Quick correction - Inventor can do a surface offset. It's just well hidden as a toggle inside another command on the solid modelling panel instead of being a specificly named surface tool. So scratch that one off.
Using Inventor at work and Fusion at home there's one thing that stands out to me. I can barely remember Fusion ever crashing on me, whilst Inventor on the other hand...
Hard to quantify that one! Fusion does smash out on me a few times but normally I'm trying bizarre things which it probably doesn't expect people to be doing!
Yeah, I've been working with Fusion for about 2 years, AutoCAD for 15 years before that, and just finished a course in school on Solidworks. I was so used to AutoCAD crashing on me, on some releases multiple times a day, and freezing up when doing simple things like a solid fillet. Then I switched to Fusion and as you say, I cant even remember a single time Fusion has actually crashed on me! I've had it take tens of minutes to calculate some intricate toolpaths, and I've had one service outage that affected me, for about 2 hours. I cant remember ever loosing any work due to a malfunction in Fusion :) Even with the potential service outages, I've lost many, many times more working hours due to AutoCAD crashing and loosing work or even corrupting files (and yes, Autocad does have an autosave function since many years). Then I got into Solidworks, and within in like a week I had more crashes and similar with SW than I've had with Fusion in 2 years :P In many way, Solidworks reminds me of AutoCAD, but the switch from Fusion to Solidworks has been surprisingly painless. I do intend to try out Inventor now that I have Educational licenses from Autodesk, and really test it out and see which software I'll go with for my next company :)
The absolute number one thing I miss from Fusion when using Inventor is the ease in toggling visibility of sketches/bodies/components that is in Fusion.
The Lagoa render engine in Fusion 360 does not support caustics. The implementation of dielectrics is in fact pretty simplistic. I'd be happy to explain the benefits of the base feature.
Niel, again amazing video! Thanks for bringing up these topics. Rendering in Inventor is a JOKE. I have to always used third party programs. I might try Fusion for my next render. Keep a hard work.
Uhhhh I've been doing surface offset in Inventor for like 10+ years. It's the "Thicken / Offset" button. You just have to hit the Surface mode button and instead of thickening the solid it will offset the face as a surface. I use it to make ribs on plastic parts before they had the "rib" tool.
It makes you wonder just how compartmentalized Fusion and Inventor development are within Autodesk. I suspect hugely but was hoping for not at all when I first saw Fusion as a long time Inventor user. Some suggested that Fusion would be the new more modern face of Inventor. So far not the case. I use both and have not been able to settle on just one. Pain in the arse! BTW, I love that you retro insert updates in your videos as news flashes. I wish more youtubers did this.
Throws a spanner in the renewal coming up of either to stay with fusion and nesting or go to inventor with manufacturing. Keep up the great content mate
Without doing a deep dive like you just offered us I had understood that Fusion was more angled to small shops/small manufacturers who don’t need multiple persons to work on a single project, like let’s say an oil rig or a cargo ship. In regards to your other vid ‘Things Inventor does but not Fusion’ you mentioned driven dimensions in multiple components, could you create those ‘driven dimensions’ as parameters and reference them that way ?
It has been for a while, desktop apps leveraging cloud services but Inventor never really adopted that much. Maybe they'll do that more in the interim as they head towards this greater cloud platform plan that they have
Yesterday was crazy. I use fusion exclusively for machining and fusion basically took down the shop. I wish fusion extensions were a bit cheaper. Cost of the machining extension seems ridiculous.
I am also looking to get to know more Fusion CAM users. Ping me if you ever are willing to chat about your struggles. This is always the best feedback!
Hey Neil, loving the video. You should do the same thing, 15 things at which fusion sucks and 15 at which inventor sucks. I'm actually moving from Fusion to Inventor because of the drawing/versioning/cloud design reservation in fusion being so unreliable. It's a shame since I'm pretty solid at fusion (at least I think). Can't wait for you to be making new tutorials on inventor since i pretty much listened to most of them!
i use fusion 360 with education license and the file is stored in clouds right.. my question is, are my data privacy save?, are autodesk team can use my 3d files? or can anyone access my file?, TBH i'm not feel safe if my data stored in cloud, how about my design copyright?.
