17 ms·

Autodesk Fusion 360 becomes almost useless for hobbyists

193 points by oger 6y ago

langitbiru 6y ago
So we have the cheaper alternatives of Adobe Photoshop which are Affinity Photo and Gimp. How hard is to build the equivalent of "Affinity Photo" to Autodesk Fusion 360? Maybe this is a good startup idea.
- cassianoleal 6y ago
  FreeCAD, OpenSCAD are FOSS alternatives. For "free as in beer" there's OnShape with the caveat that all your projects in the free tier are public, and that it runs on the browser or via mobile apps. The iPadOS app has Apple Pencil support which is pretty neat.
  - brudgers 6y ago
    There is also BRLCad which is in the public domain.
  - IshKebab 6y ago
    Unfortunately FreeCAD is kind of unusable (in the same way that KiCAD is), and OpenSCAD isn't an alternative at all. The only decent FOSS parametric CAD software I've found is SolveSpace, but it is quite limited, e.g. it doesn't even have a bevel tool, and there's no CAM. It's pretty much the Notepad of CAD. CAD is just one of those things that is too complicated and niche for FOSS to do well.
    - oogway8020 6y ago
      Cadquery is a very nice python only API, based on the OpenCascade, much better API then FreeCAD. So someone looking to make parametric models via code, I think it's the best option out there.
    - mrfusion 6y ago
      What are the limitations of openscad?
      - skykooler 6y ago
        The biggest one is that everything is done via, essentially, writing a program that creates the geometry; there's no interaction with a GUI.
      - IshKebab 6y ago
        It's fine for making stuff that is highly parametric and procedural, like gears and fasteners. You wouldn't want to design anything else with it though, like a car or a pen or a gun.
    - jbay808 6y ago
      > CAD is just one of those things that is too complicated and niche for FOSS to do well. It's arguably too complicated for hackers to do well in their spare time, but there are plenty of FOSS projects in similarly complicated niche areas. The most successful ones tend to have companies or consortiums backing them, who aren't looking to make money on the softare itself but have it complement or support their other activities. OpenModelica for one example. I always wonder why a consortium of big manufacturers (say Ford, Caterpillar, Hitachi, etc) don't just throw their weight behind some FOSS CAD initiative and get something standard that they can rely on forever. I don't think it would cost them more than 3rd party software in the long run.
      - qppo 6y ago
        > I always wonder why a consortium of big manufacturers (say Ford, Caterpillar, Hitachi, etc) don't just throw their weight behind some FOSS CAD initiative and get something standard that they can rely on forever. The problem for these businesses is that their internal CAD libraries are essentially proprietary tooling, they don't have an interest in making it open source, and much of the tooling around those libraries and software packages is proprietary or patented. It's kind of analogous to Qualcomm's stranglehold over cellular communications. If you don't pay them you're also throwing away decades of IP and tooling around it, and lose interoperability.
      - dotancohen 6y ago
        > in the long run That's your answer. Seriously. People have taken the initiative and talked to the engineering departments and bean counters at large engineering houses (brands you're not familiar with, that do the engineering for e.g. Ford, etc but not the design which is typically in-house). The reasons are A) short term cost with no benefit, B) having to train staff, and C) compatibility with extant files. Not only will the current staff have to be retrained but nobody can be hired with experience with the tool.
  - incanus77 6y ago
    I would highly recommend the Joko Engineering series of FreeCAD YouTube videos. I went from being pretty adept at OpenSCAD to getting FreeCAD to "click" by watching this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geSQlBczsWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geSQlBczsWY After that, I spent a month last year doing a daily household item challenge, which really leveled up my skills and now there's no turning back. https://twitter.com/hashtag/30DayCADChallenge?f=live https://twitter.com/hashtag/30DayCADChallenge?f=live
- qppo 6y ago
  It's a great startup idea, almost guaranteed exit through acquisition by Autodesk et al.
- japanuspus 6y ago
  Obligatory comment to anything related to parametric 3D modelling: Have a look at [solvespace], which is a GPL3 cross-platform standalone parametric modeller with an awesome hacker-feel. If you drop by github to look at the code, make sure to check out some of the other awesome projects by @whiteshark (who is one of the authors). [solvespace]: http://solvespace.com/index.pl http://solvespace.com/index.pl
  - abakker 6y ago
    As far as integrated CAD/CAM, I've never seen anything as nice to use as Fusion on the OSS side. Honestly, I'll just end up paying. It pisses me off that they managed this so poorly, and even more that their pricing tiers include so much BS. Oh well.
  - app4soft 6y ago
    Fully agree. SolveSpace is awesome for daily engineering![0] > make sure to check out some of the other awesome projects by @whiteshark Typo Fix: @whitequark[1] [0] https://github.com/Symbian9/SolveSpace-Daily-Engineering https://github.com/Symbian9/SolveSpace-Daily-Engineering [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whitequark https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whitequark
- PascLeRasc 6y ago
  Fusion 360 was the Sketch/Figma answer to SolidWorks/Adobe, and I think it still can be. I’ve seen some absolutely amazing CAM work done in Fusion and I love using it. It’s so easy to get started actually making stuff in it. We’ll see about the limitations but right now they don’t seem too severe.
- JeremyHerrman 6y ago
  > How hard is to build the equivalent of "Affinity Photo" to Autodesk Fusion 360? Maybe this is a good startup idea. Answer: It's extremely hard to build any equivalent to Fusion 360 or any full featured CAD/CAM tool. This is not a weekend hackathon problem! There are so many fundamental building blocks, with many requiring teams of PhDs to produce: CAD kernels, constraint solvers, file format interop, sketching tools, assembly support (mating), simulation, etc... Not to mention the manufacturing specific modeling tools for sheet metal, generative design for milling & 3D printing.
  - langitbiru 6y ago
    So it can be considered as hard as building VR headset (Oculus)? Is it what we call a moonshot project?
    - JeremyHerrman 6y ago
      If you want to build each individual piece without licensing from Siemens/Dassault, then yes this would compare to a moonshot. Parasolid, the CAD kernel owned by Siemens, is more than 30 years old at this point. The same amount of effort has gone into many of the other building blocks as well. OPENCASCADE is a FOSS CAD kernel but doesn't work well for real CAD, and support is hard to come by for companies building on it. Most startups tend to license these tools instead of building them, but that comes at a large cost that must be pushed down to customers, hence the $$$$ cost of CAD today.
