Just as a heads up, AutoDesk will start deleting your Fusion Files if you don't login once a year
This doesn’t sound like an issue for those who use Fusion frequently, however you may want to find ways to get local files, just to be safe.
Freecad is where it's at.
How’s Freecad these days? I avoided awhile ago it because it looked difficult to use but I think this might push me over to it
It does take a little work to get started especially if you haven't used any cad software before. But once you get the basics it's easy to search for different techniques to address any problems you encounter.
The weekly releases are looking rather promising on the UI polish, Maker's Muse did a video on it recently. There's also Ondsel which has an even more polished UI.
And they are getting closer to the 1.0 release as well:
Issue stats: overall, there are 1852 open issues in the tracker, down by 14 from last week. 26 of them are v1.0 release blockers, down by 14 from last week as well.
Hot take: that’s fair. They probably have thousands of users who made an account, drew a bunch of stuff and then abandoned it.
It’s not the best solution - that would be local offline storage - but it’s a fair change.
It's fair if you ignore that it's a problem of their own creation 😅
I do understand the point you're making though
And this is why all tools I use are opensource.
This is my biggest gripe with Fusion 360 after the literal dozens of minutes using it. Why can't I just save my projects locally?
I’ve personally switched over to FreeCAD, because of Autodesk signin policy (not this one, fusion kept signing me out forcing me to keep having to log back in). I am excitingly waiting for the next major FreeCAD release since the daily builds are looking extremely promising.
Why can’t I just save my projects locally?
Because then you wouldn't be Autodesk's bitch, and Autodesk really wants you to be their bitch.
Wait what?
So when I save my F3D files locally I don't get the whole project in the file?
You do. It's just more tedious, and you may not get some of the collaborative history like component comments and the like.
Pretty sure you can save them locally, it just requires extra clicks every time, which is super annoying.
Ok. I too hate that everything is directed to cloud and saving locally is treated like something strange that no one wants.
The day Autodesk removes the capability for local save ("export your files from cloud" in some Autodesk website is not the same as saving files directly from Fusion 360) is the day I leave Fusion 360.
But then there's fewer reasons to beg you to subscribe.
I have all the autodesk products available in software center from my job. Decided to give fusion a try, as it includes what was once eagle as well as enough 3d for my use... Online only? Where file? No offline stl because conversion is done online? GTFO! I'm back to using inventor and an ancient eagle version.
Dumb cloud-only stuff. Good that I use Onshape, where stuff like that could never happen!
...wait a minute, shit. It absolutely could and probably will. The owners certainly could restrict the free tier or ban my account if they want, and then everything is gone.
I absolutely hate that. I really like Onshape, because it works great, but we NEED an, at least decent, FOSS option. I don't necessarily need stuff like flow simulations, just good modeling, like in F360 or Onshape.
FreeCAD didn't work too for me. The UI was horrible, the workflow very unintuitive and wonky, and it crashed a lot, while not supporting basic functions.
There were a few alternatives around too, but they were in the very alpha stage and didn't work yet at the time I researched.
I really wish someone would create something from scratch, or fork something that already works, like Blender, and turns it into a CAD.
It's just sad to know all my hundreds of models in Onshape will get useless some time in the future.
There is cad plugins for blender. That said try FreeCAD again with the next major release. From the looks of FreeCAD daily, it’s really improved
Freecad link branch ?
Realthunder has been working with the main team to get his toponaming fix into mainline FreeCAD, and they've already adopted several of his UI improvements and settled on an assembly workbench. Version 1.0 should finally be released by the end of the year, and the weekly builds are promising. I don't know if it's quite there for me yet, but I'm hoping it will be by the time my paid-for Alibre is feeling long in the tooth, and any CAD DIY enthusiast would be wise to keep half an eye on FreeCAD.
Seriously give Ondsel a try if you haven't, has a different ui on top of freecad and a few workflow changes/sketch tools that make it less clunky. I use realthunder + modern ui for freecad and while yeah, there's clunk, it's useable and importantly, no limits on your files. Modern UI gives freecad a ribbon bar and some other enhancements that I like, swapping between benches took a bit to get used to, draft at least the hotkeys are kinda sorta intuitive and make the flow a lot nicer.
I switched cold turkey off of SW Maker for that reason, it limits where your files can be opened on that license, plus kept trying to save my files to a cloud storage by default. I've said it before, yeah freecad isn't perfect, has clunk, but it's provided to me free of charge with no limitations on its usage, I'll gladly accept that.
https://github.com/aconz2/Fusion360Exporter lets you bulk export all of your projects to local storage.
Yeah, got the same email. Fortunately I already exported everything to .step files and am using Ondsel ES full-time for my designs.
Oh fuck this digital hellscape. I wouldn’t mind if a solar storm killed every fucking processor on this planet tomorrow.
Watch as the 21st century as you know it devolve as supply chains collapse and everyone no longer has access to the necessities needed for survival.
If you're a beginner: get used to a different software, because Autodesk is the king of enshittification. Your files will be hostage and then you're going to pay the subscription to keep them alive. Don't waste your precious time in mastering Autodesk applications, the more you wait the harder is the switch
It's just so rough to switch away from the one major CAD suite that doesn't tar and feather UX devs on sight. Seriously, I like solidworks and solidedge and etc etc, but holy cow those interfaces are just unpleasant to use if you haven't been steeped in them for the last 30 years. Even Rhino is more intuitive.
I found Onshape to be quite nice. It was relatively easy to translate skills from Fusion to it after a few YouTube videos.
Having tried Fusion 360... It's interface and design paradigm is utter trash. NX, Creo, and Solidworks are all far ahead. Can't speak for catia, I've never used it but the versions I saw looked worse than Fusion
Solidworks has the most intuitive interface I've seen so far. I may be biased from using it for like 15 years at this point but I've also tried Fusion 360, SketchUp, Ondsel and FreeCAD with varying degrees of success in creating designs and assemblies more complicated than a nut and screw.
FreeCAD, optionally with Ondsel.
Great advice that I'm definitely going to take. I'm just learning now and kind of shopping around for which modeling software to learn.