As mentioned in the other video, Fusion really really really needs dark mode. Just a nice quality of life thing that would help with eye fatigue. Also the function to 2d print a drawing onto a piece of paper in Fusion is garbage. I open up the window to print a drawing and you get hardly any options. You can pick the printer, pick what sheets to print, toggle line weights on/off, and that's it. Something like printing double sided to save paper isn't even an option.
Cathartic is one word, just as frustrated as all the commercial users is another way of putting it! I'd already been working on this video for 4 days by that point, just needed to grab about a dozen more screen videos but then it sh*t its pants... so it added another day to the video. I could grab some footage from the Fusion YT channel but not for everything, so yea, I was quite frustrated as well
@@Neil3D Export cad does the job yes. But in the 3d printing env you can check if the mesh density is high enough or not too much. You can also spin the model and select the bottom side of your stl depending on how it would be easier to print. But that's pretty much it.
I have never used this area of Inventor, but I believe it has auto functionality of splitting your model and adding connection pins of specified shape/size for printing large model on smaller printer and then reassembly. I haven’t followed up to see if Fusion has now added that functionality.
Autosave eh? Inventor users have been asking for this since the early 2000’s. Must be particularly difficult to implement since Adesk has been ignoring users requests for so long.
Not sure how it could be not as good, surely it either offsets the surface/face or it doesn't? I don't know of any command in Inventor that would do what I did on that wheel face, not without chaining commands anyway. Feel free to advise where it is if I've missed it tho.
@@jdmather5755 God dammit, it's nested inside the thicken command as a toggle on the solid modeling modify panel... occupational hazard. I'll put a note about that. Good I guess that Inventor can actually do that, but it's nowhere near as obvious as Fusion
@@Neil3D I haven’t had time to go back and watch the video again, so I might not have caught the Delete to remove a face, but Delete Face with the Heal option is the same as the Delete (in solid) in Fusion. Otherwise it is the same as the Delete in Fusion surfaces.
All those features are nice. I could use the healing tools for surfaces and the McMaster Carr add-in. I could use both of those multiple times daily. Rendeirng in Inventor is a joke, but not something that I use regularly... so not that big of a deal. Love the jacket BTW,. I think it ROCKS!!
Jacket fans represent and unite! Yea although you get Fusion with PDMC, it's not as simple as just using Fusion now and again with Inventor models, although I guess you could download some McMaster-Carr parts into Fusion and then export them right out and into Inventor... bit of a workflow but should do the job
@@Neil3D I have PDMC and hardly ever use Fusion. Usually out of curiosity. I do use alot of McMaster Carr parts. More than CC parts. It would be a pain to flip back and fourth like that. Wish we had a adding like Fusion and there us a direct import for SolidWorks.
I have people asking me all the time what the differences are between Fusion and Inventor.. it saves me a ton of time if I can just show them a video like this. Far from useless.
Hmm, weird, in my experience, Fusion is by far the most stable CAD system out there, none of the other real ones are even in the same ballpark. Sure, I've managed to bog down Fusion a bit with some heavy CAM tool paths, but it has never crashed or lost data on me. I've had significantly more stability problems with Solidworks in 8 weeks than I've had with Fusion in 2 years. I used to work with Autocad, and with a few releases I had multiple crashes per work day, and it froze up completely every now and then while doing simple things like a solid fillet.. I did have some issues with Fusion when I first installed it, not crashes but weird issues, and it turned out that every single one of them was 100% because I ran it on Win 7.. Win 7 was not a supported OS by Fusion then, and for good reason, so I can't hold that against Fusion/Autodesk. After installing Win 10 on the same CAD laptop, Fusion runs very well and uses very little resources. Just by starting Autocad and having it doing nothing, with no file open, my CPU fan revs up :P
At the end of item #12 you mentioned my biggest gripe with Inventor. Why on earth doesn't it automatically save what you've done? They could at least build into it a routine that will save everything as it is when it decides to CRASH. AutoCAD does and so does Fusion. They all belong to the same Shell company AutoDESK so share some of the tricks between platforms!
