, but Parasolid is more reliable and has real support through Siemens.
I recently got a 3D Printer and have been learning Fusion360 and designing my first parts. Guess I'll take another look at FreeCAD.
In general, I'm happy to pay for things that "have value", but the pricing here ($495/year) is just too much to justify for a hobby.
Also have a look at SolveSpace. Version 3.0 is nearing completion but if you can build from source or use the snap store you can use it now:
http://solvespace.com/index.pl
https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace
There are also a few great YouTube channels with tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEvJVXu3VfGMSOdpA0jrG...
Removing the rapid movement seems like a petty move.
Removing the simulation is fine for me if that's not the simulation of the manufacturing operations which is absolute necessity.
Hopefully that move will help some slicer like Cura expand and do some CAM code, because up until now there was no need to develop because Fusion was really good and was free.
"My name is Inigo Montoya..."
Not to mention the misleading infographic with the checkmarks (which displays the important information in a more dim, harder-to-notice color and displays old outdated information in bold black which goes top to bottom) or the interstitial with the dark pattern button that says "I don't want to save 40%" in order to dismiss.
I can't speak for all of its use-cases, but even then: I haven't found any 3D modeling software that is as easy to use & feature rich as Fusion. However, for 3D print slicing and compiling after the model has been made, Ultimaker Cura is really a gold standard in the space, and open source (AGPL3 I believe).
One thing that's been needed for years in the open source space is a decent mechanical CAD program and integrated CAM system.
The issue is that such things are still dark arts to write.
There are open source projects that are out there, including BRLCAD, Blender, and other special purpose programs.
Fusion 360 is head and shoulders above them in terms of usability and integration with the CAM system.
the "just use fusion 360, it's free" contingent have, imo, stifled interest and support for FOSS CAD (alternately, view it as a very successful market domination move by Autodesk)
Is there a word for this?
https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/552#issuecom...
The only thing I'm unsure of is if it supports some functions such as milling, threads, etc. I think interfacing it with OpenSCAD just for this use-case would be huge (define the function in OpenSCAD, apply it in solvespace).
I tried hard to use FreeCAD, but maybe not hard enough, as I really had some difficulties using that workflow (IIRC, finding the 2D planner interface was difficult enough, and constraints didn't work as expected). It did have an OpenSCAD interface, though.
The last point is something worth mentioning: an opportunity FLOSS has that proprietary software often lacks is interoperability, either with the save formats, or directly with APIs, or calling each other for specific parts. I wish this was leveraged a bit more in this space.
There's a built-in gcode generator for 3-axis milling. I've never used it, since I don't have a mill or router.
Helical features is in a development branch, and is one of the blocking features for the next release. It mostly works, but still has some open bugs.
I've tried F360 a few times and each time dropped it thinking "this is designed to lock me in and make me pay for it".
The people Autodesk wants to sell subscriptions to sneer at the "hackerspace" types and scoff at Fusion 360.
Odd that it doesn't mention small businesses though - wasn't it previously personal or <100k USD pa?
But also.. why? If it's already personal use only, and someone has an automatic tool changer for their personal use CNC mill, why not let them use it? Get hooked on it? Continue to want to use it when they have a saleable product idea?
But designers of small PCBs (whatever their worth) or people 3D printing can continue unimpeded?
And I'm sure ATC can be added back in as a post-process, since it must at least stop for a manual tool change, or its CAM would be useless for even hobbyists.
I believe ATC moves are implemented as macros by the machine. So the code emitted looks like:
M6 T2
and the ATC behavior is filled in with a macro for the specific machine.
To nerf ATC users, Fusion is preventing toolpaths with multiple tools from being exported in the first place. So you have to generate individual toolpaths for each tool.
The sad part is that hobby machines also make use of the "M6 T<tool number>" macros to move the machine to a place where it's easy to change tools and then do automatic touch-off before continuing. It's not only professional-class machines that will be affected.
