May 7, 2016 Update – What’s New

Welcome to another Fusion 360 update where we deliver the latest and greatest so you can be more productive and get things done faster. This update includes some notable improvements in 2D drawings, modeling, rendering, CAM and our data management infrastructure. let’s walk through it together, shall we?

Now watch me WIP, watch me DM…DM

Remember WIP DM (Work-in-progress data management)? Boy we sure do, and we’ve been very busy at it, wrenching on the this significant upgrade to our cloud data management infrastructure, upgrading it, making sure that everything is bolted down and is connected properly. You will notice some things feel snappier and that’s good and all, but this will also make so much more possible.

Things might not look different as far as the new WIP DM, but this update represents an important internal milestone for us, and takes us another step towards enabling more powerful data management and collaboration workflows such as the much talked about branching and merging experience we’ve been designing. We’ll definitely keep you in the loop as we start revealing the new capabilities these improvements make possible.

New Features added to 2D Drawings

Support for Cosmetic Threads 

2D drawings now supports threads (mentioned in this IdeaStation idea). If you have a design that has threads on some of its parts, you know that the Thread tool lets you toggle between cosmetic threads or modeled threads. Having modeled threads may look awesome, but it puts more of a load on your machine to compute, especially as your designs get more and more complex. 

Now when you create a drawing of your design, you can have thread edges turned on or off in the View Properties dialog.

Having it on will display where your cosmetic threads are. Keep in mind that this is displayed differently in ASME and ISO standards. Here they are in a side-by-side comparison.

ASME – cosmetic threads are represented by the dashed lines.

ISO – cosmetic threads are represented by solid lines.

Text Property Editor

Previously when you wanted to annotate a specific area of a design, or call something out with a blurb, all you had was the ability to write text without any way to format it. Now you have some basic text editing capabilities such as text height, style, and a selection of fonts at your fingertips.

Surface Texture Symbol 

It’s important to communicate in a drawing what kind of finish you want on your designs. As part of our efforts to provide more annotation tools, we now have Surface Texture under the Symbol drop down menu that lets you do just that. For those not familiar with Surface Texture and what each symbol type means, here is a useful surface finishes/textures Wiki page that should get you up-to-speed.

Border and Title Block Visibility

So what if you didn’t need a title block or border when you created a 2D drawing and just wanted them gone? Before you were able to delete them yet couldn’t get them back, but now you can turn them on and off by going to the Sheet Settings option at the bottom and checking whether you want to display them or not.

In addition to these features, we’ve also made a ton of fixes in the 2D drawings space. Here are some of the more notable ones:

• There were some designs where you couldn’t export a drawing from the details page of A360. This has been fixed.
• There were instances where if you made a change to your design, saved it, and went back to it’s associated drawing, you didn’t get prompted that the design is out-of-date/options to update. Now Fusion will let you know that your design is out-of-date.

Select and Get Simple Measurements 

We love it when a plan comes together, and we’re happy to report that one of the highest voted ideas on the IdeaStation made it into this update. TMC.Engineering submitted this IdeaStation idea around having simple measurements appear when you select something on your design, without needing to use the Measure tool explicitly. This idea accrued 124 votes, and we’re glad to see it become a permanent feature of the product. Way to go community!

Mirror, mirror on the wall…let me mirror components? 

Another popular IdeaStation idea by KirillChepizhko and roambotics_scott (here and here) is now a reality; you now have the option to mirror components with the Mirror command! Simply pick the component you want to mirror, then select the plane you want to use as the mirror plane, and you’ve got mirrored components.

Autocomplete Parameters Now Available 

Another IdeaStation idea submitted here by Helmi74 and here by CabbageCraig was around being able to type in a letter within sketch dimensions and have Fusion autocomplete the name for you if you have custom parameters set within your parameters dialog. Now you can. Hooray!

Local Background Rendering 

Good news! StefanLazic, you’ll really appreciate this since you posted it in the IdeaStation. You now have the ability to use the same rendering workflow for local rendering, as you had for cloud rendering. This means you can render designs to a preset or custom size and resolution on your desktop in the background while you continue to work. Here’s how this works:

The rendering icons have been updated to show two ways to render:

In-canvas render will kick off the same real-time interactive rendering behavior as it was before.

Render lets you choose between background cloud rendering and local rendering.

When you change it to local rendering, turn on Advanced settings to reveal more options to adjust the quality of your render. You can also set a custom image size, with the max being 4000 x 4000 pixels at 72 pixels per inch.

When you hit render, the software will do its magic and save the data for background local rendering. You’ll see a couple of notifications, and once it’s ready, it’ll begin to render. At this point, you can continue to work on your design.

When the rendering is finished, it will appear in the Rendering Gallery where you can preview the render, re-render, or save it.

So we heard you want to rotate SVGs 

There’s been a lot of talk (also as an IdeaStation idea) around how to better manipulate SVGs for making logos in Fusion, like  rotate and resize. Previously I’ve posted a work-around of how to do it, but now when you import a SVG, you’ll get a preview of what it looks like and rotate it before you place the SVG. Better yet, we got rid of all those sketch points that come in so now when your SVG is placed, it looks nice and clean.

Graphic Improvements

• We also improved our Depth of Field (DoF) feature where previously if you picked the area where you want your focus to be, you’d have to pick it again if you played around with your camera angles (pan, zoom, etc). Now Fusion will remember where you placed your point so that you no longer have to pick the area again after zooming in and out.
• In terms of fixes, we found a memory leak issue where the amount of data to render would increase even though the design and rendering settings were unchanged. This is now fixed.  
• There was also a weird regression related to a graphics issue where if you applied a Zebra analysis on a T-Spline box, the blue highlight would turn into some sort of a mutated Chia pet. This is now fixed, and let’s never speak of it ever again.

Workflow Improvements

• We’ve heard you say it wasn’t easy finding where/how to import data. Now when new users sign in for the first time, the data panel will open automatically to your first default project with a blurb about how to import existing data, pointing to the upload icon.
• Speaking of data, we now support SolidWorks 2016, Inventor 2017, NX 10 and Catia V5-6R2015 files. Woohoo!  
• For some reason the share menu was missing from the Mac system menu bar. Now it’s back!
• There was regression issue on Macs where you weren’t able to insert OBJs as a mesh in Fusion, and if you did, graphics performance became less than optimal. That’s now fixed.
• There was another strange issue where Fusion would crash when you’re trying to exit the software. Talk about irony. This was largely happening on Mac machines running El Capitan. We’ve made a fix that should stop this from happening from now on.
• We found a regression issue where if you wanted to download Meshmixer from the 3D print dialog, nothing would happen. Now it works as it should.

CAM improvements

• Lonniecady posted the idea of adding model override to Turning operations in the CAM workspace. This will allow you to select sketch geometry on the geometry tab in Turning so that you have more control over what material to remove in each step.
• We made fixes to our CAM kernel which fixed many other issues that have been reported in adaptive clearing, toolpath generation, as well as Spiral and turning ID grooving behaviors. One of these issues had to do with how the tool was only retracting to X0 instead of all the way to the defined retract plane when Resh Machining was on. Now it will go all the way to the Retract plane every time.
• We also fixed some nasty reproducible crash issues around selecting an open contour in the 2D pocket command, selecting curves as geometry input, as well as copying, deleting, and pasting operations.
• Tool library file extensions have been changed from mytoollibrary.json to a less devspeak extension: .tools. Having a unique extension will make it more easy to identify them from other file formats when you’re importing and exporting tool libraries.

Building out our API

• We fixed a number of bugs in our API related to attributes and incorrect line breaks in our Python API definition so that it is more readable.
• We’ve added the ability to create a new real BrepBody based on an input BrepBody which can be transient. This is possibly only valid in the context of a direct modeling document or a basefeature in a parametric document.
• Some of the command related events (ValidateInputs and InputChanged) don’t provide an easy or intuitive way to get the associated CommandInputs object. @ekinsb and our API gurus have added a new “inputs” property to both of the related eventArgs classes. Winning.

We’ve also added a Test attribute for Fusion entities. The attribute includes:

• ConstructionAxis, ConstructionPoint and ConstructionPlane
• SketchDimensions and GeometricConstraints
• JointOrigin, RigidGroup, AsBuildJoint and Joint classes
• Meshbody class
• Support attribute copy/paste
• Product (asset) and Document classes

Component Behavior Fixes

• Bluelife reported this component copy and paste issue where after a new component was pasted, he was not able to edit the new component’s parameters. We discovered that this was a regression bug, and now it’s fixed.
• There was a bug where if you had referenced designs in your original design, mirrored the reference design, then created a new component, joined the new one with the mirrored, and THEN broke the link on the referenced design, the joint would disappear. The joint should remain, and now it does.
• There were some crash issues related to breaking links and getting the latest of a cross-referenced design. We’re glad to report that these have now been fixed.
• We’ve received crash reports on Fusion crashing when you were using the Move command or when you were creating a joint. Apparently it was related to the Parameters issue, and now it’s been resolved.

Sketching Improvements and Fixes

• There are have been many reports around inserted DXFs having the wrong scale/units. Good news – you can now choose/override units when you insert a DXF 🙂
• Now when you snap a sketch vertex to point outside the sketch environment, Fusion will show a coincident constraint icon.
• You can now pre-select multiple sketch geometry and then add equal constraints on them in a single scoop.
• Previously if you pre-selected sketch geometry and went into the Offset command, your pre-selections would not remain selected. Now they do.
• Robduarte reported this sketch bug where after he created a rectangular pattern in a sketch and switched the Distance Type from Spacing to Extents, it screws up the whole thing. Now it should work as it should.    
• There was a weird bug where if you had symmetry constraints applied to the vertical end points of a line and then dragged the line, it wouldn’t remain symmetrical. Now it does.
• There was crash issue where if you edited an existing sketch that was very complex, a circuit board for instance, Fusion would crash. We dug into this and found out that it was graphics related. Now this is fixed.
• When you projected a point of a sketch onto another surface, Fusion would sometime end up crashing. It happened on a couple specific designs, and now it’s fixed.

Again, thanks for your continuous support! We love learning about what you guys are designing with the software, and constantly find ourselves with our jaws dropped after seeing what you guys are sharing. Massive kudos. Onward to the next update!

Keqing and the Fusion team

Want to know what came before this update? Click here or the “Product Updates” category filter below.