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.<p>This is their problem to solve, and they have chosen to do it this way.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Revision: May have spoken too soon Re: solidworks. <i>sigh</i> I gues if you are a great software engineer with some free time, have a look at FreeCAD. It needs some good help.
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.<p>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.<p>The problem is that after OnShape went full commercial, this is the only relatively inexpensive option with history-based parametric modeling.
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.
I would be so happy if Blender tackled parametric modeling like this.<p>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.<p>After that went poorly I'd just picked up Fusion 360 about a month ago and have been doing pretty well with that. Whoops.
Well, I guess I'm glad I didn't invest in that Fusion360 course that I had been eyeing.<p>$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.
I always though it was a cludgy, bloated piece of software and despite a few attempts to get into it, never really did.<p>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.<p>(And i was on acommercial license for a year or two, gifted by them in some promo as it may have been).<p>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.<p>I wonder how much Blender could be modded to achieve this?
For anyone who has dealt with Autodesk in a professional setting in the last 2 decades, this was 100% expected.<p>They are an awful company whose entire business model is "the first hit is free, kids!".<p>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".
Thread from yesterday: Changes to Fusion 360 for Personal Use <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24494653" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24494653</a>
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.<p>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)
Inflammatory title, and not the title of the linked article.<p>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 <i>any</i> effect on me.)
TechShop leaned pretty heavily on it. So did a local spinoff group designed to rise from the (local) ashes of TechShop.<p>I wonder what will take its place.
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?<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>For the time being though, I will save off my drawings, and donate some $ to freecad <a href="https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Donate" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Donate</a> to encourage them.
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.<p>The changes are painful (especially the lack of STEP export), but that stops well short of "almost useless" IMO.
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.<p>~ $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.
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.<p>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).<p>They have a decent tutorials page[0] here for getting started with the basics.<p>[0] <a href="https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Tutorials" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Tutorials</a>
So we have the cheaper alternatives of Adobe Photoshop which are Affinity Photo and Gimp.<p>How hard is to build the equivalent of "Affinity Photo" to Autodesk Fusion 360? Maybe this is a good startup idea.
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.
Here's a question for the IP legal crowd<p>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?<p>Similar question for a lot of tools that create IP and hide it behind a gate on the cloud. It seems legally shaky.
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.
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 ?<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
(disclaimer: I have only used this software for rock-bottom basic 3D printing)<p>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.<p>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.
For 2D, LibreCAD is quite serviceable (and very AutoCAD-like).<p>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.