Hi! Thanks for a great video. A question on the part with geometric patterns... It seemed like the patterning being shown was on a face that was curved in several directions. Do you know if then Fusion's geometric patterning function then works on faces with at least slightly more complex curvature (for instance if one wanted to model a pattern on a body panel for a car or a brake lever for a bicycle)? I had tested a while back, but it seemed at that time to be limited to uniformly curved geometry. Thanks and best regards, James
I use both. Fusion is so much better and faster it's mind blowing. The way you can model in one environment, both parts and assemblies is game changing. the problem is fusion is nutered so you need inventor for all the grown up work.
An item I would wish for in Fusion on modelling threads is a clearance offset for 3d printing. Sure it has thread classes for subtractive machined surfaces, but 3d printing is much sloppier on those dimensions. I always have to do an offset face of about 0.3mm clearance on the modeled thread before printing it. On the thread feature, adding an optional chamfer end would be nice or an option to extend a thread past the end to compensate for a chamfer.
if someone is willing to shell out $2300 for inventor alone, i can not understand why you wouldn't just buy the product design & manufacturing collection for $3000 where you get both and more.
After that massive cloud outage I went ahead and installed Solid Edge community edition. I was wondering how much I can do with absolutely no training whatsoever. It was a bit painful but fun nevertheless. Now I thought that this could be video-worthy subject to consider ;)
I've thought about that before many times, but its generally against their license terms to use the trial or community licenses for creating material for profit. And by that I mean generally all licenses, so its seemed safer to just not do it and avoid any liability!
If you're "living" inside the Autodesk world, you're used to combining different tools together. Inventor with Fusion for example 😋 so you can take the benefits from both worlds. We switch a lot between Autodesk Products to get the best out of it. Again good overview.
Great video Neil (and fantastic jacket). Using volumetric latticing today with one day access at 4 cloud credits was good value - I fear the move to Flex Tokens though. All F360 simulation solves, even the simplest linear static stress studies, are now done on the cloud. No local option available anymore. Annoying for productivity especially when the AWS servers are busy and it can double the time to get results.
I worked out the cost of a static analysis on the cloud at over £16 a run based on the minimum number of flex tokens you can buy at a time. That is ridiculous
@@mikejones0967 My understanding is that whilst linear static stress analysis has to be carried out on the cloud it incurs no cost. However, every other type of simulation now involves cloud credits, and when they get replaced by Flex Tokens there's nearly a 300% cost increase. It annoys me too that Flex Tokens automatically expire after 12 months (money down the drain)
Quick correction - Inventor can do a surface offset. It's just well hidden as a toggle inside another command on the solid modelling panel instead of being a specificly named surface tool. So scratch that one off.
Using Inventor at work and Fusion at home there's one thing that stands out to me. I can barely remember Fusion ever crashing on me, whilst Inventor on the other hand...
Hard to quantify that one! Fusion does smash out on me a few times but normally I'm trying bizarre things which it probably doesn't expect people to be doing!
Yeah, I've been working with Fusion for about 2 years, AutoCAD for 15 years before that, and just finished a course in school on Solidworks. I was so used to AutoCAD crashing on me, on some releases multiple times a day, and freezing up when doing simple things like a solid fillet.
Then I switched to Fusion and as you say, I cant even remember a single time Fusion has actually crashed on me! I've had it take tens of minutes to calculate some intricate toolpaths, and I've had one service outage that affected me, for about 2 hours.
I cant remember ever loosing any work due to a malfunction in Fusion :)
Even with the potential service outages, I've lost many, many times more working hours due to AutoCAD crashing and loosing work or even corrupting files (and yes, Autocad does have an autosave function since many years).
Then I got into Solidworks, and within in like a week I had more crashes and similar with SW than I've had with Fusion in 2 years :P In many way, Solidworks reminds me of AutoCAD, but the switch from Fusion to Solidworks has been surprisingly painless.
