Easy Way to Assemble in Fusion 360
Autodesk Fusion 360's March 2021 Update is... wait for it... a game changer. There, I said it and I feel a little dirty now. I know what you're thinking, here's an Autodesk guy dropping buzzword bingo words on a LinkedIn article, peddling a product that he has a vested interest in its success. Hey Rob, why don't you drop a "paradigm shift" or everybody's favorite "best-in-class" while you're at it? I know, I know so let me circle back, drill down on some low hanging fruit that has been on my radar and let you know how with some outside the box blue sky thinking we were able to scope out a solution that's a win-win. Hard stop.
Hopefully that's the funniest thing you'll read all day. But I digress! (Ok, I'm done now)
So what's the big deal enough call something a game changer? Let me walk it back (goodness they don't stop) to 2014 and my first experience with Fusion 360. By that time I had used Autodesk Inventor for around 14 years and I knew it cold, heck I might have been the only one that thought the Engineer's Notebook was cool. I shared what I knew about modeling with Inventor enough that 4.5 million YouTube views later, folks still seem to be learning something from them. So the switch to Fusion 360, for me anyway, wasn't an easy one. Turns out, I'm not the only one.
Different By Design
Fusion 360 set out to do a couple of things at the outset:
- Disrupt the CAD/CAM Market by lowering the barrier of entry, and accessibility to CAD/CAM technology. Check that box, people still can't believe what we've put into a $495/year subscription.
- Introduce an experience that is easy to learn, easy to use, easy to install & maintain, and makes it easy to access your data. Check that box as well. Fusion 360 has caught fire with people that have never used a CAD system before. We found a great deal of success with students, startups, and hobbyists in large part to building an experienced specifically designed for people new to CAD.
As a result of that very explicit effort to make it easy to use for those new to CAD, the first reaction to those familiar with another CAD system (people like myself) was from the very start, well it was different. You're put into a design workspace where there is no distinction between a part or an assembly. There are a number of things different between Inventor and Fusion 360, but for now lets focus on that last comment: no distinction between a part and an assembly. If you understand multi-body / multi-component / top-down design methods, no distinction between part and assembly is awesome, it's quick, and for an individual developing a product that method is great but you would have had to know that was the modeling methodology you had entered into. If you didn't know the difference (someone new to CAD), you didn't know this was different and that's ok. But, if you were expecting, based on previous knowledge of CAD software, to be asked to create either a part or assembly and since you weren't asked well... it might have been confusing.
Familiar By Design
The thing we set out to do, in an attempt to build a more familiar assembly modeling experience to those familiar with other CAD applications, was to make it possible for people to create parts, create assemblies, bring parts into assemblies and position them relative to one another. Make it familiar to those that use this "distributed" approach to assembly modeling. There's a very functional purpose that having a distributed model serves. In that each part is its own file, it naturally creates a division of labor between team members all working on different parts of perhaps the same assembly making any file already open by one user read only to anyone that attempted to open it. A limitation of Windows that actually served a very useful purpose for design teams.
Record scratch moment. Fusion 360's data is in the cloud, it doesn't use the same inherent file locking as an application reading a file from an OS. Could be an issue... or... we could just utilize that and come up with some cool shizzle. Which is exactly what we did.
Edit In Place
The first thing we had to do was to make it possible to edit a part file that you reference into an assembly. As part of that, you'd expect to be able to share geometry from one part to another - project geometry between reference components. We did that, even turned Assembly Modeling on its head with Assembly Context. While editing a referenced part in an assembly, when you project geometry to that active part an assembly context is created within it. Which means you no longer have to have the assembly open to reference geometry that would otherwise only be available at the assembly level. Here's a two minute or so video on context:
New External Component
The next thing we introduced was an option to create a new external component during the Create New Component dialog. Prior to this option you had to create a new document, save it, then place it into an assembly. Inconvenient to say the least so we made it possible to create a new component as an external from within an assembly.
Is this a departure from multi-body / top-down assembly modeling? No, in fact you might want to use distributed sub-assemblies, but have those sub-assemblies contain all local components. It really depends on how you want to use the distribution model as a means to establish a division of labor. You get the best of both.
Implicit Reservation
Finally on to the March 2021 Update of Fusion 360 which includes a project we've called Implicit Reservation. This project set out to provide a means of communication between participants in a design project that are actively working on the same assembly at the same time. IR actively communicates who's got what open, who might be editing a component, reserves (locks) a component to the person actively editing it, un-reserves it on save or close, and notifies the other participants that an update is ready to consume. No upload, no download, no pack and go, none of the things you hate about updating your assemblies when someone shares a change.
Check out this video from Trent that summarizes this [insert buzzword] feature that we think you're going to love:
Finally, if you're up for adopting this as part of your Fusion 360 workflows, read more about best practices in this article from John Helfen:
Leave your comments, lets keep the conversation going.
-Rob Cohee
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/assembly-modeling-fusion-360-rob-cohee
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