It should be theoretically possible to run the multiple generated files through a script to put them back together, but this is likely too much complexity for the vast majority of users.
Oh that's a shame, I'd assumed it would use the 'compulsory stop' code, so no ATC, but allowing the opetator to. I hadn't considered that non-ATC machines might do something helpful with ATC codes. (I don't have, but have recently become interested in having, a CNC mill or anything.)
As far as I can tell from the plans page, that's been completely axed. It's now either restricted personal use, or USD$495 (currently on offer at $297) /seat/year.
The real lesson here is: that's what happens when you use software that's free as in beer.
A bait-and-switch scheme is anything but.
I'm sure the deer congregating at the corn feeder feel the same way, at least until opening day of hunting season.
And the Turkey must think "The farmer must love me. He feeds me and tends to my needs. Why look at the calendar, with Thanksgiving day just around the corner..."
> I'm sure the deer congregating at the corn feeder
> feel the same way
> And the Turkey must think "The farmer must love me.
It's a lot more user friendly than it used to be and still rapidly improving.
I wrote a script that imports STLs into Blender and saves them as OBJs. No cloud required! Works every time! Wow!
It is unfortunate when I read the list of things they are doing to make the life of a hobbyist harder, because Fusion 360 has been pretty useful to me. They should just make it something you buy for $50. Would instantly pay.
There are some great non-SaaS tools out there if you're willing to spend a little money. Rhino 3D is one stand-out in this space. And if you're looking for a decent CAM solution, check out Estlcam. It's a stand alone tool with a ton of great features at a reasonable price.
Fortunately for me, this is exactly what I'm writing up.
For more complex stuff I used inventor fusion which was a free beta but I think this is now part of 360.
I still have to get into it as 123D is still sufficient for me :)
Fuck it, FreeCAD!
They're not blocking it behind a paywall. It's still free. I understand that for hobbyists, it can be expensive. But if you are using things beyond the free tier, that's more than just a hobby. And I know this is an unpopular opinion, but being a Software Engineer, I really hate it when anytime a software company tries to charge for things, it's unfair and it's price gouging. But people fail to acknowledge that it is the only industry where you can even pick things up as a hobby for free. Literally anything else you want to pick up as a hobby costs money upfront. If all of the 645,000 users were willing to put up with those upfront costs, they wouldn't have had the need to price their plans so high.
I expect that most of the new features cater to professionnals, except for basic maintenance and a few simple features. The workload necessary to match hobbyist expectations is nowhere near a single full-time dev.
But these products are monstrously complicated for wat they are, in part due to the company looking for ways to extract value at every point it can (forcing cloud mechanisms: they cost money for sure, but are mostly used for locking customers in and as an excuse to require a permanent connection). And for every possible revenue stream, it seems...
I'd say this is a good thing if it makes FLOSS alternatives a bit more attractive. Hobbyists are usually hard to switch to alternatives once they find something "good enough". In turn, they tend to produce lots of documentation, tutorials, and training material. Just look at the number of people you can ask for help with, say, plotting a graph in Microsoft Excel vs doing it in LaTeX.
> [...] as talked about in the announcement, we did not make these decisions lightly, but it is necessary in order for us to continue support Fusion 360 for Personal Use as a free offering, cut down on abuse of the license type, and continue to develop advanced capabilities.
The issue of charging from the software is distinct from the issue of enforcing the requirement that the license is for non-commercial purposes. Even if they had a low cost hobbyist license with all the features unlocked, the people currently using the hobbyist license for commercial purposes would just use the inexpensive one as opposed to paying for the full commercial one.
Autodesk could've taken the approach of sending sternly worded letters to commercial users using the hobbyist license, or even deactivating commercial users with the wrong license type, since their software is partly cloud-based and requires an Autodesk account and internet connection. Instead, they've taken the approach of changing the feature set, which is why some people are annoyed.
Drawings is not "more than just a hobby."