Changes to Fusion 360 Personal License - STEP is BACK & My Thoughts

there have been a lot of stress in the fusion 360 community over the changes coming in personal hobbyist license some starting october 1st and some taking into effect in january next year i think there have been a lot of confusion and misunderstandings and autodesk definitely need to take some of the blame for how this was communicated out fusion 360 is still free i'm going to share an update with you since the news broke a couple of weeks ago in my opinion fusion 360 is still the best option for you to use on your personal projects to be clear this is my own youtube channel i have never monetized the channel but means that i never made any money or gotten any cut from the content that i've created here or the relationship that you and i have but i do want to be clear that i am employed at autodesk i am affiliated and part of the team for fusion 360. i wanted to make this video on my terms my words and my thoughts i want to cover three things in this video one i want to make sure that all the information gets out there two i want to highlight what is really changing and three in the end i'll give you my opinion i know many of you have spent hours watching my videos thank you and you might have heard me refer to myself as a busboy now because some people are watching this from around the world let me just explain in the u.s a boss boy is normally a young college kid who is cleaning off dirty dishes and cleaning tables at a restaurant when the guest leaves a boss boy is like the lowest paid person in a restaurant now you wouldn't go to a boss boy and ask them why they served brussels sprouts instead of asparagus with the salmon for that you would ask the chef what you're about to see is a call i had with steve hoover steve hooper is the vp and general manager of fusion360 he is the master chef thank you so much for uh for taking the time to uh to do this quick call not at all it's a pleasure good to talk to you so i just want to make clear for anybody who's watching this that you and i have known each other for about six years um we have been in massive meetings together we have had dinner together we have had coffee at pier 9 chit-chatting about fusion 360 in the future and how everything is going and i don't know if it's mutual but if you showed up at my front door at nine o'clock at night i would let you sleep on my couch nice yes it's mutual yeah but i'm gonna jump right in and steve why did we make these changes to uh to the personal licenses for fusion 360. so yeah i mean the reason we made the changes is because and this comes from a really good place trust me i am we're super passionate about the maker and hobbyist communities and so we needed a way to make sure that we were able to stand behind the personal entitlement long into the future we wanted to protect it as much as we can now of course we're a commercial business so we have to make sure that we're able to prevent misuse of that personal entitlement as much as possible so all these changes um they were all done with good intent and i know that might be difficult for some people to appreciate and some people will be cynical and say that you know we've done these changes to somehow try and manipulate the community but i i wish people would genuinely believe me when i say it was done from a good point of view it was done with good intent to ensure that we could protect our commitment to that personal entitlement along into the future and ensure that it just wasn't being misused because the more commercially successful fusion is the more we can afford to invest in our other areas of interest which are in the maker and hobbyist communities and then in the educational community as well same same thing goes for the educational license you see we just needed to make sure that in both cases those entitlement types are being genuinely used for what they were designed to be used for and not being abused in the commercial environment because if they undermine the commercial success of fusion it puts all those entitlements in jeopardy so our job is to just make sure that we can continue to commit to providing those design and manufacturing capabilities to people who want to use them in their spare time as a hobby freely and and so that's why we made the changes and it makes sense right like you want to you want to create a piece of software that you can make money off because it's a business we got to make money um but at the same time you also want to have a personal addition that somebody's working on their personal projects at home either if it is they got to build their deck or if they got a have a small cnc or a 3d printer tinkering with somehow there needs to be some kind of a separation in there to be able to get somebody who needs to use a commercial license to actually go and use that right yeah yeah for sure and to be clear i mean it's mutually beneficial that's always been our belief and i hope that's why people can trust me when i say this because there is a benefit to the general fusion community the goodness that makers and hobbyists bring to our online forums in terms of like the videos that you share freely with people they help educate everybody the community support helps to encourage usage and adoption and it and it stimulates general awareness of fusion so there is a benefit to the fusion business um so there's definitely a good quick pro quo between the two communities and that's why we're absolutely committed to it there's no way that we would want to do something that you know in any way hindered that community so our goal with the the limitations that we put in place was to ensure that we could protect as much of the functional usage that people enjoy today as possible while just preventing misuse of that free entitlement in the commercial communities so that was basically why we made the changes and we felt that things like the active document limitation i i think when people understand that fully they'll realize that for a genuine hobbyist or maker that isn't actually restrictive at all it should genuinely enable anyone in that community to carry on doing the work that they're doing today quite freely without any you know feeling of restriction for a commercial user on the other hand i think it probably would create a problem and that and that's intentional because that entitlement type is specifically not designed for them and so we felt that we reached a pretty good balance there but what i will say is i think as an organization and certainly personally i made a mistake by not ensuring that that was adequately communicated so for example i saw a lot of misinterpretation in our description of the active document limitation and that was totally awful i should have been better at ensuring that we as a team were