How do you like Inventor so far?
In some ways it is way more dated than Fusion, but it feels more direct. I am really asking myself why Autodesk does not just mash both together for one perfect product with all the features. 
As a software dev, I can tell you thereās a 99.999% chance that would be an absolute nightmare.
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Am at a point where turning ideas into reality using Fusion 360 is more fun than daunting, dipping into OpenScad for some specialized parts, but pulling those into larger Fusion based assemblies. Then I read Ryanās comment which has made me curiousā¦
Curious how hard is the transition from Fusion 360 to Onshape for people? Is there a good 1:1 mapping between their features, does Onshape have comparable constraint based sketching thatās useful for creating 2D DXFs for CAM even if you donāt want to make full 3D objects?
Hoping a lot of your Fusion knowledge will carry over to ease ramp up. Guess a good test is whether people who know both tools āwellā still only exclusively use Onshape? Onshape seems useful for collaborative design between multiple people.
Well that is a tough question.
Two people just told me Onshape seems completely foreign coming from Fusion360. I thought on the surface, the main difference people had to work with was a vertical tree vs horizontal timeline.
To me, it is nearly identical but better in all the right waysā¦but I came from Pro/E, then Solidworks. The onshape team has some solidworks background so they are probably more similar than some would think. A sketch is a sketch, an extrude is an extrude.
I do not like the cloud only thing but that is the current way of the world.
Sketches, relations, and projections seem extremely more robust. Fusion breaks in very strange ways tangents move to the other side very frequently, projections are lost for no reason, and āfully definedā means very little. Mates/joints are made as you would build in Onshape, fusionās joints are point based. An onshape sketch is far cleaner, so complicated parts are far easier to work with for me.
The largest difference some might see is Onshape has you make parts, then use them in an assembly, kinda like building something in real life. Fusion wants you to do this all in one file. This leads to large timelines, assemblies extremely difficult to navigate, and errors cascading very far down the āTreeā.
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My biggest problem with Fusion is that its just so slow. Iām not sure why this is, but on the same system, Inventor will ALWAYS run better than fusion, no matter how good or bad the PC is. I do CAD for a living. On my work PC, which is a high powered system, Inventor runs flawlessly and Fusion runs well, but noticeably worse.
My home PC is a decent system, and Fusion is nearly unusable. Inventor, while not breaking any speed records, is at least adequate. The similarity of the programs is such that I donāt understand the reason for the difference, but its enough to make it to where I avoid using Fusion at home, except for CAM when I must. Add to this that Fusion is not great with prints and assemblies, Inventor is a no-brainer, if one has the access.
Once I get my CNC up and running again, I may look into other CAM options and just quit fusion all together at home. I will probably continue to use it at work since it has a good post for our Haas mill, and its more intuitive to me than say MasterCam or Partmaker.
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Have you ever played around with Master/Skeleton modeling technique? I am starting to dabble in it a bit. Havenāt used it on a large enough assembly to determine if it is indeed better than making each part individually.
Basically, you model your assemblies in a single part file where each component is a unique solid body. This way clearances and mating features can be made to stay consistent, and small changes donāt (or at least shouldnāt) break the assembly. From there, components can be exported from each body into discrete part files (with or without retained dependencies), then discrete assemblies/subassemblies can be built using the parts to check stacku-ps, run simulations, create explosions, detail subassemblies, etc.
I think this is what they were going for when creating Fusion, but just seems like the execution wasnāt there. It just ended up āclunkyā, with all the problems you described above.
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I had a custom brand new SolidWorks Workstation custom-built at my last company to run only SolidWorks, it crashed and froze all the times as did all the other machines.
Not sure CAD software is ever very robust. Save all the time.
The only fusion slowdown I ever see on a basic PC at home is editing the first couple of sketches on the LR3 assembly and waiting for the changes trickle through every features after, Rendering is even pretty fast for me. One of the first things I praised fusion for was being very stableā¦
I use 1-3 (Each plane major features) master sketches and build from there. Each subsystem gets its one set from there.
For me this is fusions biggest weakness. Projections were lost on nearly every change. Extra lines and dimensions needed to be added to make things slightly more robust. Onshape is proving far far more consistent.
A funny easy way to see the differences between the two, make a circle, bisect it with any sort of line, dimension everything. Trim the circle on either side of the bisection. Fusion deletes at least the circle dimension and sometimes even the line dimensions. Onshape knows what you are trying to do and no dimensions are lost. Now imagine every single feature after that getting lost because you trimmed an unnecessary piece of a sketch. If you leave the piece you do not need then extrusions get tedious because you have to click every closed region to extrudeā¦waste of time.
I am not an Onshape evangelist - it just happens to be the only program Iāve been able to get my head around, but I have tried Fusion again recently because it just seems to have the weight of numbers, and itās completely foreign to me coming from Onshape. I think itās a Mac/PC thing to be fair they are just different - and to my mind Onshape is much closer to a Mac in that itās a lot more visual.
I think the ability to branch the timeline is super amazing - once you get the hang of that it really does help in design development and producing a cleaner project with fewer things to break.
I donāt like that itās cloud based, but I love that itās cloud based and really takes up very little computer resource.
Yes, I canāt say if itās comparable, but itās a very simple process.
I am super curious about your switch @vicious1 - I know itās not the worldās cheapest software, and Iām quite sure Iād pay for it if I had a commercial objective, but I also know that every change comes with a cost in time. You have obviously found that assemblies work easily (as they are supposed to do) but even mate connectors is a concept that I struggled with for a very long time (Iām not sure Iām through it yet) - is that something that comes from Solidworks?
