Fusion 360 Free version - work arounds

[Andrewg]

Like many (I assume) I had grown to love having the features of a full 3D parametric modelling available to me for my home projects, not that I often need all the power it provides. The removal of features from the free version has been a PIA to work around.

I tend to use Vectic V-Carve in the workshop for 2D work and generating G-Code quickly as it is so simple and user friendly. So the biggest pain was the removal of .pdf or .dxf export from Fusion 360, stopping the easy moving of 2D parts between the two. However I have found 2 fixes while searching

- Print to PDF
In Fusions 360 you can't export a drawing to pdf anymore, but you can print it and use the Microsoft Print to PDF driver (other free pdf print drivers available) to generate a pdf ready for importing into Vectric. On import you have to rescale the parts to full size, but with a reference dimension from Fusion and the dimension and scale features in Vectric that is simple and accurate to around 6 decimal places. I had some concerns about the resolution and complexity of the pdf file generated so i drew a 50mm cube, printed it to pdf, imported into Vectric, created a profile cut, exported the g-code. I then inspected that to confirm the files was clean and short, simple point to point moves of 50mm (not thousands of short segments for example) - not exhaustive but encouraging and so far has worked for me on simple outlines of parts. (I think the resolution is 600dpi by default for this print driver)

-Mapboard Pro
Recently been frustrated (and confused) by the Arrange (and Nest) features not being available, as taking parts from a Fusion 360 design and laying them out onto stock material is a common stage (even if I then rearrange them in Vectric at the machine to suit actual material available that day. YouTube made me aware of a Fusion 360 App Store App called Mapboard that not only recreates the arrange feature but also export of results in dxf and svg format! Feedback from users is excellent, the app only costs around $16 for Mapboard and $25 for Mapboard Pro. So I have bought it, and so far am very impressed.

Of course the idea of allowing third party apps that replace functionality disabled in the free version seems perverse way to manage a product and so who knows how long Autocad will allow this to continue or will impose further restrictions, but for now it works like a dream!

FreeCAD 0.19
Longer term the answer is probably to not rely on Autocad's fickle generosity, so I have started to use FreeCAD, the open source parametric modeller. Version 0.19 that came out recently is a huge step forward. Whilst nowhere near as sophisticated a UI, it does embody the parametric and constraint driven design approach I have come to prefer from Fusion 360 and so I have been using it for simple parametric box designs, getting it to spit out 2D dxf ready for CAM in Vectric. It does however also have an increasingly sophisticated CAM workbench so that might soon be an unnecessary step. Worth a look.

[cropwell]

I have started to learn Fusion360 as an alternative to Sketchup Make for producing my quick and nasty (functional not beautiful) 3D prints. I may switch to FreeCad as I do not like cloud storage and processing. I feel it leaves me too vulnerable to ransom, should Fusion decide remove the 'free' option.

[John McNamara]

Hi

I was pleased to see that the widely used solidworks program is to be made available for makers at a modest fee 99USD a year?

Solidworks is widely used in industry. You get an idea of its usage when you visit free 3D CAD sites like Grabcad. The vast majority of the 3D models available are written in Solid works.

The SW Maker version is not yet available It appears that it will be cloud based.

To me it is the first counter strike against Autodesk Fusion that has a good chance of gaining real traction, It will be interesting to see how this battle plays out. With decent competition users are likely to be rewarded with better options at lower prices.

Google Solidworks for makers there are a number of links to check out.

Regards
John

[Andrewg]

SOLIDWORKS is certainly a leader in mech eng design, and having a cheaper, more secure way to access a personal licence (I believe for some years you could get cheap licences by joining a model engineering society) will be reassuring to those who can use it......But you can't beat free, and at least for now Fusion 360 is still free with all that professional, parametric, constraint based, integrated CAM goodness....if you can navigate around the recently imposed restrictions.

SketchUp is a fantastic tool for designing rectilinear woodworking projects, but does not handle curves well and the short comings of the models it produces can be a liability when you move to CAM.