      - mywittyname 6y ago
        They also have a massive global team of really brilliant people working on NX and the related components. I'm talking former NASA employees who worked on components for the space shuttle or Mars rovers work there. That's the kind of expertise you can't really buy or acquire as an OSS project. Plus, they are not shy about acquisitions. It's how they maintain their dominance. Any company that builds a remotely useful product in that space will find themselves sitting in front of a Big Fucking Check that's going to be hard to turn down. Anyone who turns it down will probably find themselves sitting in front of several patent lawsuits all over the world.
detritus 6y ago
I always though it was a cludgy, bloated piece of software and despite a few attempts to get into it, never really did. I particularly disliked having to upload files to their 'cloud' for conversion between formats or even (if memory serves) for slicing objects. Not really what I'm comfortable doing with client's assets. (And i was on acommercial license for a year or two, gifted by them in some promo as it may have been). I too echo the sentiment of langitbiru elsewhere in this thread - with the inflation in the home hobbyist scene over the past few years, I wonder what it would take for an Affinity-a-like to shake up the domain a little. I wonder how much Blender could be modded to achieve this?
- bborud 6y ago
  Fusion 360 used to be very buggy. It isn't anymore. Change in speed is harder to judge since improvements have been very gradual, but the days of waiting endlessly on processing that can't be interrupted is pretty much over. According to friends of mine who do fabrication it is a lot more stable than the high end stuff they have to use which costs an absolute fortune. That stuff is, apparently, "buggy as f*ck". I don't think Blender is an option or even a useful starting point for a replacement. It solves an entirely different problem and any similarity in problem domain being addressed is purely superficial. (Get a fabrication professional to take you through their CNC workflow to get an understanding of how it is used). The dependence on the cloud sucks for two reasons: Autodesk can make all of your work go away at any moment and Autodesk have never done much to optimize uploads/saves so they are slow.
  - detritus 6y ago
    For the record, I actually run a CNC and a laser professionally and whilst I'm not intimately familiar with Blender, I know how other 'non-specific' software can be modified and/or used as a starting point for creating project files. It might not perhaps suffice for the creation of a building or a jetplane, but for hobbyist use, I don't see why not. For instance - I use Adobe Illustrator as a 2D 'CAD' program, purely because I find it MUCH quicker to work with than the likes of AutoCAD (which I gave up on years ago). I just found Fusion360 incredibly slow. Perhaps things have changed since, but I last looked at it about 8 months ago.
wlesieutre 6y ago
I would be so happy if Blender tackled parametric modeling like this. Tried FreeCAD, gave up in frustration after I drew a second sketch on the face of an object and no matter what I did it wouldn't extrude. After that went poorly I'd just picked up Fusion 360 about a month ago and have been doing pretty well with that. Whoops.
- splatcollision 6y ago
  Since blender is so easy to write add-ons for with their Python API, I'd be surprised if there wasn't already community effort around this. I don't know much about CAD requirements, but it looks like there are a few tools available already and efforts underway: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=blender+cad+add-on https://duckduckgo.com/?q=blender+cad+add-on
  - wlesieutre 6y ago
    The critical thing is that Fusion 360 and similar tools use a non-destructive parametric workflow. Everything is defined based on sketches with dimensions and constraints like "this angle is 30 degrees, these lines are parallel, this is a right angle, this radius is 3 cm" and you can go back in at any point to change a previous dimension, even if it was on the very first shape you started building from. The whole object recalculates from the new design. The CAD addons for blender are helpful for doing some more precise drawing actions (like finding the intersection point of two edges, which blender doesn't normally give you), but they're still fundamentally in a destructive mesh workflow. You have a pile of vertices/edges/faces, you do some editing, and you have a different pile of verticies/edges/faces. There's some stuff doable with non-destructive modifiers, but they're for very limited specific tasks.
    - skykooler 6y ago
      I think that with a bit of work, an addon could build on the boolean modifiers (among others) and create something fairly powerful.
- samwillis 6y ago
jwr 6y ago
I read the limitations carefully. I think only the lack of STEP export is a showstopper. The rest seems pretty much OK for hobby use. Also, as a side note, I would be happy to pay a subscription fee, just perhaps not $499/year, for "advanced hobby use". Autodesk could look more into separating hobbyists from businesses, I'm sure it's possible. The problem is that after OnShape went full commercial, this is the only relatively inexpensive option with history-based parametric modeling.
- qz2 6y ago
  So far.
- delecti 6y ago
  Agreed. Based on my (admittedly limited) usage of Fusion 360 for 3d printing related hobby use, I don't see my personal usage of it being affected by any of the changes. But I've definitely benefited from other people using those features, and it seems likely they were on the same hobbyist license.
- randomdata 6y ago
  Save the 10 model limit. The recent addition of the tools to help with "bottom up" design provides a nicer workflow for a lot of cases, but would prevent you from having more than nine components in your assembly (the assembly being the 10th) which seems too little even for the smallest of hobbyist projects. It would be reasonable if there is an exception for models included in an assembly. Apparently that restriction is not coming until next year, so time will tell.
- AtHeartEngineer 6y ago
  $8-10 a month would be awesome, and they would probably make a ton of money using that subscription model. It's short sighted that they don't do this.
  - Pet_Ant 6y ago
    That would probably be sufficient for light industrial use as well though. And those are the customers they are trying to "shake down". No judgement, but that's the problem with hobbyist stuff that is professional grade... cheap professionals use it.
at_a_remove 6y ago
TechShop leaned pretty heavily on it. So did a local spinoff group designed to rise from the (local) ashes of TechShop. I wonder what will take its place.
roland35 6y ago
I have been using fusion 360 as a hobbiest for a few years now, and this is certainly disappointing to see but unfortunately not surprising. I am not a fan of having online based file management either, but that is how a lot of these tools extend themselves to be more of a "service" and then get subscription dollars. Circuit maker by Altium is another example. One possible alternative is Solid Edge by Siemens- they've had a "community edition" which is free for hobby and education use. It isn't as popular as Solid works or Creo but it is a full featured tool. It does have a full featured price as well of course once you go commerical (these tools are $5-20k per seat per year generally)