As opposed to the fusion way or something else?
Onshape mates are almost a direct cross of SolidWorks and fusion. I like SolidWorks best, it feels just like you are putting something together, for me. I do not like that point orientation thing fusion uses and I do not like seeing it in onshape but have not had to use itā¦yet.
Fusion has you choose a point and make the orientation of that point match another point to align things. The Fusion use of planes and cylinders still makes you use that weird point system. Solidworks you can say this plane and that plane are touching, just like if you stacked two pieces of flat material. You do not need to say this corner of this plane facing in this direction and that point on that plane in that orientation.
No, I am coming from a place of no prior experience - it looks super logical and easy and I completely understand the concept, yet I always manage to end up with parts in opposing planes or inside our or springing the other side of the page. I am getting better though!
Maybe I just think I understand the concept! 
Price is odd. Solidworks is $3-4k +$1.3k/yr to stay up to date. Comparable onshape is $1.5k/yr flat. In the long run Solidworks is cheaper. Very long term. Buttttttt, In solidworks you have to deal with a VAR to buy your stuff, for me solidworks is unstable, and onshape has a free 6 month trial right now. So I am trying for 6 months and seems like I will be staying. Sharing files with you guys is also very hard in solidworks.
Fusion is $680/yr but I can not figure out how to make robust models or assemblies, no matter how hard I try. I want to make some changes to my MP3DPv5 printer but the thought of the cascading failures has me scared to touch it. The time I waste fixing lost projections is easily worth the extra $820 /yr. This will also let me make more requested changes and things as they come up with new models and not be afraid of the model failing. It might be an update thing, it might be how I modelā¦either way, being afraid to touch a model is a lame way to run this type of business.
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Yeah you kinda get the hang of that as you do it more. Whatever is going to move it the least is what I do first. Like a plane than a set of bolt holes, etc. Having a space mouse helps as wellā¦for large assemblies.
This is an infuriating and stupid system, was the biggest departure for me going to fusion, and it just doesnāt work well. Sometimes I just want two planes to stay in contact, and having to apply offsets to everything is just dumb.
Inventor assembly mates work almost identically to SW, and make much more sense.
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I think I was one of the 2ā¦.
But let me just clarify a little about that. Itās not that I think that Onshape is bad, or that I canāt learn it, itās just that it feels foreign, and itās not immediately obvious to me how Iām supposed to do the same things that feel easy to me in Fusion.
Iām sure Fusion was the same to me the first time I opened it, but I took some time to watch some videos and have gotten fairly proficient with it.
I have no CAD background. I played with AutoCAD a bit as a kid/teenager in the 90s because my dad used it for work, and I played with Solidworks a couple times in college for the fun of it because I hung out with some Mechanical Engineer majors and it looked fun, and free software was quite easy to come byā¦ 
At one point, I could open Blender and spend 10 minutes and couldnāt figure out how to get a Cube placed. Now I can do a bit of stuff in there too.
So Iām confident itās something I can handle, I just havenāt had the time to actually have a look at it, and with Fusion being the only one Iāve used, itās just different enough that I donāt know what Iām doing there by just clicking around.
At some point Iāll find a Udemy course or something and give it a shot, itās just not quite at the top of my list of things to do yet
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Iām a bit of a Solidworks die-hard but Iāve been using OnShape for more and more stuff simply on the back of the cloud storage of models and the browser interface being āgood enoughā for some of the simpler things Iāve been working on myself.
For Solidworks I have 3 different installs I have access to covering 2 different versions and each with different levels of legitimacy. I currently canāt design something at work and load it in a legit version at home. If I want to work on it at home I either need to be in my office or using a dual-boot so I can keep the slightly peglegged, parrot-wearing version quarantined from my other stuff.
OnShape being usable in a browser has been weirdly freeing, so I can happily work on something at work, have it synced to home without needing to muck with dropbox/USB drives, can open and work with models happily on my primary every-day PC which is an Intel NUC running Linux. I hadnāt realized just how much friction there was in that workflow. Now everything is āIāll figure out how to do that in OnShapeā, at least for personal stuff.
For anything work related itās still all offline Solidworks stuff because I canāt imagine the companyās IP lawyers being remotely interested in having a conversation about cloud based model storage thatās managed by our CAD providerā¦
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That is the nice side of the cloud thing.
I have a bunch of Solidworks stuff I donāt have any access to anymore. That is a huge bummer. Looks like onshape has a 1:1 converter but you need a current 2020+ solidworks installed at the same time to convert them. I am sure I could get that done for me if I ever needed any of it (Primo).
Been using Onshape for the last few hours. Even when I break something it is a lot easier to fix. I miss this for sure. CAD is much more pleasant this way.
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I tried to fire up my windows machine with Fusion360 today. I keep that machine around just to run Fusion. It is complaining. I go through this about once a year when I try to open up Fusion for something (generally its a V1 printer CAD 
). Iām not sure itās worth the hassle.
I have the free maker licence and with my university credentials could get a higher free tier- but Iām not sure itās worth it.
Iāve been playing with Onshape a bit the last few days, and it seems to be a alot more intuitive for me.
The free version not allowing private files isnāt a problem for my use case.
I donāt mind sharing any of my derivatives of a V1 machine and have no plans to do any private/commercial work with it.
Itās nice to be able to fire up the tool on any OS from anywhere.
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That is a pretty big plus.
That is good to hear.
So far the measure tool is a bit of a bummer but it does give me what i want, weāll see when I get into something a bit more complicated how I feel.