Comment by raynr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raynr | Hacker News Reader

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Wow, I did not expect this. I started looking at Fusion 360 a couple years back because it seemed very hobbyist friendly, and while I primarily use it for 3d printing, I've dabbled in laser cutting and CNC too.

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.

I totally resonate with your reaction. I wrote a response to their email out of hopelessness. Pretty sure it won't be read, but as it summarizes my thoughts I can post it here as well:

> 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.

Yep and it's also short sighted, eating their future user stream.

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.

I absolutely expected 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.

FreeCAD is the big name, but I'd check out SolveSpace too. Then there is of course OpenSCAD which works well for the things it happens to work well for, but I wouldn't call it full replacement for a CAD. To wrap up there is the oldie and honestly bit intimidating BRL-CAD, which I'm kinda trying to learn whenever I feel like I need to do mechanical design.

SolveSpace looks like a dead project though.

EDIT: was wrong, it's still under dev.

As mentioned in another thread, the last official release was 2.3 in late 2016.

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...

While not as capable and well supported as Fusion, the two top alternatives that I am aware of are: https://www.openscad.org/ and https://www.freecadweb.org/

With FreeCAD being closer to Fusion than OpenSCAD.

I feel LaTeX relates to MS Word like OpenScad to FreeCad.

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 ;)_

I've used FreeCad for some time, I'm not doing anything super advanced but works well for all basic modeling task.

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"

has anyone used form•Z[0] recently? i remember liking it much better than autocad in college (waaay back in the day), simply because it was much easier to get started modeling (but not nearly as integrated into the engineerng workflow).

[0] http://www.formz.com/fzsite1219/products/formz/formz_free.ht...

Give SolveSpace a try too.

I don't think solvespace has any offset or minkowski sum operation, it's a staple of mechanical modelling.

How about Onshape Free? https://www.onshape.com/products/free

We've used it internally for some fun demo/hack projects and have had a good experience with it.

Everything I have seen from Autodesk, this was what I expected from day one I learned of Fusion 360. I hoped I would be wrong, but no.

The natural result of this change will be piracy, especially for non-commercial users. People tend to forget that paying $0 for a crack is always an option and entirely within the scope of the free market. Either way i hope Autodesk sees an apparently plummeting user base and reverses course.

I'm using FreeCad for simple 3d-printing, and it mostly works, has all the features I need, but you have to struggle with everything.

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.

I also noticed that sketches can be messed up if you make changes earlier in the chain. BUT: if you get in that state, you can use the 'Map to Sketch' feature to repair it. It's a bit clumsy- even after mapping, you have to click on the sketch, and the object made from it, to get it to recalculate. But this has saved me a fair amount of rework when fixing something earlier in the chain.

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.

> you can use the 'Map to Sketch' feature to repair it

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.

Thanks, that's very helpful.

I know you specified local-install but I've found onshape better than any of the alternatives I've tried. It's web-based but I've never had performance issues and having easy access to my designs from any computer is an added bonus.

I dislike online-only software - there’s not always a connection where I want to do design work (say, at Xmas at my uncles farmhouse OR trapped on an airline OR a metered connection).

> Parametric modelling has really saved my butt

That doesn't go. Otherwise they could have scrubbed any free package altogether.

I interpreted it as:

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.

Somehow this post was on the front page of HN 5 minutes ago and is now at #59 on the second page (3rd if you do 20 per page). WTF HN?

It set off the flamewar detector.

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