I do intend to try out Inventor now that I have Educational licenses from Autodesk, and really test it out and see which software I'll go with for my next company :)
I used to get a lot of crashes when using Vault (also over VPN). I’ve since quit Vault (and the VPN) and now I almost never get crashes.
The absolute number one thing I miss from Fusion when using Inventor is the ease in toggling visibility of sketches/bodies/components that is in Fusion.
I've watched about 5 seconds so far and that jacket and the attitude are just dope mate! ;-)
Interesting to see the supplier content in action. Seems quite useful!
The Lagoa render engine in Fusion 360 does not support caustics. The implementation of dielectrics is in fact pretty simplistic. I'd be happy to explain the benefits of the base feature.
Niel, again amazing video! Thanks for bringing up these topics. Rendering in Inventor is a JOKE. I have to always used third party programs. I might try Fusion for my next render. Keep a hard work.
One of the best videos yet Keep helping us with fusion 360
I've been pretty impressed with the nesting add-on as well. Now if they can just make the version history optional..
Uhhhh I've been doing surface offset in Inventor for like 10+ years. It's the "Thicken / Offset" button. You just have to hit the Surface mode button and instead of thickening the solid it will offset the face as a surface. I use it to make ribs on plastic parts before they had the "rib" tool.
It makes you wonder just how compartmentalized Fusion and Inventor development are within Autodesk. I suspect hugely but was hoping for not at all when I first saw Fusion as a long time Inventor user. Some suggested that Fusion would be the new more modern face of Inventor. So far not the case. I use both and have not been able to settle on just one. Pain in the arse!
BTW, I love that you retro insert updates in your videos as news flashes. I wish more youtubers did this.
Throws a spanner in the renewal coming up of either to stay with fusion and nesting or go to inventor with manufacturing. Keep up the great content mate
Thanks Chris! There's always the PDMC but that's a canny jump up in cost from Fusion!
Great video Neil! ( "Scusi! Scusi!" >>> die laughing)
Without doing a deep dive like you just offered us I had understood that Fusion was more angled to small shops/small manufacturers who don’t need multiple persons to work on a single project, like let’s say an oil rig or a cargo ship. In regards to your other vid ‘Things Inventor does but not Fusion’ you mentioned driven dimensions in multiple components, could you create those ‘driven dimensions’ as parameters and reference them that way ?
I feel your pain about the outage, was in the middle of setting up a new system and everything on the desktop app suddenly greyed out
Thanks for the great content Neil! Couldn't cloud be a complement to local operation, rather than an exclusive-or situation?
It has been for a while, desktop apps leveraging cloud services but Inventor never really adopted that much. Maybe they'll do that more in the interim as they head towards this greater cloud platform plan that they have
Yesterday was crazy. I use fusion exclusively for machining and fusion basically took down the shop.
I wish fusion extensions were a bit cheaper. Cost of the machining extension seems ridiculous.
I am also looking to get to know more Fusion CAM users. Ping me if you ever are willing to chat about your struggles. This is always the best feedback!
i've got an opportunity to switch over to fusion from inventor. how hard is it to convert a 200 gig library?
So... F360 is more to product design while Inventor to mechanical design?
Hey Neil, loving the video. You should do the same thing, 15 things at which fusion sucks and 15 at which inventor sucks.
I'm actually moving from Fusion to Inventor because of the drawing/versioning/cloud design reservation in fusion being so unreliable. It's a shame since I'm pretty solid at fusion (at least I think).
Can't wait for you to be making new tutorials on inventor since i pretty much listened to most of them!
Cloud based design sounds good, but its not 100% reliable. In a professional environment, that is not acceptable.
great video with a ton of tips , thanks
i use fusion 360 with education license and the file is stored in clouds right.. my question is, are my data privacy save?, are autodesk team can use my 3d files? or can anyone access my file?, TBH i'm not feel safe if my data stored in cloud, how about my design copyright?.
