There is mesh preview and integration with the other Autodesk 3D printing and mesh tools. You can wrap or match a t-spline to the mesh data, which gives you super-powerful design tools for editing meshes. They have a wealth of tools for dealing with OBJ and STL meshes. Speaking of megatrends, Fusion 360 covers the 3D Printing base admirably. In any event, the “Sculpt” facility in Fusion 360 uses the T-Splines technology. It’s not clear to me what that means for Rhino users going forward. While it looks like you can order T-Splines for Rhino from Autodesk, the T-Splines web site looks pretty dead. Just as Solidworks users of HSMWorks were nervous to see Autodesk acquire the company, users of T-Splines where nervous when Autodesk bought that company. T-Splines take all that and put it on steroids. I’ve tried it in that capacity to do a design for a custom rifle stock, for example. Rhino has a reputation for being the best tool to use when you need to design things with smooth flowing organic curves. But I also learned a bit about an addin for Rhino3D called T-Splines that my friend was wildly enthusiastic about. It proved to be a wonderful visit from which I learned a lot about working with carbon fiber. I was visiting a fellow Rhino3D user not that long ago to hear about his carbon fiber fighter plane wing tip project. ![]() You can access your files from any machine because they’re in the Cloud and you have the ability to collaborate on those files with others on your team. – Cloud Computing is another megatrend that’s coming up fast on the road ahead, and Fusion 360 offers a bevy of Cloud Collaboration features. The smart money has been on CAD that combines both approaches. ![]() But there are those times when the Parametric approach championed by Solidworks is more productive than Direct Modelling. I love Rhino3D for it’s quick and easy Direct Modelling approach and many have come to argue that it’s a much more productive CAD paradigm versus Parametric. – It offers both Direct Modelling and Parametric Modelling. The CAM package has all the right stuff on paper too: Suffice it to say that the potential ability to have access to HSM Works Professional level CAM for $300 a year seemed like a compelling offer and led me to jump on this Fusion 360 deal.īut HSMWorks and great CAM was not all the Fusion 360 promised. ![]() That’s competitive with the professional CAM market, but pretty pricey for anyone that won’t be using it daily to make their living. HSMWorks is an excellent CAM package, but the Premium version is $9995 and the Professional version is $7500. This prompted a lot of speculation about how well Autodesk would treat customers of rival CAD product Solidworks.įast forward to today and HSMWorks is still available for Solidworks, there is a version for users of Autodesk’s Inventor called “Inventor HSM”, and we get essential parts of HSMWorks built into Fusion 360 as well. The product was doing nicely and garnering a growing following until about 2 years ago when the user base got the shocking news that Autodesk had acquired HSMWorks in its entirety. It’s a slick clean sheet of paper approach that really cleans up the UI experience and that feels like a fresh and powerful approach to CAM. As it originally shipped, they integrated with SolidWorks, and this is the version I am most familiar with. The original HSMWorks is still available, and is intended to be integrated with a CAD package. ![]() If you’ve never tried HSMWorks, it’s a very neat package that I really like using. What attracted me to it was the promise of getting HSMWorks CAM in the full 3D version for $300 a year. That’s a substantial discount for what on paper looks like a very promising CADCAM package.įusion 360 bundles CAD and CAM together into a single package. I took advantage of the offer, and I was happy to see it clarified that the offer of subscription to the low-end version for $300 a year will get you their “Ultimate” version (normally $1200 a year) for as long as you pay the $300 a year subscription. I wanted to get back quickly with a mini-review of Fusion 360 since there is this special offer that will expire sometime soon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |