I was at a Fusion 360 Workshop with Autodesk in Dallas a few weeks ago. We got some great hands-on experience and got to work directly with some of the Fusion Success Team also. Thanks Thom for the workshop and Shayne, Marty, Michael for your great insights into how Fusion 360 thinks!
As I was jotting notes down on my surface, I kept hearing these great lines. Some of them made me chuckle a little, some of them made me think about Fusion 360 in a little different light. I scribbled them down with my standard quote glyph so I could remember them for later. Now I’m sharing them with you.
While you can use Fusion 360 like a standard parametric modeler, that’s not how it thinks.
I never thought about the difference between how the programs "think." This made me step back and re-evaluate some of the stuff I've already been creating in Fusion 360!
What happens in sculpt, stays in sculpt!
This one made me laugh. It's true, you really have to understand how the sculpt environment works in relation to the rest of the design if you're adding sculpted t-spline bodies to your design.
In Fusion 360 it doesn’t matter where stuff happens, it matters when it happens.
This is a totally different way of thinking while you're modeling. We got this quote when we were discussing why you can sometimes restructure sketches and bodies, and other times can't.
Let Fusion be Fusion!
As an instructor, I thought this was a good tip. You don’t have to constantly be comparing it to Inventor, or SOLIDWORKS, or AutoCAD. I tend to contrast a lot with this or that when I'm teaching. While this can help if someone is familiar with another program, it isn't always the most beneficial way to learn Fusion 360. Sometimes it's just going to do it its own way (refer to quote #1). If you're comparing too much to a single program you're used to, it can get frustrating because then you want it to work just like that program. It doesn't, Fusion is Fusion. At the same time, it's interesting how this relates to the next quote.
We’re taking the DNA from all these other products and experiences, and rolling it all into Fusion 360.
This was a cool thought. It might seem at first to contradict the other quotes, like Let Fusion be Fusion, but it doesn't really. It's true, with the amount of feedback from the user community, Fusion 360 is really like a combination of both new ideas and all of the good parts of other programs rolled into one. You can definitely see the DNA from programs you've used before, but there are so many other influences involved. Fusion 360 is a combination of all sorts of DNA. Instead of working like any single one of its influences, works like the ultimate evolution of all the design tools from the previous revolution.
I imagine the team behind Fusion 360 must feel like the ultimate digital-genetic engineers. Diginetic Engineers, maybe. Ok, so I coined that phrase just now and I'm not sure it will take off. And maybe I'm going a bit too far with this analogy, but it kind of works, right?
I hope these quotes and ideas help you to look at Fusion 360 in a different light than you have before. As always, feel free to leave comments or questions below!
