Fusion 360 Free version - work arounds

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!).

Attachment 29991Attachment 29992

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!

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.

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

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!

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.c...ware/community

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Originally Posted by 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!

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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.c...ware/community

Kit