Four years to the day after Autodesk announced Inventor Fusion as a technology preview, Autodesk announce that Fusion 360, their cloud accessible 3D CAD modeling platform, is commercially available. The licensing cost is $25 USD / Month / user, however beginning today there is a 90 day free trial. Although significantly, the product will be completely free for Students and Enthusiasts, that’s a game changer right there.
Fusion 360 offers easy to use, easy to learn interactive direct modeling of solid objects, as well as complex surfacing capabilities via the integration of their T-Spines technology. One of my favorite parts of Fusion 360 is the ease of assembly; the interactive assembly joints are quite easy to apply and manipulate. Not only only do they get recognized within the simulation environment, but you can use them to create motion studies
Fusion 360 keeps track of your model version information in an easy to use project workspace, and keeps track of that information automatically. This frees the user from checking data in and out.
One of Fusion’s earliest claims to fame is their far reaching model format translation, able to import almost any format of 3D CAD model into their projects. Furthermore users can control which team members have access to the project data. The project data is tied to a Fusion 360 account that is perpetually available on the cloud, including when you don’t wish to license the service.
Fusion 360 allows users to open the data and export it, you simply can’t edit it until you need to license the service again. This makes Fusion 360 possibly the most flexible, collaborative 3D modeling tool available.
A significant part of Fusion 360 is its Social Collaboration tools. The product leverages Autodesk’s 360 storage technology and builds a social interaction layer over the top of it. This allows users to interact with each others models, commenting, reviewing & requesting changes to better suit the overall design end goal.
Another announcement is coming in a few days that ties in another partnership with this service. Check back in this week for those details. In the meantime go download your trial and start playing with this awesome bit of kit:
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