The BEST Fusion 360 Computer Settings & Specs!

hi folks fusion 360 let's talk about what computer you should buy or what you should look for in the computer specs let's talk about settings in fusion 360 including some hidden ones as well as in your overall Windows and computer settings that can help you get fusion to run at its best number one is what computer are you using for fusion 360 fusion 360 is great because is quite tolerant of lower powered computers laptops etc nevertheless the computer you're using is fundamental to the software the things that you want to pay attention to we've got broken out on this article at the time of recording this video there are things like having at least four gigs if not eight gigs or more of RAM having a dedicated graphics card that has at least two gigabytes of RAM having a solid-state hard drive in other words not a platter hard drive and only using one monitor not two monitors to help unburden your graphics card of having to handle multiple monitors these things can really help card here to the page that we keep up-to-date on both good options for computers to use as well as keeping up with the ever-changing minimum requirements and recommended computer specs including diving into some pretty technical things like clock speed and multi-core processors will use this v8 engine block as the sample today i just opened the file i've made a couple of changes and i know i've made changes because there's an asterisk next to the file name this is telling me I have unsaved changes now if I click Save two things will happen one it will save that file and upload the latest version to the cloud and it will update the rev in this case it would index up to v40 automatically that's fine but sometimes I just want to save because I don't want to risk losing some recent changes but I'm not really ready to save up a version to the cloud or use up the bandwidth especially at larger file sizes so hit ctrl shift s and it will save a local version to your computer but it won't upload it to the cloud and it won't index up your version this is still really helpful and if you happen to have your computer crash or fusion crash you'll be able to get that saved version back I'm a big fan of switching the visual style or the view display settings visual style they just added keyboard shortcuts which I'm a bigot and I really only used to shaded with visibles that you see here and wireframe but you see the shortcuts there control seven switches me into wireframe mode I can see through the model and control six switches me back into the solid view I'm on a decently powerful computer right now an HP Z 2 mini workstation plenty of RAM nevertheless with large fusion files you can have a problem simply with the visibility of the file especially as you zoom in one easy way to improve that is to right-click on the component and choose display detailed control fusion will default to an adaptive display control which means as you zoom in it'll calculate the model with more detail we can switch that to fixed leave it on low and this can really improve your performance and you can actually see it as we zoom in we can see tessellations of this circle but I don't really care about that I know that I sketch these as circles I can still pick the lines just fine and again it can really improve the speed with which you're able to do modeling sketching and camp selections this display detailed control setting is probably the best thing that you can do to improve your fusion 360 performance and quality of life especially if you're working on a slower computer or with a large complex fusion file on that note one of the keys to long-term stability within larger fusion model is not having circular dependencies or other things sort of break just like you see here we've got either warnings or errors within our CAD design tree a great way to stack the deck in your favor is to base things off of a stable geometry if I want to sketch a plane I am better off using the origin when possible because the origin and its axes are never goes anywhere I base a sketch off of a plane here and I happen to delete that pocket later you're going to create a problem here potentially going to tax the fusion solver this is important because many of the operations in fusion 360 require the solver to recompute your whole model behind the scenes one way you can get an idea for how healthy your model is go to modify compute all that's going to rebuild your full model and the time this takes tells you how quickly you able to go through and handle those calculations what we did here was pretty quick they showed up some warnings these are probably my own fall from deleted phases you don't see that option that means you're in direct modeling mode right click on this and click on this last option here to toggle into the mode I'm in here which is captured design history let's hop into your preferences click your name preferences there's some great things we can do here number one uncheck show default measure what this is doing is anytime I click on a piece of geometry it's giving me information about that sketch or face in this case it's telling me the length of it if I click on a face it's giving me the surface area this generally happens quite quickly and so it's not a problem but it is taxing on your computer and for me most of the time I'm using the I key to enter into the measure mode to do things like pick single points or even hold down control and measure distances between two planes so I don't care about this bottom right area as much especially on bigger models where it could be taxing your computer if you're totally new to fusion 360 head over to NYC CNC calm and under fusion 360 getting started we've got some videos on how to download it and our recommended base settings let's dive a little bit deeper here this fusion file not only has our ls3 engine block but it also has our hasti our 200 Y trunnion as well as the Raptor dovetail device if I were to activate just the engine you'll see that it shadows all of the other components that are no longer activated and while that can be helpful it's actually really taxing on your graphics card which has to calculate or render numerous transparent and semi-transparent surfaces you could just uncheck the visibility or under your preferences design turn off active component visibility and you'll no longer have a differentiated look to other preferences that I have modified under design I have turned off auto look at sketch I've turned off auto project geometry on active sketch plane we turn on auto look at sketch auto look at sketch automatically moves the model when you