So with workarounds, Fusion 360 is still a compelling option in the short term, but FreeCAD now seems a safer choice where you needa simple parametric model to drive part design for CNC.

[cropwell]

SketchUp is a fantastic tool for designing rectilinear woodworking projects, but does not handle curves well and the short comings of the models it produces can be a liability when you move to CAM.

My gamechanger with Sketchup was that I could not get a .stl export feature, when I moved to a new Ms account. It wasn't worth the bother of registering with Trimble as SketchUp Make is crude and clunky (crap!).

[Neale]

It's been mentioned on this forum before, but Tim Paterson's plugin for F360 overcomes a couple of the CAM restrictions - see here (https://github.com/TimPaterson/Fusion360-Batch-Post). It allows multiple tool gcode output files and restores rapid moves for positioning (and watching adaptive cutting without this is painful!) It has some rough edges but I have been using it for some time successfully.

As a free alternative for 3D CAD, I suggest looking at Solid Edge from Siemens - completely free for hobby users, and arguably more powerful than F360. Steeper learning curve but plenty of tutorial material available. Big down side is no free CAM - but I am told that you can export 3D models and import into F360 for gcode generation.

[Andrewg]

Thanks Neale, I was not aware of Tim Paterson's plugin, which certainly seems to address some lost functionality within Fusion's CAM. Will definitely try it.

Solid Edge, SolidWorks, Pro Engineer, On shape along with Fusion..they are all serious, high value applications trying to attract the hobbyist with special offers and artfully constructed restrictions! Disentangling the pros and cons is not easy. So for example a quick look at Solid Edge suggests that at least you get to download the app with a forever licence but it has a less intuitive UI, no CAM restricted file output options, so not an immediate winner.

I started this thread in the woodworking section because I realise metal cutting engineering types have different requirements to us woodies and are probably looking for something to work with Cambam. So bearing that in mind:

I used to make extensive use of SketchUp to design furniture projects and generate cutlists. However the clue is in the name -Sketch, as it is usually best to redraw something than try and modify a design. When I started designing more complex pieces with curves and angles, I moved to Fusion and found the parametric, constraint and history based modeling a huge step forward that I could use to print out templates full size or pass 2d dxf files to a friend with CNC.

Two things have change for me:
1. I have bought my own CNC and invested in VCarve desktop which I find great for making the CNC do what I want in the workshop.The 600x600 max size restriction is only a problem occasionally (so far Carbide Create has done the simple big jobs like spoilboard surfacing)

2. Fusion 360 has removed features from the free version, in particular 2D DXF output and GO rapids. With the free Tim Paterson plugin and $25 Mapboard plugin, it looks like there is a reasonable workaround so sticking with Fusion for now.

However that is only because I am up to speed with Fusion already and I certainly don't trust Autocad and have been bitten before (used to use Draftsight for simple 2d stuff until it got withdrawn, now trying LibreCAD). So whilst a competitive environment of other 3D CAD providers chasing the hobby market is good, for me the best hedge still seem to be to start learning FreeCAD for simple 3d modeling and large size CAM.

However I am interested in what other people do and think?

[Leadhead]

Freecad 0.19 Released as stable version. Well worth an investigation.
Check out the German guy on utube for great tutorials. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8otDF_C_fw&ab_channel=FreeCADAcademy (http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8otDF_C_fw&ab_channel=FreeCADAcademy)

[routerdriver]

I always harboured suspicions about the generosity of Autodesk and never even looked at Fusion.Freecad is extremely capable and improves every day.What it isn't is easy to understand or well documented.I persevere with it because it is truly free and there are enough good youtube tutorials to get me over the hurdles.It is worth looking at several on the same topic because there may be more than one way to do most things and a combination of approaches may be even better.I recommend sliptonic and Joko Engineering and always look for the latest additions.Any reference to earlier versions than 0.17 may well be obsolete by now.

