What is Fusion 360? - Fusion 360 Tutorial

- Now, you're already watching this video. So clearly you're interested in Fusion 360 but before we begin, let's back up and talk about the software a little more generally. So we can see here on Autodesk's website that it is an integrated CAD, CAM, and CAE software solution. So that stands for computer aided design, manufacturing and engineering. And it's somewhat rare to get all three of those in the same software package. So that's one of the big benefits of fusion. There's two ways to get ahold of the software. And one is to subscribe sort of gone are the days of course where you could just expect to download software and have it forever. Fusion operates on this sort of subscription model. So if you're going to pay for it and use it in industry or business or something, as of this recording the software costs about $500 per year. Now, the last time I recorded this course a couple of years ago, these terms were very different. And so this can really change at any time and it's sort of the blessing and the curse of cloud software. So the software is going to update itself constantly. It is constantly going to have new features that roll out but that means that the graphic interface will change and that your cost might change year to year if you're factoring that into your business. Now it's also possible to get a free trial. And there's a lot of ways to do that. You can see here there are a couple different flavors of free trial. If you're using it personally you can get a one-year subscription. Commercial users only get a 30 day trial but they also get these 300 cloud credits. So in addition to paying for access to the software we're paying for computer operations that take place not on our computer, but off in the cloud. So for example, if you're doing renderings, you know things that require a lot of computation that work actually gets off loaded onto fusion servers and offloading that work costs credits. It gets a little complicated. And then for educational users like myself I'm a college professor. I can get up to this three-year subscription. Now there's another wrinkle in here too. So if we take a look here, this is a page that talks about Fusion's use with a hobbyists, right? So there's a lot of people in the so-called maker community that once a muscular program like fusion, but they're either making very little money or no money at all. So you can see here, they have a special license for individuals with noncommercial personal design projects or individuals doing home-based non-commercial manufacturing and fabrication. And there's a lot of details there as well. So you have to be working outside your primary area of employment engaged in hobby businesses and there's fine print and on and on. So (laughs) if you plan on using this in a commercial industrial setting, you probably want to go for the straightforward subscription, but if you're like me and you're sort of a funky maker and this isn't where your primary income is coming from for the moment, at least fusion is still relatively free. So in addition to this being a design, manufacturing and engineering tool, there's not really an acronym for it. But another thing that's important to know about fusion is how it facilitates collaboration. So there's also a large community that's participating in for example, posting designs for free. So I can see here in the gallery a bunch of different designs to check out. If I say go-to gallery, I could, for example, do a search. Here's a search as leftover when I was playing around before for the Ardwino, which is a little circuit board that I use in a lot of my projects. And for example, I might often need to know the dimensions of an Arduino so I can build a case for it or something like that. So I'll pick one of these that looks good, click through it. I can see how many people have looked at it how many people have liked it and so on. So how likely it is to be accurate. And I can go ahead and download those models. Let's head back to the top of that community page as well. We can see down in here, there's forums on different topic areas, blogs, and so forth. And then this is a cool one down here to help shape fusion three 60 by requesting a feature. Right? So if I click on request a feature, I can see in here that people from the community might say, you know in every other software package when I use the right mouse button that does X and, you know would fusion please consider doing that too? Or would you please add this command or another? And in some cases the developers write back and they say, agreed, yeah we'll go ahead and add that feature. So that often requires that a number of people vote on and request that feature and so forth. But that's one of the benefits of this cloud based software being able to access the developers directly. Whereas the downside might be that unlike the traditional model, where you buy your software and you're done in this case, you are subscribing to it for as long as you'd like to use it.