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The Future of Collaboration in Fusion 360
A couple weeks ago Kevin posted on what the Fusion 360 team is working on for the next few releases. There’s a lot to be excited about! In this post I’ll go into more detail on the future of how you work with your data and collaborate with others in Fusion 360 (as promised earlier). And expect that future to arrive soon, because we release frequently.
Project Management, Libraries, Activity, and People
We are cleaning up the list of projects and adding a smoother project creation workflow inside of Fusion. Libraries will be available alongside your list of projects. We are starting off with some standard hardware (nuts, bolts, etc) and will expand from there, moving toward more content and the ability to author your own libraries. Inside of projects you will be able to view project activity and an improved view of your project members.
Distributed Designs and In-Use-By UI Update
AKA X-refs and better display of what you and your teammates are currently working on. Soon you’ll be able to externalize parts and subassemblies of your overall design. A huge benefit of working this way in Fusion 360 is that references are automatically tracked and maintained, so renaming or moving components won’t ever result in broken links. And now different people can more easily work on different parts of the design. This, combined with an improved view of who is doing what, will make working with your team that much easier. Look for both of these around February of next year.
Concurrent Design with Branching and Merging
Our team is super excited about this one because it solves so many common design problems that we’ve heard from the community, both in Fusion 360 and other programs, and improves workflows for both teams and single designers. Branching and merging lets you easily:
- Work in parallel with other members of your team.
- Explore changes or alternatives to a project and keep changes that make sense while leaving behind changes that don’t.
- Understand how your project evolved over time and what decisions were made (and why).
- Restore or reuse any design(s) in your project from any point in your project.
- Use any point in your project as a starting point for a different project.
As an example of #1, take two designers working together on a mountain bike. After agreeing on a rough layout one works on the frame design and one works on the suspension in parallel, each without worrying about who has which files open (or “checked out”), and without having to play games with copying designs and changing names or folder structure. They just move to a branch and start working.
As the pair reaches points where they are happy with the frame and suspension their progress is seamlessly integrated into the main version of the bike (as illustrated below). And if there is ever a conflict, such as changes to the same part made in parallel, Fusion 360 lets them compare alternatives and pick a winner.
What’s cool is when this is released you’ll be able to continue working with Fusion 360 in the same way as today, and these powerful new workflows will be a click away when you need them.
We would love to get your feedback as all of this is actively being designed and developed. Also a lot of the team is at Autodesk University (AU), Las Vegas this year, if you are joining us at AU, we’d love to hear from you in-person.
Will Secor
User Experience Designer
Comments
Oceanconcepts
Will, this ability to branch and iterate and compare within Fusion, without creating folders and versions that are difficult if not impossible to track is a huge deal. I think it is as useful for individual designers as for groups- for anyone who is developing, as opposed to implementing, a design. I’m working now on a design that may move in directions of potted electronics, partially potted, or not potted at all. Being able to build and refine these versions in parallel would be a great benefit when it comes to comparing approaches and deciding what to prototype. Happy to discuss at AU.
Ron
CGPM
I have been waiting for “assemblies” for a long time. Very glad to hear it is coming soon!!!!
casperhofstede
Looks like Git, awesome can’t wait.
O.Tan
It will be interesting to see if Drawings will be integrated into this as well. Meaning let say I made 1st branch and dimensioned it, then I create a 2nd branch which is just a revision or alteration of 1st branch, so rather then having to redimension everything, I’ll probably just make a duplicate of 1st branch drawing and then re-reference it to the 2nd branch and F360 will update my dimensions accordingly.
TrippyLighting
This looks very interesting and feels more like version management systems used in soiftware development e.g GitHub or subversion.
A welcome deoparture from “normal” version management.
However, in order for X-Refs to not cause hiccups with existing designs the Fusion team may want to look at the current limitation that a referenced sketch cannot be moved into a component even if that sketch is used exclusively in that component, e.g. to define the base extrusion for that component.
So when you want to export your parametric design you loose the sketch and depending what else you did also part of the timeline.
It would be very helpful if that restriction be removed so there is a path forward to export if a user forgot to first create a component, activate it and then start sketching.