[cropwell]

Well - my foray into FreeCAD did not end well. I have just deleted the software and all of the work I tried to do with it. I learned a lot in the process. First of all 'Free' isn't always good value. The actual cost was a lot of wasted time as I could not get it to create 3D stl files which were error free. Everything looked OK, but the meshes were bad and the file was full of non-manifold surfaces.

All the help available was just confusing as I do no speak Geek.

I suppose I will just have to bite the bullet and go with Fusion360. At least I have been able to create 3D prints with it.

[Muzzer]

I've used Solidworks and Inventor professionally and Alibre (first), then Solid Edge, Onshape and Fusion (now) as a hobby user. They are all very similar "mid range" CAD systems and very capable in their own right.

I stopped using SW because the licence was eye wateringly expensive (plus an eye watering "maintenance" fee). It's good to see them offering a sensible price for amateurs finally. They used to offer HSMworks 2.5D as a free plugin but I think that may have gone away now that Autodesk owns it.

I loved Solid Edge but dropped it because of its limited popularity and the fact I only had an educational licence with no legal means of extending it beyond its official usage, rendering any work potentially inaccessible. It's now free for ever, which might have tipped me in its favour back then. However, there's no CAM option.

I was a beta user for Onshape. I liked it and its online model but I dropped it when Fusion came along, as all the plugins were so expensive.

FreeCAD was pretty buggy. It may be better now but when I looked at it again last year, the CAM workbench was still pretty limited and pretty buggy. It's developed by a small team of well meaning softies but there's no proper budget or roadmap, so I wouldn't want to rely on it any time soon.

Not sure why you'd use Alibre CAD with or without CAM, given you have to pay for both and it's a bit of a minority sport. Nothing wrong with it as such.

I was really pissed off when Fusion did the dirty last year, as they had promised not to charge for hobby users. This didn't sit well with my Scottish / Yorkshire blood. I got Tim Paterson's ad-in working with my free Fusion system after some messing about (my motive was mainly to get the rapids back) but it's not very user friendly and while it's certainly not a criticism of the work he did, he's not planning to make any further updates.

In the end, I've swallowed my indignance and coughed up the £360 per year for Fusion. In return I get the full CAD and CAM with the exception of the damned manufacturing "extensions". It has to be said that Fusion is now pretty much fully featured and compares well against the other CAD systems. It's also got a very active and well funded development team as well as excellent support and an active community. I can live with and just about tolerate the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Autodesk etc without developing an attitude problem.

I'd say that if you want free or very low cost but fully featured CAD, then Fusion 360, SE and SW are excellent options. But if you use or plan to use CAM / CNC, there's little to challenge Fusion 360. The free version is pretty darned good and you can always use the workarounds mentioned above if you can be bothered. You can also turn the subscription on and off as far as I am aware.

That's my view although as with a lot of things in life, there's no right or wrong.

[cropwell]

I just spent 30mins on Fusion and drew out the part I needed and created the stl file, which was error free. After all the buggering about with FreeCAD, I am back on track with the project.

[routerdriver]

I sot of understand the sentiments about Freecad and it isn't well documented,but with the aid of a few good youtube videos it does enough for me to run my small hobby router.I do use the Linux appimage version and update it daily as this gets the latest functionality.It gets even more useful once you discover the set of hoops that need to be jumped through to enable the 3D surfacing toolpath options.It may not be perfect,but I don't have to deal with Autodesk and their evolving attitudes to hobby users.

[Neale]

Last time I tried FreeCAD was quite a few years ago and I haven't heard anything about it yet that would make me drop F360 - although I know it has a lot of keen supporters. I'm also using the Paterson extension to F360 which has a few rough edges but puts useful functionality back in. The CAM is good although if I had a fourth axis, I might have to spring for a paid copy. However, even as a hobby user, I've run into problems with more complex models - you get to the point where one more error makes the whole thing fall apart. I'm now shifting towards Solid Edge which, I'm told, is more suited to complex models. I suspect it's partly due to my approach to model creation, but SE looks fun to learn! Even after familiarity with F360, there's quite a learning curve. I'm told that exporting 3D models from SE to F360 works well to make use of the free CAM.