As mentioned in the other video, Fusion really really really needs dark mode. Just a nice quality of life thing that would help with eye fatigue. Also the function to 2d print a drawing onto a piece of paper in Fusion is garbage. I open up the window to print a drawing and you get hardly any options. You can pick the printer, pick what sheets to print, toggle line weights on/off, and that's it. Something like printing double sided to save paper isn't even an option.
I bet it was cathartic to vent about the cloud outage RIGHT as it was occurring :D
Cathartic is one word, just as frustrated as all the commercial users is another way of putting it! I'd already been working on this video for 4 days by that point, just needed to grab about a dozen more screen videos but then it sh*t its pants... so it added another day to the video. I could grab some footage from the Fusion YT channel but not for everything, so yea, I was quite frustrated as well
I use Inventor 3d printing environment.
To export stl...
Same! 😂
I don't remember trying but surely the regular file 》export CAD or save copy as, they do STL out?
@@Neil3D Export cad does the job yes.
But in the 3d printing env you can check if the mesh density is high enough or not too much.
You can also spin the model and select the bottom side of your stl depending on how it would be easier to print.
But that's pretty much it.
I have never used this area of Inventor, but I believe it has auto functionality of splitting your model and adding connection pins of specified shape/size for printing large model on smaller printer and then reassembly. I haven’t followed up to see if Fusion has now added that functionality.
So funny the suscribe reminder jaja
Autosave eh? Inventor users have been asking for this since the early 2000’s. Must be particularly difficult to implement since Adesk has been ignoring users requests for so long.
Not sure if it is as good as the tool in Fusion360 but Inventor does have a surface offset tool
Not sure how it could be not as good, surely it either offsets the surface/face or it doesn't? I don't know of any command in Inventor that would do what I did on that wheel face, not without chaining commands anyway. Feel free to advise where it is if I've missed it tho.
@@Neil3D Can you send me the file? I am not aware of any differences between Inventor Offset Surface and Fusion 360.
@@jdmather5755 God dammit, it's nested inside the thicken command as a toggle on the solid modeling modify panel... occupational hazard. I'll put a note about that. Good I guess that Inventor can actually do that, but it's nowhere near as obvious as Fusion
@@Neil3D
I haven’t had time to go back and watch the video again, so I might not have caught the Delete to remove a face, but Delete Face with the Heal option is the same as the Delete (in solid) in Fusion. Otherwise it is the same as the Delete in Fusion surfaces.
All those features are nice. I could use the healing tools for surfaces and the McMaster Carr add-in. I could use both of those multiple times daily. Rendeirng in Inventor is a joke, but not something that I use regularly... so not that big of a deal. Love the jacket BTW,. I think it ROCKS!!
Jacket fans represent and unite! Yea although you get Fusion with PDMC, it's not as simple as just using Fusion now and again with Inventor models, although I guess you could download some McMaster-Carr parts into Fusion and then export them right out and into Inventor... bit of a workflow but should do the job
@@Neil3D I have PDMC and hardly ever use Fusion. Usually out of curiosity. I do use alot of McMaster Carr parts. More than CC parts. It would be a pain to flip back and fourth like that. Wish we had a adding like Fusion and there us a direct import for SolidWorks.
inventor sounds like it sucks really bad
Inventor might be nice burn it is just an old platform …
I think you should do your job well and stop comparing softwares. It's a waste of time and useless.
I have people asking me all the time what the differences are between Fusion and Inventor.. it saves me a ton of time if I can just show them a video like this. Far from useless.
What is the wrong with the jacket? I like it.
It's so good that it transcends beyond opion into being factually fantastic
Fusion would be great if it actually worked. It just doesn't . Do anything mildly complex and it will bug, lag and crash. Every time.
Hmm, weird, in my experience, Fusion is by far the most stable CAD system out there, none of the other real ones are even in the same ballpark. Sure, I've managed to bog down Fusion a bit with some heavy CAM tool paths, but it has never crashed or lost data on me.