start sketching on a plane so if I want to put a circle on this face right here let's see for circle select a face notice it moves and Orient's a model to me this can be very disoriented especially in larger complex or multi-component assemblies I would rather leave that setting off I'll see for circle I'll pick my sketch I'll start sketching it and if I need to look at that face straight on I can choose look at and pick that face and control that myself similarly if we turn on auto project geometry an active sketch plane what happens is if I hit C for circle and I click on this face it is automatically projected behind the scenes everything on that face I selected I strongly dislike that let's undo that turn that feature off C for circle pick my face and if I need to reference a certain edge I'll hit P for project I'll click the edge that I need click OK I haven't created extra and unnecessary sketched geometry in my model next under preferences choose graphics selection display style could be set to simple transparency effect can be set to better performance check the box to limit effects during navigation to maintain framerate and then there's minimum frame rate during navigation frames per second the higher this number is the better off your computer is going to work because it's going to be willing to drop things if it drops below that frame rate so if we have this at 60 and we start to navigate around it will recognize it can't keep up you know we'll go ahead and drop things that we don't care about like the shadows here that disappear if we had this at 2 it's going to tax your graphics processor because it's going to maintain the visibility transparency shadows etc as we orbit around usually I don't care about details like that when I'm orbiting or navigating and obviously you can check limit effects when graphics memory is low speaking of graphics it looks like I'm using Windows 95 I'm not what I have done is going to control panel choose performance information and tools adjust visual effects and I have turned off all of these unnecessary visual effects in windows they're absolutely pointless in my opinion and all they do is Rob your graphics card of otherwise useful ability I did leave thumbnails on that way I can view pictures and windows folders and I have smooth edges of screen thoughts because my monitor doesn't show fonts very well at least on this particular computer unless I have that checked one more hidden but very valuable graphics option is choose the help down arrow support and diagnostics graphics diagnostic and choose limit effects to optimize performance click close I'd mentioned earlier about not using dual monitors and being conscious of your windows resolution what you don't want to do is have an incredibly high resolution even worse is folks that run a really high resolution the icons become really small so then they scale those icons up I'm running a 24 inch monitor and I leave it at 1920 by 1080 it's perfectly fine so as a general rule stay away from things like 4k monitors or 4k settings and likewise I am running two monitors I haven't had a problem with it but just keep in mind that graphics processor has to split its resources now between those two monitors let's wrap up with some cam tips I just opened this file again and I had to spend a few minutes recomputing everything so that you aren't watching the video with a bunch of red uncomputable and I don't want have to right-click and generate everything when I want to open this file and show somebody a demonstration so go ahead select these operations right click and choose protect it will put a padlock next to it and you'll no longer have to recompute them even when you've saved and opened the file on it the same or different computer some adaptive operations can take a really long time to compute that compute time is driven not only by the underlying geometry what your tolerance setting is and whether you've got things checked like both ways if you're not sure the operation is computing make sure you leave the operation expanded and you can watch this file size sometimes it appears to be stuck and you don't see the percentage sign updating but you can see the kilobyte of file size growing that tells you it's still working this 3d adaptive on the mount hood is a great example i'm regenerating this tool path with a smaller tolerance in both ways adaptive it's probably going to take quite a while and the 49.9% can be a little bit frustrating because we don't always see that number changing even though the file size which will show up here momentarily and replace the word generating that is helpful worst case choose manage task manager and you're actually able to see a much greater detail of what's going on and in the case where you've got multiple operations you can even take it a step further with things like concurrency distribute you can and even to a path compute priority let's say that tool path has done generating it took 14 minutes I really don't want to regenerate it but you wanted to run it with tool 6 instead of tool for hop into your tool library choose your mesh on to number 4 right-click renumber tools I'll put it in as school number 6 click OK click close it change the t6 without requiring a regeneration of the tool path very handy and finally let's say you want to better understand what's happening with this tool path and the code that it's going to output instead of going to simulate like you normally do right click on the operation and choose view tool path what we get is a line by line breakdown with XYZ coordinate positions what type of move it is the feed rate and the RPM we can click on this first line and use your arrow keys to index through this simulation to get a very good idea of understanding how is it splitting up the point of your tool path where is it doing rapid feed raise where is it cutting and so forth not directly related to the speed of this underlying software but nevertheless a very helpful tool when it comes to understanding just exactly how is the cam tool path being generated and what's your machine going to do at certain locations so folks hope you learned something hope you enjoyed again check out the articles over on NYC C&C on both learning using 360 as well as what computer to pick up take care see you soon [Music]

Channel: NYC CNC

Views: 70,551

Keywords: tormach, fusion 360, how to, cnc, machine shop, nyc cnc, DIY, machining, milling, CAD, cnc machining, cnc milling, increase computer performance, preferences, CAM, tips, tricks, learn, education

Id: yFULbrb89RI

Length: 13min 38sec (818 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 17 2019