One problem with being an amateur is that you have never been taught the "proper" way to use these tools. There's a lot (probably too many) of YouTube videos around which address individual operations, although even I can recognise that many of these are teaching poor technique.

[cropwell]

I woke up at 4 a.m. with arthritis pain in my knee, so I decided to try out F360 some more. In an hour I knocked out the two components for my project, created stl file and checked them for errors (none!).

2999129992

Now I just need to get the 3D printer sorted (it needs new nozzles).

I still don't like F360 for being cloud based, but at least it does the job!

[Muzzer]

If you fancy getting into Solid Edge, there certainly used to be an excellent set of tutorials and exercises. Looks as if it may be this area https://solidedge.siemens.com/en/resources/tutorials/. I did the whole lot over several months and got to try out most of the features in the process.

I really enjoyed using SE. The default "Synchronous Technology" feature is pretty interesting. But if you plan to use CNC (eg users of this forum), it would seem a bit odd (to me) to use one product (eg SE) for CAD and Fusion for CAM. Fusion allows you to switch between the 2 in seconds to make changes to the design when generating toolpaths. I often (usually) do find myself doing this a fair bit. Although it seems to be frowned on for some reason, I also run my control s/w (Centroid in my case) on the same PC, so I can pretty much do everything on one machine. I save the g code from Fusion to the folder my Centroid system looks in for its work files.

[Kitwn]

Having just invested in Vectric Vcarve Desktop but with no intention of laying out the vast sum required to buy Aspire I've been wondering what free 3D design software is capable of being used to create designs I can import into Vcarve for artistic sculpting instead of relying on other people's designs of pretty grape vines, dragons and cute dogs (there seems to be a lack of cute dogs, just lots of growly ones). This is not something I'll be wanting to do in the near future, there's enough to learn already, but I'd be interested in hearing more experienced people's views on which free or relatively cheap software is best suited for creating these kinds of arty objects rather than the more engineering type stuff. I'll need to start now, my artistic talents are not that great as it is and learning how to do 3D stuff on a computer as well as how to draw something worth cutting into a piece of decent timber will need some time.

Many years ago, when I was into making animated films, I looked briefly at the open source Blender software. It hasn't been mentioned in this thread but does anyone have experience with this particular package?

Kit

[cropwell]

One thing I don't like about Solid Edge is the cost. If you can't easily find a price, it means it is expensive. I am a retired hobbyist with only a State Pension (£150 per week) as pocket money. Solid Edge looks as though it would take half of that. No way Jose!

[Muzzer]

Solid Edge is free for eternity for non professional use, as in the licence has no expiry date. When I used it that wasn't the case, so I couldn't see any certainty that I'd be able to continue using it and accessing any work I did later on. It's proper, professional software, equivalent to Inventor, Solidworks, Onshape, Fusion etc. If you don't plan to do any CNC work, there's no reason not to get stuck in!

IIRC, you end up with a watermark on any 2D drawings you create (big deal!) and apparently you can't open files in a paid for version of SE but that's academic here.
https://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/plmapp/education/solid-edge/en_us/free-software/community

[Kitwn]

One thing I don't like about Solid Edge is the cost. If you can't easily find a price, it means it is expensive. I am a retired hobbyist with only a State Pension (£150 per week) as pocket money. Solid Edge looks as though it would take half of that. No way Jose!

I haven't looked at the details of what you can do with it but there is a free edition of Solid Edge for the likes of us...

https://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/plmapp/education/solid-edge/en_us/free-software/community

Kit

[cropwell]

Thanks Guys, I have loaded up Solid Edge and will try it out when I can get my brain working...

[Kitwn]

Thanks Guys, I have loaded up Solid Edge and will try it out when I can get my brain working...

I'm quite tempted to look at SE as well, but still have Vcarve and UCCNC as shiny new software to get to grips with so it won't be just yet. There's a limit to how much the old brain can cope with all at once. Please let us know how you get on.

Kit