gorkish 6y ago
I'm kind of sick of companies punishing personal/hobby/learning users because another group that should be paying for their software isn't doing it. This is their problem to solve, and they have chosen to do it this way. I regret spending effort in learning how to use this platform. I am removing all my public Fusion360 designs and tutorials and replacing them with recommendations to others to avoid their software. Original: Anyone looking to learn CAD probably ought to just jump right to solidworks as a vendor that is at the very least more predictable and has better return on your time. Revision: May have spoken too soon Re: solidworks. sigh I gues if you are a great software engineer with some free time, have a look at FreeCAD. It needs some good help.
- Kliment 6y ago
  Alternatively, try FreeCAD. It's an amazingly capable software, and you don't have to fear it will one day be bought by autodesk and ruined.
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    Why freecad over openscad? (Im Still new to the scene)
    - Kliment 6y ago
      I am a passionate OpenSCAD user and prefer it for many things, but there are several reasons I tend to work in FreeCAD sometimes, and recommend it to people: - Way more functionality - STEP support - Constraint solver Also it's much more point-and-clicky, in the same way Fusion is, so it's much less confusing for a Fusion user to transition to FreeCAD rather than OpenSCAD. That said, OpenSCAD is phenomenally powerful, it just requires you to think in a particular way. I happen to enjoy thinking that way and most of what I make ends up being OpenSCAD. I mostly use OpenSCAD to design parts, and FreeCAD to design assemblies and integrate parts into existing things. If you're looking for an intermediate thing, check out cadquery, which uses the same geometry engine as FreeCAD but has a very OpenSCAD-like feel and language to it.
sjs382 6y ago
Well, I guess I'm glad I didn't invest in that Fusion360 course that I had been eyeing. $300/year (temporarily discounted from $500) is way too much for "advanced hobby use". I think $50/year or $100/major version is my limit for hobby software.
andyfleming 6y ago
Thread from yesterday: Changes to Fusion 360 for Personal Use https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24494653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24494653
katmannthree 6y ago
There are other free-as-in-beer options but the only ones that don't have a risk of this happening are the open source packages, of which FreeCAD and SolveSpace are the only current viable 3D options. If you need a parametric cad package for small assemblies or occasional use FreeCAD is most likely workable. I've been using FreeCAD in a light-duty professional capacity for several years now and will be happy to help out anyone who wants to transition to it (email is in my profile). They have a decent tutorials page[0] here for getting started with the basics. [0] https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Tutorials https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Tutorials
bleepblorp 6y ago
Autodesk's behaior in this is no different, morally, from metal theft: an act that gives a trivial benefit a very small number of people at a massive cost to many victims. The amount of money Autodesk's multi-mansion & yacht class of managers will make from attempting to force hobbyists into paid software rental is trivial compared to both Autodesk's existing profits and the amount of damage this will do to the creative capacity of society. It's a problem that government continues to allow extractive companies, such as Autodesk, to offer one-sided consumer "contracts" that are binding on consumers but can be unilaterally and arbitrarily revoked by the issuer.
jblakey 6y ago
Man, I was just getting started in Fusion 360! Bummer!
matz1 6y ago
297/year is not bad, certainly cheaper than a lot of hobby. Is hobby supposed to be cheap/free ?
- andyfleming 6y ago
  My concern isn’t over the current price. The larger investment is my time. If I spend hours and hours learning software and creating things with that software, I don’t want to risk it being crippled or the price being raised exorbitantly. I would rather use open source software or pay for software with a reasonable licensing model (and ideally from a company without a history of consumer-hostile practices).
- dotancohen 6y ago
  That is very expensive for hobby software. For contrast, I pay about $50 per year for a Jetbrains IDE for professional use. That's software I feed my family using.
  - matz1 6y ago
    I'm talking about hobby in general. Let say tennis hobby, the annual membership cost alone could easily go more than 297/year.
    - wccrawford 6y ago
      297/yr isn't the cost of "the hobby". It's the cost of part of the hobby. Then you need machines, bits, and material to work with. And it's unlikely that a CNC alone will be enough for anything, so there's a bunch of related tools and supplies needed. It's like saying "a $300 set of clubs isn't too much to have golf as a hobby" but forgetting that you need to pay for all kinds of others stuff, too.
      - matz1 6y ago
        yes, i wasn't implying 297/year is the total cost of "the hobby". thats why i compare it to tennis membership, which is also only the cost of part of the hobby.
scrooched_moose 6y ago
For anyone who has dealt with Autodesk in a professional setting in the last 2 decades, this was 100% expected. They are an awful company whose entire business model is "the first hit is free, kids!". I can get things like limiting cloud storage (if they actually offered offline storage). But removing .step export? That's just 100% "screw you, now we have your projects and you can't get them out".
mayoff 6y ago
Inflammatory title, and not the title of the linked article. As a 3D printing hobbyist who uses F360, I don't see these changes having a major effect on me or many of the people who post on r/3Dprinting and r/functionalprint. (I'm not sure they'll have any effect on me.)
mrkeen 6y ago
How have hobbyists historically afforded Autodesk software? I dabbled in 3ds Max back in the day, but I was never under the impression I could justify purchasing it.
sokoloff 6y ago
While I'm disappointed in the changes, I both disagree with the characterization of "almost useless" and with the editorializing that's inherent in choosing that title for this submission to HN. The changes are painful (especially the lack of STEP export), but that stops well short of "almost useless" IMO.
- adammunich 6y ago
  It really is almost useless, there's not really a way to get useful 3D models out anymore.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    I've used it many dozens of times for 3D printed parts which I expect will continue to work just fine to export STL files. It wouldn't surprise me if there are more hobbyist users making STL files for 3D printed parts than all other hobbyist use cases combined. (If you add 2-and-a-half-D CAD/CAM [also still pretty well supported], I'd wager a large sum that it's still useful for more than half the current hobbyist user base.)