communicating what that limitation would look like and feel like from a user experience perspective so one thing i want to follow up on with the team is to record a few videos so that people can actually um see it in action for themselves because i think when they see that they'll realize that as a maker or a hobbyist it's really not that restrictive because i think at the moment the description that we put together although well intended leaves some openness to interpretation and i think as a result people have imagined the worst case scenario and it really isn't that um so yeah that that's one thing i think we could have done better and it's something it will follow up on in terms of communication yeah and i think it's also i mean when you see the communication that came out you see the tables it's it's very easy to jump to the worst case scenario very quickly um where you know if you are a professional i'm comparing when i used to work at ritlam and you know programming cnc machines like you're chasing you know if you can shave off 10 minutes of making a part you know that's money in your pocket um and you need to you need you need that 10 minutes so you get you can you can eat where as a hobbyist or working on a personal project it's a little bit more lenient that if you have to you know if the process gets slowed down a little bit now it can't be any hindering so you can't maybe do something if it's if it's slowed down a little bit you know that's i'll probably just go over and get a cup of coffee and and you know be happy with that yeah it makes a lot of sense you know on the flip side though when there's good feedback and i know some people um we're cynical and they you know understandably they feel we're a big corporate organization and that we'll hide behind the wall and not want to listen to feedback and trust me when i say this we listen to feedback everywhere so everyone on our team trawls through the facebook forums through the online forums through the autodesk community forums we listen to as much as we can when we wake up in the morning trust me we go through those threads last thing in the evening we go through those threads we don't always like comment straight away because a lot of the time we're trying to just digest the information and also there's some quantification that needs to happen right so you need to understand when we make a change like that there's always going to be some negative impact to a degree our job is to minimize that to make it as as infinitesimally small as possible but in some cases we get it wrong right so one area that i feel that we've adjusted our perspective on there having listened to the feedback is around step so one thing that we hadn't anticipated when we were mapping out some of the limitations that we wanted to employ we just hadn't fully understood the amount of community traction there were in forums like thingiverse for example and with makers and hobbyists exchanging models and using step as the medium to do that exchange in those environments so we didn't want to jump to a conclusion so we listened to a lot of the feedback and we quantified it so we have some tools that allow us to look at online social communities and quantify the amount of sentiment around a particular topic we can also look at data so we can see like how many step imports exports are going on and it became quickly clear to us that that was one area that we probably needed to rethink so we will ensure that we keep step in the client for fusion 360 to ensure that personal users can continue to export step so that was one thing that i did want to emphasize that we do listen and if there is genuine feedback of course you know everyone's going to have feedback on every decision and we can't please all the people all the time but when there's a body of evidence and there's hard data that we can look at that supports some of that feedback then we genuinely do want to do the right thing and we'll listen to the feedback and we'll admit we got it wrong i got it wrong and we'll um we'll make that change that amendment to look after that community because like i said the last thing we wanted to do was penalize this group of users the intent behind these decisions was to do quite the reverse it was to protect the personal edition entitlement type sorry and to make sure that we could continue to fund it well into the future so i don't want anyone worrying that it's going away or this is a gradual erosion of the capabilities and that it'll disappear it's quite the opposite we wanted to make sure that we consolidated the changes in one in one hit and that we were able to communicate that clearly and concisely and in a couple of cases i think we got it wrong so we need to reflect on that amend the decisions and communicate it appropriately you know another area i did see again just in terms of how we communicate we said that the personal edition wouldn't be able to use extensions which to us we felt that that language was um self-explanatory which again was a mistake to us extensions are a form of functionality that users can pay to turn on so we have like a machining extension and an additive manufacturing extension so these are very deep levels of functionality for specialist personas in the commercial community now extensions is a term that we use to describe those units of functionality that you can turn on selectively but we hadn't appreciated that it might be misinterpreted as things like python scripts or add-ins that you get from the app store so of course there'll be no limitations to those but unfortunately that use of language wasn't clear to people so again i'd apologize for that we should have thought about that more deeply sometimes it's you know these are avoidable mistakes so i hope we're able to clarify it here in your video and of course we'll do a better job of communicating in the future and i also want to just echo to anybody who's watching here so no doubt autodesk is a big car big company a big corporation um but knowing and i know a lot of the people who is building this software and interacting and making this happen and it's genuine good people who is trying to do great work and and deliver a great product and the fact that we have this personal license that makes everybody being able to go out and and model things up and not only model things up in 3d be able to 3d print it but also still being able to use cnc and other functions within rendering and other functions in there i i think it's it's good to hear from you and i appreciate that that you know this is still the intention yeah i mean i think a lot of this comes down to trust and it's difficult to trust a large corporate organization um because i think if there's trust there amongst the community if there's a mistake that's made and it's a genuine mistake people will