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The thing is, with Fusion 360, they created a product so good no one can match them at this point. It's pretty remarkable how fun and easy it is to use compared
by muska3 6y ago
The thing is, with Fusion 360, they created a product so good no one can match them at this point. It's pretty remarkable how fun and easy it is to use compared to Pro/E and Solidworks. With regards to Revit, I've never used this software, but I wonder if it's a similar situation.
- dogma1138 6y agoFusion 360 isn’t a Solidworks competitor, not even close that would be Autodesk Inventor. Yes Fusion 360 is very easy to use but it is because it’s basically sketchup with basic CAM, simulation and parametric modeling baked in.
- muska3 6y agoIt's actually nothing like sketchup, it's a full fledged parametric modeler, which sketchup never was.
- dogma1138 6y agoNow yes it began its life as a freeform and direct edit modeling, which it’s still it’s main focus.
- numpad0 6y agoI believe Fusion 360 is full AutoCAD engine with locked down GUI?
- donquichotte 6y agoIt's also remarkable that while in many areas with "theory-heavy" software development (e.g. compilers), the open-source solutions are arguably better than the proprietary ones, this is not at all the case for mechanical CAD software. I wonder whether the overlap of people who can program, people who know enough math to develop a mechanical CAD software and the people who care about mechanical CAD is just too small for a successful open source effort. Yes, there is FreeCAD and OpenSCAD, but every time I try to use them, I give up in the end and whip up something in Fusion360.
- auggierose 6y agoI guess people who can do the math would like to get paid properly for their efforts.
- tfinniga 6y agoI think a big part of why this happens is that a lot of the fundamental math of CAD doesn't have good answers - everything is heuristics and approximations to within a tolerance. You can get a simple NURBS kernel up and running in maybe 2 dev-years. But getting good heuristics created for all of the common edge cases is what takes the huge number of dev-decades, and what you pay for with one of the commercial kernels. You won't even know what the common edge-cases are until you start getting user reports of things failing, so you'll need to be doing this development with a large community of users. There is no closed-form formula to tell how long a NURBS curve is. Offsets of NURBS curves are not NURBS curves. Likewise, intersecting NURBS surfaces produces intersection curves that are not possible to represent as NURBS curves. So something as simple as a fillet is impossible to exactly produce in like 3 ways. Booleans then add the joy of topology to the mix. It's all heuristics and approximations and dirty hacks.
- mianos 6y agoWhile this is true of programs like Rhino, it's not as true for fusion360. There are no NURBS in fusion360. I would guess that the fusion360 kernel is very focussed on deterministic solutions, specially being constraint based, where the errors in heuristics would multiply across the history. Interestingly, in situations where the math has more guesswork, as I think lofts and such are, fusion can be really quite bad. Rhino is amazingly good (and it's many many years old). Fusion360 is just a baby but it's pretty good for what it does. Once you use constraints based CAD it's hard to go back.