    - pbalau 6y ago
      I can go to "Tools -> Make" and the selected body will be sent to my makerboat desktop app. This means there is a reasonable easy way to add apps to F360 (since I doubt MakerBoat is so big for Autodesk to make a special thing for them), which means you can export in whatever way you want.
darth_avocado 6y ago
You paint as a hobby, you buy paint, canvass and brushes. You read as a hobby you buy books. You bike as a hobby you buy a bike. You use CAD as a hobby you pay for CAD. Not everything is cheap, some hobbies are expensive, others are not. Buying books is cheap, buying a bike is not. I'm tired of people talking about free software as their right. People who make the software also have families to feed.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  I was struggling to get past this first comment where the poster says: > I have had various commercial, home-use and free licenses with Autodesk since about 1990. If you've been using a product for 30 years and never paid for it, it's really hard to complain. I'm not a big fan of Autodesk for various reasons, but if you are a hobbyist, there are affordable alternatives. If they need the more advanced features Autodesk offers versus competition, you can pay for them.
  - XMPPwocky 6y ago
    I can't find that comment for context- wouldn't a commercial license be paid (and home-use might be, too, considering they split it out from "free")?
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      Sure. But he also mentions free licenses which are indeed "free". He also says in the next line "Are any other free users..." which means he's on a free license now.
- Nullabillity 6y ago
  All of those have incremental costs to reproduce. The variable cost for software is practically zero.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Yeah, because the people that wrote the software aren't worthy to be paid for their skills.
crispyambulance 6y ago
I've been using Fusion 360 for about a year for hobbyist projects. It's been intuitive, fresh, very capable and the learning curve was long-ish but not steep. A spacemouse makes it an absolute joy to work with once you get your motor skills adapted. ~ $300/year is not trivial, but it's more than reasonable if you're using it for "a lot" of stuff. I would say that 10+ projects in a year is using it a lot. CAM with FIVE-AXIS milling is a lot, needing to use the cloud for rendering is a lot. Simulation, generative design and custom extensions are a lot. If you're doing all of those things, you're definitely on the far edge of "hobbyist" and should be forking over some money.
- pbalau 6y ago
  True, I'm using it fairly often, but the only thing that affects me from that list is "Project storage is limited to 10 active and editable documents". And by that I mean I need to delete the crap I have there, I can survive with 1.
qppo 6y ago
Here's a question for the IP legal crowd If Autodesk is hiding a design I make using Fusion 360 behind a gate on their cloud, does that require I grant them a license to the IP represented by that design? Who owns the IP, if I create it, but they prevent me from accessing it? Similar question for a lot of tools that create IP and hide it behind a gate on the cloud. It seems legally shaky.
dade_ 6y ago
I figured it was a trap when I bought my 3D printer in 2012 and decided to invest the effort to learn FreeCAD. Free as in freedom, and I continue to donate to their project.
theincredulousk 6y ago
(disclaimer: I have only used this software for rock-bottom basic 3D printing) It seems to me the deeper features make for highly sophisticated and capable (read:valuable) engineering software. At the risk of getting pitchforked, is $25 a month ($300/yr) for an "advanced hobbyist" not ...reasonable? I mean an average cell-phone bill is 4x that. Of course it is always annoying to get into a subscription model when you only use something infrequently - can you activate it 1 month at a time? Otherwise, if someone is using it often, then 25 bucks a month seems to me a more-or-less a fair value, in the context of status-quo capitalism.
Ductapemaster 6y ago
I'm so confused about Autodesk's licensing now. I have an Eagle subscription at $100 a year and a number a months ago they bundled in F360 with it, which was a welcome change. But now, F360 alone is $300 a year (and they say it comes with a free Eagle subscription??). How are there two pricing models? Am I going to be surprised by a 300% cost increase when my subscription renews? Are they going to force me to subscribe to F360 to get Eagle? Thankfully I just renewed, so I won't have to worry about this for at least a year, but this is frustrating.
2Gkashmiri 6y ago
How does the open source and Foss ideology come into the whole "families to feed so they can demand extortion money and DRM and vendor lock in and platoform lock in ? If blender model can work for them, surely all software can be built on that and I would gladly pay for "maintenance". Monthly but not otherwise.
m0zg 6y ago
For 2D, LibreCAD is quite serviceable (and very AutoCAD-like). For 3D there's FreeCAD, but, IMO, while it is nominally quite capable, the UI is so obtuse and inconsistent that after a few hours with it, you'll just pay whatever Autodesk is asking you to pay. That's not to say F360 is great, but FreeCAD is unfortunately much worse. I really wanted to like it, since I don't like my work to be tied to proprietary software, but after digging through it for a week I was back to F360.
StillBored 6y ago
I'm a fusion360 user, mostly for simple 3d printed things. I had already stopped recommended it to people last year when they started messing with the hobby/startup license. Frankly, I would be perfectly willing to toss a couple hundred dollars at them if it were a boxed product that I "owned" and could reinstall in 10 years. But they don't offer that, its a rental model or nothing. After all, I paid for simply3d, despite there being a bunch of free slicers, because it works well and I can use it for an hour or so a year (because I use it in 5 min bursts) without fretting over continuous payment. In the end, I will probably give TurboCad another spin in a year or so when the next set of fusion360 feature removals happen. I used it a bit a few years ago and have that copy, and they continue to sell a "permanent" license version that is fairly reasonably priced. Plus, it looks like they have done a fair bit of additional work to make it work better for 3d. For the time being though, I will save off my drawings, and donate some $ to freecad https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Donate https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Donate to encourage them.
Marley_82 6y ago
I use Alibre - specifically Alibre Atom3D. It does everything I need it to do - it was $199 - I own my license. It has STEP, part modeling, assemblies, drawings, the whole 9. It's all parametric. The interface is simple, but it is still powerful. I imagine 99% of what most "hobby" people do can easily be done in that software.