trust that we'll get it right you know that we'll amend it and um i think we've got to do more to work on that with the community because you know i think like i said right the beginning all of these changes were intended with you know good intentions i should say the whole point of these changes was to protect that investment and to ensure that those users could carry on enjoying that technology and um you know i think we just got to do a better job at that communication but that really is the goal that's our ultimate objective is to make sure we stand behind that personal entitlement just like we do with the educational entitlement and the commercial entitlement and it's just making sure we get the balance right between them so that it's a viable business that we can continue to support that technology and that each of those communities continues to benefit from it equally thank you so much steve i appreciate it thank you for your time not a problem last pleasure speaking to you all right take care all right bye that was the part one of this video to make sure that you get the information part number two is that we're gonna go over what is really changing and the best resource to learn about the new step update and these different changes is to go to the fusion 360 blog here my good friend and colleague ching wrote a blog post that i have linked down in the description so let's just take a quick look at what the different items are scrolling down the page you will find this table now to the left you can see what is in fusion today and on the right you can see what is coming with these new changes now the first item is design and 3d modeling so everything's going to stay as they have been when it comes to sketching extrusion surface modeling sculpting all the standard mechanical cad type of environments data management stays the same and the same goes for 3d printing unlimited project storage have caused some confusion going forward you can have 10 active edible documents and an unlimited amount of archived documents so there's no limit to how many files you can have in fusion 360 it comes down to how you interact with them so let's say that you open up a assembly that has 50 or 75 components in it that assembly will still act and behave the way that you would expect it comes down to when you start editing the individual components within that assembly so you can have 10 active documents and if one of the components you want to edit is not in that queue of 10 active you'll just have to archive one or more of those active documents and then you can make the component you want to edit active so just a little bit of friction but nothing that should stop anybody to get that job done export file types also got some attention and you just heard from hooper that step has been added back in there i want to highlight that this was only export import was never a problem so you could still bring in mcmaster car or go to grab cat and bring in a step fire from there now from export you can of course export out stls objs and now also step but i also want to include that there's also files like inventor files can be exported that can be opened up by most other cad systems for manufacturing there is no multi-axis milling what i would call advanced 4-axis and 5-axis probing automated tool chains and rapid feed about the two last items automatic tool chains and rapid feed you heard from hooper that this was to kind of creating a difference between the commercial license and the personal license but you can still post out your code you can open that code up in a text editor and you can add your mo6 for the automatic tool change you can change some g01s to g00 for your rapid feeds for documentation 2d drawings it's single sheet and print only the biggest thing here i think is that we removed that you can print directly to a pdf now i don't want to give you all the tricks but you can go out and download a free pdf driver and then you can still print your your fusion 360 2d drawing to a pdf but again it's about adding a little bit of friction and separation between the commercial and the personal license rendering is local only and that just means that you couldn't offload it all to the cloud and utilize the powers of the cloud while you can get more work done locally at your machine again this should really not affect anybody on a personal license next you will see in the table we have simulation and that is not going to be available in a personal license going forward i want to highlight that this does not mean the simulation in cam where you can simulate your tool path that is still available we are talking about fea talking about doing static stress on non-linear studies that is now only available in the commercial license generative design is not available and then you heard hubert talking a little bit about the extensions so this was something that i got a few emails about so we were a little bit confusing there about what we call extensions compared to what is called add-ons so extensions is the advanced manufacturing and high-level kind of tool path and other functions the add-ins for you to for example use gears or other things that is still available still for you to use so extensions really just to talk about raising the level of some of the capabilities within fusion collaboration is staying on a basic access and the same with electronics now to the last item of this video my opinion and this is where i'm going to flash that this is my opinion not my wife not my kids and not otter that's my employer i know many of you have spent hours on learning fusion 360. like i said earlier fusion 360 is still completely free and in my opinion totally functional for you to do your personal projects rest assured that the time that you've spent on learning fusion 360 is not wasted the models that you have created are yours you own them and you can download them to a hard drive if you like you can still have fun doing your projects and using fusion 360. if you feel that these changes are too much of a roadblock maybe you should consider upgrading to a standard fusion 360 license with all the builds and results as in addition to the hundreds or perhaps thousands that you have spent on machines tooling and 3d printers i know that some of you who are watching this video have decided to explore other options i totally respect that you need to do what is best for you i want to thank you for all the support you've given me over the years and i hope that one day you and i can meet have a chat and drink a beer i will read all the comments to this video but i will not respond it's too difficult for me to manage to respond clarify and then go back and forth but you can email me if you email me vialashchristensen.org forward slash contact me i will respond to you link in the description you