I've had significantly more stability problems with Solidworks in 8 weeks than I've had with Fusion in 2 years. I used to work with Autocad, and with a few releases I had multiple crashes per work day, and it froze up completely every now and then while doing simple things like a solid fillet..
I did have some issues with Fusion when I first installed it, not crashes but weird issues, and it turned out that every single one of them was 100% because I ran it on Win 7.. Win 7 was not a supported OS by Fusion then, and for good reason, so I can't hold that against Fusion/Autodesk.
After installing Win 10 on the same CAD laptop, Fusion runs very well and uses very little resources. Just by starting Autocad and having it doing nothing, with no file open, my CPU fan revs up :P
I use inventor for everything, except for machining. I export to fusion for that.
Maybe the Inventor team still programs and create Inventor on that 12-15-year-old hardware.
Time to upgrade their hardware. 🤣
At the end of item #12 you mentioned my biggest gripe with Inventor. Why on earth doesn't it automatically save what you've done? They could at least build into it a routine that will save everything as it is when it decides to CRASH.
AutoCAD does and so does Fusion. They all belong to the same Shell company AutoDESK so share some of the tricks between platforms!
I wish Inventor could COMBINE SOLID BODIES that are in different PARTS.
Hi! Thanks for a great video. A question on the part with geometric patterns... It seemed like the patterning being shown was on a face that was curved in several directions. Do you know if then Fusion's geometric patterning function then works on faces with at least slightly more complex curvature (for instance if one wanted to model a pattern on a body panel for a car or a brake lever for a bicycle)? I had tested a while back, but it seemed at that time to be limited to uniformly curved geometry. Thanks and best regards, James
I use both. Fusion is so much better and faster it's mind blowing. The way you can model in one environment, both parts and assemblies is game changing. the problem is fusion is nutered so you need inventor for all the grown up work.
Would be interesting to see this series but comparing Inventor and SolidWorks.
An item I would wish for in Fusion on modelling threads is a clearance offset for 3d printing. Sure it has thread classes for subtractive machined surfaces, but 3d printing is much sloppier on those dimensions. I always have to do an offset face of about 0.3mm clearance on the modeled thread before printing it. On the thread feature, adding an optional chamfer end would be nice or an option to extend a thread past the end to compensate for a chamfer.
if someone is willing to shell out $2300 for inventor alone, i can not understand why you wouldn't just buy the product design & manufacturing collection for $3000 where you get both and more.
That's kind of the idea with pricing structures like that.
After that massive cloud outage I went ahead and installed Solid Edge community edition. I was wondering how much I can do with absolutely no training whatsoever. It was a bit painful but fun nevertheless. Now I thought that this could be video-worthy subject to consider ;)
I've thought about that before many times, but its generally against their license terms to use the trial or community licenses for creating material for profit. And by that I mean generally all licenses, so its seemed safer to just not do it and avoid any liability!
@@Neil3D Reminds me of a joke about 50 lawyers at the bottom of the lake.
Erm... Inventor had generative design not that long ago...
It really didn't. Generative Design has never been in Inventor.
@@Neil3D It has "shape generator" which is a very basic version.
If you're "living" inside the Autodesk world, you're used to combining different tools together. Inventor with Fusion for example 😋 so you can take the benefits from both worlds. We switch a lot between Autodesk Products to get the best out of it. Again good overview.
Great video Neil (and fantastic jacket).
Using volumetric latticing today with one day access at 4 cloud credits was good value - I fear the move to Flex Tokens though.
All F360 simulation solves, even the simplest linear static stress studies, are now done on the cloud. No local option available anymore. Annoying for productivity especially when the AWS servers are busy and it can double the time to get results.
I worked out the cost of a static analysis on the cloud at over £16 a run based on the minimum number of flex tokens you can buy at a time. That is ridiculous
@@mikejones0967 My understanding is that whilst linear static stress analysis has to be carried out on the cloud it incurs no cost. However, every other type of simulation now involves cloud credits, and when they get replaced by Flex Tokens there's nearly a 300% cost increase.
It annoys me too that Flex Tokens automatically expire after 12 months (money down the drain)