193 points by oger 6y ago

So we have the cheaper alternatives of Adobe Photoshop which are Affinity Photo and Gimp. How hard is to build the equivalent of "Affinity Photo" to Autodesk Fusion 360? Maybe this is a good startup idea.

cassianoleal 6y ago
FreeCAD, OpenSCAD are FOSS alternatives. For "free as in beer" there's OnShape with the caveat that all your projects in the free tier are public, and that it runs on the browser or via mobile apps. The iPadOS app has Apple Pencil support which is pretty neat.
- brudgers 6y ago
  There is also BRLCad which is in the public domain.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  Unfortunately FreeCAD is kind of unusable (in the same way that KiCAD is), and OpenSCAD isn't an alternative at all. The only decent FOSS parametric CAD software I've found is SolveSpace, but it is quite limited, e.g. it doesn't even have a bevel tool, and there's no CAM. It's pretty much the Notepad of CAD. CAD is just one of those things that is too complicated and niche for FOSS to do well.
  - oogway8020 6y ago
    Cadquery is a very nice python only API, based on the OpenCascade, much better API then FreeCAD. So someone looking to make parametric models via code, I think it's the best option out there.
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    What are the limitations of openscad?
    - skykooler 6y ago
      The biggest one is that everything is done via, essentially, writing a program that creates the geometry; there's no interaction with a GUI.
    - IshKebab 6y ago
      It's fine for making stuff that is highly parametric and procedural, like gears and fasteners. You wouldn't want to design anything else with it though, like a car or a pen or a gun.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    > CAD is just one of those things that is too complicated and niche for FOSS to do well. It's arguably too complicated for hackers to do well in their spare time, but there are plenty of FOSS projects in similarly complicated niche areas. The most successful ones tend to have companies or consortiums backing them, who aren't looking to make money on the softare itself but have it complement or support their other activities. OpenModelica for one example. I always wonder why a consortium of big manufacturers (say Ford, Caterpillar, Hitachi, etc) don't just throw their weight behind some FOSS CAD initiative and get something standard that they can rely on forever. I don't think it would cost them more than 3rd party software in the long run.
    - qppo 6y ago
      > I always wonder why a consortium of big manufacturers (say Ford, Caterpillar, Hitachi, etc) don't just throw their weight behind some FOSS CAD initiative and get something standard that they can rely on forever. The problem for these businesses is that their internal CAD libraries are essentially proprietary tooling, they don't have an interest in making it open source, and much of the tooling around those libraries and software packages is proprietary or patented. It's kind of analogous to Qualcomm's stranglehold over cellular communications. If you don't pay them you're also throwing away decades of IP and tooling around it, and lose interoperability.
    - dotancohen 6y ago
      > in the long run That's your answer. Seriously. People have taken the initiative and talked to the engineering departments and bean counters at large engineering houses (brands you're not familiar with, that do the engineering for e.g. Ford, etc but not the design which is typically in-house). The reasons are A) short term cost with no benefit, B) having to train staff, and C) compatibility with extant files. Not only will the current staff have to be retrained but nobody can be hired with experience with the tool.
- incanus77 6y ago
  I would highly recommend the Joko Engineering series of FreeCAD YouTube videos. I went from being pretty adept at OpenSCAD to getting FreeCAD to "click" by watching this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geSQlBczsWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geSQlBczsWY After that, I spent a month last year doing a daily household item challenge, which really leveled up my skills and now there's no turning back. https://twitter.com/hashtag/30DayCADChallenge?f=live https://twitter.com/hashtag/30DayCADChallenge?f=live
qppo 6y ago
It's a great startup idea, almost guaranteed exit through acquisition by Autodesk et al.
japanuspus 6y ago
Obligatory comment to anything related to parametric 3D modelling: Have a look at [solvespace], which is a GPL3 cross-platform standalone parametric modeller with an awesome hacker-feel. If you drop by github to look at the code, make sure to check out some of the other awesome projects by @whiteshark (who is one of the authors). [solvespace]: http://solvespace.com/index.pl http://solvespace.com/index.pl
- abakker 6y ago
  As far as integrated CAD/CAM, I've never seen anything as nice to use as Fusion on the OSS side. Honestly, I'll just end up paying. It pisses me off that they managed this so poorly, and even more that their pricing tiers include so much BS. Oh well.
- app4soft 6y ago
  Fully agree. SolveSpace is awesome for daily engineering![0] > make sure to check out some of the other awesome projects by @whiteshark Typo Fix: @whitequark[1] [0] https://github.com/Symbian9/SolveSpace-Daily-Engineering https://github.com/Symbian9/SolveSpace-Daily-Engineering [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whitequark https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whitequark
PascLeRasc 6y ago
Fusion 360 was the Sketch/Figma answer to SolidWorks/Adobe, and I think it still can be. I’ve seen some absolutely amazing CAM work done in Fusion and I love using it. It’s so easy to get started actually making stuff in it. We’ll see about the limitations but right now they don’t seem too severe.
JeremyHerrman 6y ago
> How hard is to build the equivalent of "Affinity Photo" to Autodesk Fusion 360? Maybe this is a good startup idea. Answer: It's extremely hard to build any equivalent to Fusion 360 or any full featured CAD/CAM tool. This is not a weekend hackathon problem! There are so many fundamental building blocks, with many requiring teams of PhDs to produce: CAD kernels, constraint solvers, file format interop, sketching tools, assembly support (mating), simulation, etc... Not to mention the manufacturing specific modeling tools for sheet metal, generative design for milling & 3D printing.
- langitbiru 6y ago
  So it can be considered as hard as building VR headset (Oculus)? Is it what we call a moonshot project?
  - JeremyHerrman 6y ago
    If you want to build each individual piece without licensing from Siemens/Dassault, then yes this would compare to a moonshot. Parasolid, the CAD kernel owned by Siemens, is more than 30 years old at this point. The same amount of effort has gone into many of the other building blocks as well. OPENCASCADE is a FOSS CAD kernel but doesn't work well for real CAD, and support is hard to come by for companies building on it. Most startups tend to license these tools instead of building them, but that comes at a large cost that must be pushed down to customers, hence the $$$$ cost of CAD today.
    - mywittyname 6y ago
      They also have a massive global team of really brilliant people working on NX and the related components. I'm talking former NASA employees who worked on components for the space shuttle or Mars rovers work there. That's the kind of expertise you can't really buy or acquire as an OSS project. Plus, they are not shy about acquisitions. It's how they maintain their dominance. Any company that builds a remotely useful product in that space will find themselves sitting in front of a Big Fucking Check that's going to be hard to turn down. Anyone who turns it down will probably find themselves sitting in front of several patent lawsuits all over the world.