Channel: Lars Christensen

Views: 72,262

Keywords: Autodesk Fusoin 360

Id: r7U5Pky6EIo

Length: 22min 16sec (1336 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Elbarfo]

No matter how much they backpedal, this will always remain true about Autodesk: They will eventually alter the deal.

[u/MyTagforHalo2]

Rapids and ATC's are still disabled for the free version, but can be edited into the g-code in post. (I have no ATC experience, but I'd imagine it's probably a lot safer to avoid manual edits)

Step file exporting is here to stay (previously removed)

Clarification on the 10 file limit to explain that assemblies will work as they always have, but you can only have 10 parts readily editable at any given moment. Presuming that you just have to shut them each on and off.

4+ axis users are still pretty much being shoe horned into the paid versions.

Generally speaking, I think for most people, it's still a serviceable program. You will have to take the time to edit your g-code for rapids (I'm sure someone will make a script at some point for post process.) This is likely just meant to be an inconvenience that compounds with multiple machines and situations where someone forgetting to change the g-code rapids isn't worth the lost time compared to the monthly cost.

I can't say I'm happy that they did any of it at all, but I have no doubt that companies were abusing the free version. With clarification in place I can't really be upset about the changes either. At the end of the day, it's a really powerful piece of software that we have access to for free, but it's development (and existence) is funded by their paid licenses. I can't blame them for trying to get people to pay for it that (statistically) should be. I kind of feel bad for pocketnc users and those of you with 4th axis upgrades more than anything else. That limitation is one of the few things that straight up can't be worked around.

[u/Urgon_Cobol]

If anyone thinks Autodesk won't try something new to force free version users to pay, please contact me, as I have a bridge and a tower for sale...

I don't trust them, I don't trust SaaS companies in general. I'll get all my parts from F360 exported and then I'll remove it completely and learn to use FreeCAD...

Autodesk did it once before at least. They bought Eagle (software for designing circuits and PCBs) and turned free version of it into subscription-based, expensive app. Then they integrated it with Fusion360 and removed stand-alone version. Eagle was used by electronics hobbyists for the past 15-20 years, and Autodesk tried to get them to pay. Now most of them migrated to KiCAD and other, alternative software...

Autodesk holds users' data hostage. They are terrorists - we shouldn't negotiate with them...

[u/CGUERIN101]

I switched to DesignSpark, easier and works great

[u/SCphotog]

I hadn't really even gotten started with Fusion... I just bought a CNC kit and was looking forward to learning... I had begun watching tutorials and just mucking around with the program.

Glad I got the news before I had spent considerable time invested.

Now I can freely move to DesignSpark, FreeCAD or whatever other alternative, and let AutoDesk's products, proverbially rot on the shelf.

This kind of behavior... and then backpedaling (makes it worse) is a pretty obvious red blinking honking sign that these people are not who you/I want to support.

[u/zmaile]

The .step export being removed was pretty anticompetitive; I wonder if Autodesk got some words spoken to them by departments such as Australia's ACCC or something equivalent in the EU.

At least now the product can be used on it's merits, and moved away from at a user's whim instead of being locked in. Though I've already moved into a combination of FreeCAD (which does parametric modelling and CAM) and Solid Edge (parametric, no CAM, but works in a windows VM without internet, and the community licence doesn't expire making it the most reliable free-premium CAD software).

[u/topsecreteltee]

Of course they/he thinks F360 is the best option, he has a vested interest. Also, Solidworks Student Edition is available for $100 for anybody with a .edu email account.

[u/s_0_s_z]

Autodesk has always been a shit company, so the fact that they've pulled this crap is totally per their standard operating procedure. The fact that they allowed the previously free version be more feature rich was them simply trying to eliminate competition and discourage other people to develop their own solution.

[u/Benzy2]

Having the .step export will keep this my design program. If I need CAM with the extra features that’s fine, I’ll use a different CAM package. But letting me export is all I’ll need for my home use as well as for any early business options I’d need.

I still think that the people complaining are unjustified. I get being disappointed (and I am too) that features are being cut out. But I haven’t given them a dime for the software and don’t plan to in the near future. For $0 I’ve not seen a better program available. It’s hard for me to complain too loud about something someone is giving me. Plus, an .edu email is pretty easy to get without taking classes and the startup option seems doable too.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a headache and I’d rather they don’t make any of these changes...but I also see them wanting to make some money on their work just like we all would like to do. I mean none of us are distributing our own freeware CAD/CAM software to fix the shortcomings of the market.