It's not just private organizations either-CAD proficiency is such a basic skill that every serious engineering school has an organizational license for their students too, which I'd imagine also costs a bundle. Industrial seat licensing for products like Solidworks, CATIA, Inventor, and (now) Fusion are enormously expensive. The upside for a ROI seems like it would be enormous, and pretty easy to make happen. I've always found it a little surprising that companies haven't built/funded a open-source organization for parametric mechanical CAD, similar to Blender for games or KiCad for electronics/PCB design. I haven't tested 90% of the features, including the motion joints.Īlso it crashes sometimes (like once a day) - you have to save often.īut it's free and it mostly works and I didn't had to deal with the licencing and registration, and it runs locally and I can use git for backups, so that's good. stl, and the tesselation configuration is weird (you have to change configuration of minimal angle between faces generated from round surfaces in totally unrelated configuration tab - it took me a long time to find it). You also can't export to anything used by 3d printers other than. Parametric modeling is possible but it also breaks very easily if you edit anything up the chain because of the above problems, to the point it's almost useless. There's a display mode that renders only lines, but the planes remain semi-transparent and mess with selecting points behind them. You can work around this by always using datum planes as the basis for each sketch but it's very inconvenient and makes editing sketches hard because datum planes occlude other stuff on the sketch. The dependencies between sketches break when you change anything earlier in the chain (like drawing a circle for a hole in a wall that was 6 polygons and now that wall is 8 polygons and the circle jumps to another corner or somewhere) because automatic naming of stuff isn't consistent. I'm using FreeCad for simple 3d-printing, and it mostly works, has all the features I need, but you have to struggle with everything. > You did not only lose a user, you lost my trust. > I don't see the point to support a company like that anymore, so I deleted my account. That's an indicator that you don't care about the product itself anymore, but that you are just trying to extract the maximum money out of your current users instead. > Today you did not just break the main use-case for hobbyists by disabling the export in DXF, but you also showed that you prefer to spend money to block existing features of your software instead of improving it with new paid features. It was kind of a win-win approach, with the additional effect that Autodesk looked like a hobbyist-friendly company. These people were anyway not going to be your clients so you (almost) did not "lose" money, and on the other side they got used to your product so when moving to a professional environment they would push for Fusion 360. Your previous approach of allowing people to use Fusion 360 for free unless they made money out of their project was really smart. > Most people I know in the makers community were using Fusion 360 because it was free, and when you are a hobbyist this makes a big difference, you are not gonna to spend hundreds of dollars for simple side projects. > I thought for some years that Autodesk was a smart company. Pretty sure it won't be read, but as it summarizes my thoughts I can post it here as well: I wrote a response to their email out of hopelessness. No cheap versions for hobbyists like me who just like to dabble and for whom a yearly sub is out of the budget.Īny suggestions for free/cheap and functional local-install alternatives to Fusion 360? Parametric modelling has really saved my butt, and motion joint functionality is very useful too. US$495 a year to subscribe to the "full" version (they have "generously" granted a 40% discount until Oct, hurry before it's too late!). dxf? No extensions? I can't even buy stress simulation credits? The file export limitations in particular are crippling. Most of the cool hobbyist functionalities remained intact. Last year (or was it the year before?), they added some restrictions to their free version. I always had the impression that Autodesk had positioned Fusion 360 as their gateway drug into AutoCAD or some other Autodesk software, but that it was remarkably full featured for that purpose. I started looking at Fusion 360 a couple years back because it seemed very hobbyist friendly, and while I primarily use it for 3d printing, I've dabbled in laser cutting and CNC too.
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