detritus 6y ago

I always though it was a cludgy, bloated piece of software and despite a few attempts to get into it, never really did. I particularly disliked having to upload files to their 'cloud' for conversion between formats or even (if memory serves) for slicing objects. Not really what I'm comfortable doing with client's assets. (And i was on acommercial license for a year or two, gifted by them in some promo as it may have been). I too echo the sentiment of langitbiru elsewhere in this thread - with the inflation in the home hobbyist scene over the past few years, I wonder what it would take for an Affinity-a-like to shake up the domain a little. I wonder how much Blender could be modded to achieve this?

bborud 6y ago
Fusion 360 used to be very buggy. It isn't anymore. Change in speed is harder to judge since improvements have been very gradual, but the days of waiting endlessly on processing that can't be interrupted is pretty much over. According to friends of mine who do fabrication it is a lot more stable than the high end stuff they have to use which costs an absolute fortune. That stuff is, apparently, "buggy as f*ck". I don't think Blender is an option or even a useful starting point for a replacement. It solves an entirely different problem and any similarity in problem domain being addressed is purely superficial. (Get a fabrication professional to take you through their CNC workflow to get an understanding of how it is used). The dependence on the cloud sucks for two reasons: Autodesk can make all of your work go away at any moment and Autodesk have never done much to optimize uploads/saves so they are slow.
- detritus 6y ago
  For the record, I actually run a CNC and a laser professionally and whilst I'm not intimately familiar with Blender, I know how other 'non-specific' software can be modified and/or used as a starting point for creating project files. It might not perhaps suffice for the creation of a building or a jetplane, but for hobbyist use, I don't see why not. For instance - I use Adobe Illustrator as a 2D 'CAD' program, purely because I find it MUCH quicker to work with than the likes of AutoCAD (which I gave up on years ago). I just found Fusion360 incredibly slow. Perhaps things have changed since, but I last looked at it about 8 months ago.

wlesieutre 6y ago

I would be so happy if Blender tackled parametric modeling like this. Tried FreeCAD, gave up in frustration after I drew a second sketch on the face of an object and no matter what I did it wouldn't extrude. After that went poorly I'd just picked up Fusion 360 about a month ago and have been doing pretty well with that. Whoops.

splatcollision 6y ago
Since blender is so easy to write add-ons for with their Python API, I'd be surprised if there wasn't already community effort around this. I don't know much about CAD requirements, but it looks like there are a few tools available already and efforts underway: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=blender+cad+add-on https://duckduckgo.com/?q=blender+cad+add-on
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  The critical thing is that Fusion 360 and similar tools use a non-destructive parametric workflow. Everything is defined based on sketches with dimensions and constraints like "this angle is 30 degrees, these lines are parallel, this is a right angle, this radius is 3 cm" and you can go back in at any point to change a previous dimension, even if it was on the very first shape you started building from. The whole object recalculates from the new design. The CAD addons for blender are helpful for doing some more precise drawing actions (like finding the intersection point of two edges, which blender doesn't normally give you), but they're still fundamentally in a destructive mesh workflow. You have a pile of vertices/edges/faces, you do some editing, and you have a different pile of verticies/edges/faces. There's some stuff doable with non-destructive modifiers, but they're for very limited specific tasks.
  - skykooler 6y ago
    I think that with a bit of work, an addon could build on the boolean modifiers (among others) and create something fairly powerful.
samwillis 6y ago

jwr 6y ago

I read the limitations carefully. I think only the lack of STEP export is a showstopper. The rest seems pretty much OK for hobby use. Also, as a side note, I would be happy to pay a subscription fee, just perhaps not $499/year, for "advanced hobby use". Autodesk could look more into separating hobbyists from businesses, I'm sure it's possible. The problem is that after OnShape went full commercial, this is the only relatively inexpensive option with history-based parametric modeling.

qz2 6y ago
So far.
delecti 6y ago
Agreed. Based on my (admittedly limited) usage of Fusion 360 for 3d printing related hobby use, I don't see my personal usage of it being affected by any of the changes. But I've definitely benefited from other people using those features, and it seems likely they were on the same hobbyist license.
randomdata 6y ago
Save the 10 model limit. The recent addition of the tools to help with "bottom up" design provides a nicer workflow for a lot of cases, but would prevent you from having more than nine components in your assembly (the assembly being the 10th) which seems too little even for the smallest of hobbyist projects. It would be reasonable if there is an exception for models included in an assembly. Apparently that restriction is not coming until next year, so time will tell.
AtHeartEngineer 6y ago
$8-10 a month would be awesome, and they would probably make a ton of money using that subscription model. It's short sighted that they don't do this.
- Pet_Ant 6y ago
  That would probably be sufficient for light industrial use as well though. And those are the customers they are trying to "shake down". No judgement, but that's the problem with hobbyist stuff that is professional grade... cheap professionals use it.

at_a_remove 6y ago

TechShop leaned pretty heavily on it. So did a local spinoff group designed to rise from the (local) ashes of TechShop. I wonder what will take its place.

