Typical Autodesk at work. First lure everyone and make the competition disappear as you can't beat free. Now that everyone is used to this program and the competition is behind because they didn't had a massive development budget, they can start to charge the insane prices
this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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Hmmm… that page doesn’t mention the free “personal use” license for hobbyists.
https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/personal
^ This page still exists, and doesn’t mention it is going away, so maybe there is still hope.
The free personal portion was nerfed recently with only a limited of active designs available and other functions blocked or paywalled.
It limits you to 10 editable things at once and I think caps the number of components you can have. I haven't found either of these very restrictive to my use cases as a home user/hobbiest. I hope the personal portion isn't going away, will have to deal with migrating everything and learning new workflows 😭
10 project limit is in F360 for years now. Also who cares when you can save/open local files?
You can? How? I’ve fumbled around looking for this but always get the “you’re not connected to the internet”.
You can click export and save F3D file locally. Then you can delete it from the cloud and open a different file from your PC. I have dozens of the designs saved locally.
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It works great for me. You push one button to make something read-only or not. There are very few functions that I care about that are blocked. I use it for design and even CAM on a CNC router.
And that probably won't be the end.
Very happy (and after 2 years usage still extremely unskilled) with FreeCad.
FreeCAD is pretty much useless, it still doesn't have basic modelling features like fillets, chamfers, etc.
That's not true. FreeCAD can do those things just fine. In fact, I have been able to do every single thing in FreeCAD that I used to do in Fusion360. There is a learning curve, but FreeCAD is extremely capable.
The problem with FreeCAD is that the UI is abysmal. There is tons of duplicate functionality in different benches, but if you start in one you might discover that it doesn’t have what you need and have to start over in another.
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This isn't true? Fillets and chamfers are available in the PartDesign workbench.
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Is free as a good enough replacement? I like fusion for the sculpting mode as well. I would rather go to an open source replacement though
Freecad sucks. I use it exclusively and it sucks.
But it's the only foss option and the only Linux option.
It's the reason I jumped on a cheap solidworks license, was fully intending to use it as my primary cad package but I just found it kinda clunky. To be super fair, I recall using it years ago and it's come a long way and I run it on my lab machine because Linux, but even not touching cad programs for almost a decade solidworks was just way easier to come back to.
Nah freecad still sucks. Change anything deeper and nothing recomputes correctly.
This is a result of the topological naming problem. FreeCAD currently doesn't handle this well at all. There's been a lot of work on this front though - you can use realthunder's fork which should be a lot better in this regard. Alternatively, you can avoid creating features directly on top of other features, and instead make planes and reference them exclusively.
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Not sure about sculpting, but in terms of sketching I find it good but flawed.
Getting to grips with sketching and how you need to complete shapes, and using support lines is a learning curve.
However I find it quite rewarding and worth the time to learn.
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Ouch, makes me glad I stuck to open source options even if they had issues.
My wife and I share a $1k Rhino license. Not so cheap but it is a perpetual license.
I don’t fuck with Autodesk, Adobe or ESRI.
Obligatory: Fuck Adobe
What's rhino?
CAD software which also has a pretty neat parametric design extension called Grasshopper.
Pretty sure they have a demo version if you’re really curious.
I used to work for a metal 3D printing company that used it as the primary CAD software.
I dream about FOSS CAD software at same level as commercial solutions. Using pirated software in meantime 😉
Inb4 "FrEeCaD eXiStS"
Yes, Freecad exists. I may not be an expert, but I do this (drafting and design) for a living, and freecad is terrible. I can get more done in Solidworks, despite it crashing, than I can in freecad in the same amount of time.
Entirely fair! I think FreeCAD is still fine for hobbyists like myself though. It does take quite a bit of getting used to (I came from Fusion360 and Inventor first) since it operates somewhat differently, but it's good that we have at least one option.
Hopefully it'll see more development and become substantially more viable in the future.
Thankfully I'm in a position where I can use SW for limited CAD tomfoolery, just so long as I'm not making models/drawings for another company or something.
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If you know how to program, build123d is a FOSS option that isn't FreeCAD! You can create objects directly from Python code, including fillets and chamfers! I've been playing around with it a lot and while there's definitely a learning curve, it's pretty powerful! There's a VS Code addon that allows you to visualize what you're working on and visually debug as well. I can do a lot of things I couldn't do in OpenSCAD (which is another easier code cad option).
As someone who has working in CAD for 15 years I can tell you that most users don't want to program 3D models. All of the top CAD packages are graphical for a reason. We need to build something to be up to par and FreeCAD is also not it.
It sounds cool but the last thing I want to do when designing stuff is to program anything.
Ouch!
I like OpenSCAD. I was interested in your solution until I found an example. It's way too verbose for me. OpenSCAD has its flaws, but it's simple.
OpenSCAD is definitely easier, and I still like it too. I started learning build123d because I wanted fillets and splines, and because you can reference the properties of an existing object (like height) when making another object. Those have always been big drawbacks of openscad for me.
I've moved away from free personal Fusion360 to OnShape and it suits my needs just fine. The free tier makes all my models public but I don't mind, and it runs much more smoothly in my browser than Fusion ever did on my desktop.
It's so buggy that I really don't see myself ever paying for it.
Same here. It still doesn’t feel optimized. Sure it works after restarting it 3 times.
Okay so Fusion360 money grab, FreeCAD bad alternative, what’s left (legitimate question)???
I dunno why you say FreeCAD is bad. When I got my 3d printer I picked it because I knew fusion would rug pull eventually, and fusion doesn't run on Linux without jumping through a bunch of hoops.
It takes a bit to learn, just like any app. But it's just as powerful. I really like the spreadsheet usage in FreeCAD to keep all my dimensions in one place.
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There's a few permanent license alternatives that I've heard recently. I've been researching Plasticity and Alibre Atom3D
FreeCAD definitely does look like a good option. I followed a tutorial the other day and was able to do some cool stuff with it. Autodesk can definitely go to hell but if I find FreeCAD is suitable for the hobby stuff I do, then I'm using it.
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Ugh
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