Fusion 360 May Update

Fusion 360’s May update is out again, and a new month has brought with it a number of new improvements and fixes to the CAD package.

Measurements Are Front and Center

Measurement is critical for all designs, so why has it always been the case that users have to go searching for measurement tools hidden in a ribbon? In the May release of Fusion 360, measuring an edge, the distance between two faces, radii and more can be done with a few simple model selections. Rather than having to find a measurement query tool, any combination of selections will give users a measurement that appears in the bottom right-hand corner of the Fusion 360 environment.

Rendering Locally in the Background

Moving on to the graphics side, Fusion 360 has a new ability to render designs locally and in the background. With this new feature, users will have the ability to use the resources on their local machines in the same way that they’d use the cloud, making it possible to render and model simultaneously. Because of this resource tweak, work doesn’t have to stop in order to deliver images for a design review. They can be generated even as modelling iterations are still being cranked out by your drafters.

Graphics Get a Boost

Another major enhancement to Fusion 360 covers a wide range of graphic issues that have been plaguing the software. First off, Fusion’s Depth of Field (DoF) function has been improved so that once a camera has been zoomed or panned to a new position, the DoF location will remain in place. In the past, once a camera was moved, the DoF position would have to be reestablished.

Additionally, Zebra analysis of T-Splines used to display a hideous blue patchwork of nonsense that was confusing. That bug has been fixed, and now analysis of T-Splines can be completed with ease.

Importable Data Types Expand

Finally, Fusion 360’s “Import Data” function now supports SOLIDWORKS 2016, Inventor 2017, NX 10 and CATIA V5-6R2015 files—a vast expansion of the file types that can be used by Fusion 360. Additionally, Mac users can now insert OBJ files into a scene as meshes, making it easier to manipulate “dumb” geometry even if it was created in a separate program.

For much more information about Fusion 360’s May release, visit Autodesk’s Fusion 360 blog.