roland35 6y ago

I have been using fusion 360 as a hobbiest for a few years now, and this is certainly disappointing to see but unfortunately not surprising. I am not a fan of having online based file management either, but that is how a lot of these tools extend themselves to be more of a "service" and then get subscription dollars. Circuit maker by Altium is another example. One possible alternative is Solid Edge by Siemens- they've had a "community edition" which is free for hobby and education use. It isn't as popular as Solid works or Creo but it is a full featured tool. It does have a full featured price as well of course once you go commerical (these tools are $5-20k per seat per year generally)

gorkish 6y ago

I'm kind of sick of companies punishing personal/hobby/learning users because another group that should be paying for their software isn't doing it. This is their problem to solve, and they have chosen to do it this way. I regret spending effort in learning how to use this platform. I am removing all my public Fusion360 designs and tutorials and replacing them with recommendations to others to avoid their software. Original: Anyone looking to learn CAD probably ought to just jump right to solidworks as a vendor that is at the very least more predictable and has better return on your time. Revision: May have spoken too soon Re: solidworks. sigh I gues if you are a great software engineer with some free time, have a look at FreeCAD. It needs some good help.

Kliment 6y ago
Alternatively, try FreeCAD. It's an amazingly capable software, and you don't have to fear it will one day be bought by autodesk and ruined.
- mrfusion 6y ago
  Why freecad over openscad? (Im Still new to the scene)
  - Kliment 6y ago
    I am a passionate OpenSCAD user and prefer it for many things, but there are several reasons I tend to work in FreeCAD sometimes, and recommend it to people: - Way more functionality - STEP support - Constraint solver Also it's much more point-and-clicky, in the same way Fusion is, so it's much less confusing for a Fusion user to transition to FreeCAD rather than OpenSCAD. That said, OpenSCAD is phenomenally powerful, it just requires you to think in a particular way. I happen to enjoy thinking that way and most of what I make ends up being OpenSCAD. I mostly use OpenSCAD to design parts, and FreeCAD to design assemblies and integrate parts into existing things. If you're looking for an intermediate thing, check out cadquery, which uses the same geometry engine as FreeCAD but has a very OpenSCAD-like feel and language to it.

sjs382 6y ago

Well, I guess I'm glad I didn't invest in that Fusion360 course that I had been eyeing. $300/year (temporarily discounted from $500) is way too much for "advanced hobby use". I think $50/year or $100/major version is my limit for hobby software.

andyfleming 6y ago

Thread from yesterday: Changes to Fusion 360 for Personal Use https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24494653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24494653

katmannthree 6y ago

There are other free-as-in-beer options but the only ones that don't have a risk of this happening are the open source packages, of which FreeCAD and SolveSpace are the only current viable 3D options. If you need a parametric cad package for small assemblies or occasional use FreeCAD is most likely workable. I've been using FreeCAD in a light-duty professional capacity for several years now and will be happy to help out anyone who wants to transition to it (email is in my profile). They have a decent tutorials page[0] here for getting started with the basics. [0] https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Tutorials https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Tutorials

bleepblorp 6y ago

Autodesk's behaior in this is no different, morally, from metal theft: an act that gives a trivial benefit a very small number of people at a massive cost to many victims. The amount of money Autodesk's multi-mansion & yacht class of managers will make from attempting to force hobbyists into paid software rental is trivial compared to both Autodesk's existing profits and the amount of damage this will do to the creative capacity of society. It's a problem that government continues to allow extractive companies, such as Autodesk, to offer one-sided consumer "contracts" that are binding on consumers but can be unilaterally and arbitrarily revoked by the issuer.

jblakey 6y ago

Man, I was just getting started in Fusion 360! Bummer!

matz1 6y ago

297/year is not bad, certainly cheaper than a lot of hobby. Is hobby supposed to be cheap/free ?

andyfleming 6y ago
My concern isn’t over the current price. The larger investment is my time. If I spend hours and hours learning software and creating things with that software, I don’t want to risk it being crippled or the price being raised exorbitantly. I would rather use open source software or pay for software with a reasonable licensing model (and ideally from a company without a history of consumer-hostile practices).
dotancohen 6y ago
That is very expensive for hobby software. For contrast, I pay about $50 per year for a Jetbrains IDE for professional use. That's software I feed my family using.
- matz1 6y ago
  I'm talking about hobby in general. Let say tennis hobby, the annual membership cost alone could easily go more than 297/year.
  - wccrawford 6y ago
    297/yr isn't the cost of "the hobby". It's the cost of part of the hobby. Then you need machines, bits, and material to work with. And it's unlikely that a CNC alone will be enough for anything, so there's a bunch of related tools and supplies needed. It's like saying "a $300 set of clubs isn't too much to have golf as a hobby" but forgetting that you need to pay for all kinds of others stuff, too.
    - matz1 6y ago
      yes, i wasn't implying 297/year is the total cost of "the hobby". thats why i compare it to tennis membership, which is also only the cost of part of the hobby.

scrooched_moose 6y ago

For anyone who has dealt with Autodesk in a professional setting in the last 2 decades, this was 100% expected. They are an awful company whose entire business model is "the first hit is free, kids!". I can get things like limiting cloud storage (if they actually offered offline storage). But removing .step export? That's just 100% "screw you, now we have your projects and you can't get them out".

mayoff 6y ago

Inflammatory title, and not the title of the linked article. As a 3D printing hobbyist who uses F360, I don't see these changes having a major effect on me or many of the people who post on r/3Dprinting and r/functionalprint. (I'm not sure they'll have any effect on me.)

mrkeen 6y ago

How have hobbyists historically afforded Autodesk software? I dabbled in 3ds Max back in the day, but I was never under the impression I could justify purchasing it.

sokoloff 6y ago

While I'm disappointed in the changes, I both disagree with the characterization of "almost useless" and with the editorializing that's inherent in choosing that title for this submission to HN. The changes are painful (especially the lack of STEP export), but that stops well short of "almost useless" IMO.

adammunich 6y ago
It really is almost useless, there's not really a way to get useful 3D models out anymore.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I've used it many dozens of times for 3D printed parts which I expect will continue to work just fine to export STL files. It wouldn't surprise me if there are more hobbyist users making STL files for 3D printed parts than all other hobbyist use cases combined. (If you add 2-and-a-half-D CAD/CAM [also still pretty well supported], I'd wager a large sum that it's still useful for more than half the current hobbyist user base.)
  - pbalau 6y ago
    I can go to "Tools -> Make" and the selected body will be sent to my makerboat desktop app. This means there is a reasonable easy way to add apps to F360 (since I doubt MakerBoat is so big for Autodesk to make a special thing for them), which means you can export in whatever way you want.

darth_avocado 6y ago

You paint as a hobby, you buy paint, canvass and brushes. You read as a hobby you buy books. You bike as a hobby you buy a bike. You use CAD as a hobby you pay for CAD. Not everything is cheap, some hobbies are expensive, others are not. Buying books is cheap, buying a bike is not. I'm tired of people talking about free software as their right. People who make the software also have families to feed.

ogre_codes 6y ago
I was struggling to get past this first comment where the poster says: > I have had various commercial, home-use and free licenses with Autodesk since about 1990. If you've been using a product for 30 years and never paid for it, it's really hard to complain. I'm not a big fan of Autodesk for various reasons, but if you are a hobbyist, there are affordable alternatives. If they need the more advanced features Autodesk offers versus competition, you can pay for them.
- XMPPwocky 6y ago
  I can't find that comment for context- wouldn't a commercial license be paid (and home-use might be, too, considering they split it out from "free")?
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    Sure. But he also mentions free licenses which are indeed "free". He also says in the next line "Are any other free users..." which means he's on a free license now.
Nullabillity 6y ago
All of those have incremental costs to reproduce. The variable cost for software is practically zero.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Yeah, because the people that wrote the software aren't worthy to be paid for their skills.

crispyambulance 6y ago

I've been using Fusion 360 for about a year for hobbyist projects. It's been intuitive, fresh, very capable and the learning curve was long-ish but not steep. A spacemouse makes it an absolute joy to work with once you get your motor skills adapted. ~ $300/year is not trivial, but it's more than reasonable if you're using it for "a lot" of stuff. I would say that 10+ projects in a year is using it a lot. CAM with FIVE-AXIS milling is a lot, needing to use the cloud for rendering is a lot. Simulation, generative design and custom extensions are a lot. If you're doing all of those things, you're definitely on the far edge of "hobbyist" and should be forking over some money.

pbalau 6y ago
True, I'm using it fairly often, but the only thing that affects me from that list is "Project storage is limited to 10 active and editable documents". And by that I mean I need to delete the crap I have there, I can survive with 1.

qppo 6y ago

Here's a question for the IP legal crowd If Autodesk is hiding a design I make using Fusion 360 behind a gate on their cloud, does that require I grant them a license to the IP represented by that design? Who owns the IP, if I create it, but they prevent me from accessing it? Similar question for a lot of tools that create IP and hide it behind a gate on the cloud. It seems legally shaky.

dade_ 6y ago

I figured it was a trap when I bought my 3D printer in 2012 and decided to invest the effort to learn FreeCAD. Free as in freedom, and I continue to donate to their project.

theincredulousk 6y ago

(disclaimer: I have only used this software for rock-bottom basic 3D printing) It seems to me the deeper features make for highly sophisticated and capable (read:valuable) engineering software. At the risk of getting pitchforked, is $25 a month ($300/yr) for an "advanced hobbyist" not ...reasonable? I mean an average cell-phone bill is 4x that. Of course it is always annoying to get into a subscription model when you only use something infrequently - can you activate it 1 month at a time? Otherwise, if someone is using it often, then 25 bucks a month seems to me a more-or-less a fair value, in the context of status-quo capitalism.

Ductapemaster 6y ago

I'm so confused about Autodesk's licensing now. I have an Eagle subscription at $100 a year and a number a months ago they bundled in F360 with it, which was a welcome change. But now, F360 alone is $300 a year (and they say it comes with a free Eagle subscription??). How are there two pricing models? Am I going to be surprised by a 300% cost increase when my subscription renews? Are they going to force me to subscribe to F360 to get Eagle? Thankfully I just renewed, so I won't have to worry about this for at least a year, but this is frustrating.

2Gkashmiri 6y ago

How does the open source and Foss ideology come into the whole "families to feed so they can demand extortion money and DRM and vendor lock in and platoform lock in ? If blender model can work for them, surely all software can be built on that and I would gladly pay for "maintenance". Monthly but not otherwise.

m0zg 6y ago

For 2D, LibreCAD is quite serviceable (and very AutoCAD-like). For 3D there's FreeCAD, but, IMO, while it is nominally quite capable, the UI is so obtuse and inconsistent that after a few hours with it, you'll just pay whatever Autodesk is asking you to pay. That's not to say F360 is great, but FreeCAD is unfortunately much worse. I really wanted to like it, since I don't like my work to be tied to proprietary software, but after digging through it for a week I was back to F360.

StillBored 6y ago

I'm a fusion360 user, mostly for simple 3d printed things. I had already stopped recommended it to people last year when they started messing with the hobby/startup license. Frankly, I would be perfectly willing to toss a couple hundred dollars at them if it were a boxed product that I "owned" and could reinstall in 10 years. But they don't offer that, its a rental model or nothing. After all, I paid for simply3d, despite there being a bunch of free slicers, because it works well and I can use it for an hour or so a year (because I use it in 5 min bursts) without fretting over continuous payment. In the end, I will probably give TurboCad another spin in a year or so when the next set of fusion360 feature removals happen. I used it a bit a few years ago and have that copy, and they continue to sell a "permanent" license version that is fairly reasonably priced. Plus, it looks like they have done a fair bit of additional work to make it work better for 3d. For the time being though, I will save off my drawings, and donate some $ to freecad https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Donate https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Donate to encourage them.

Marley_82 6y ago

I use Alibre - specifically Alibre Atom3D. It does everything I need it to do - it was $199 - I own my license. It has STEP, part modeling, assemblies, drawings, the whole 9. It's all parametric. The interface is simple, but it is still powerful. I imagine 99% of what most "hobby" people do can easily be done in that software.