Howdy folks.
Now that reality may be setting in sooner then later, I need to get a new PC together. I intend to get on the fusion 360 train due to cost, Integrated cam, and widely used by people I intend to colborate with(you guys). I also may be taking on a role in both kitchen design and CNC programming, and I’ll be creating our workflow and such(don’t get started on existing kitchen software options).
The question to the crowd is what PC to get or build? I did see the official requirements page, and it seems either vague or really low. Pretty much any PC from the last 10 years could run it(present one is falling in on itself, though runs it slowly). What am I missing? Is it more cloud based processing and I just need to capture the results? Suggestions for parts?
Cheers and beers
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It’s essentially a web app in a wrapper, so had fairly low requirements. Runs just fine on my 4 year old iMac and 6 year old PC. Actually complains about the graphics on my state of the art pc laptop, but works fine.
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Fusion360 actually runs on a local installation, but saves projects in the cloud. The app updates are downloaded locally, and a lot of the materials need to be downloaded as well before they can be used, thus its not all contained within the cloud.
I use an iMac built in 2009 (2.66GHz Quad Core, 16GB RAM) and it works very quickly.
Anything current will work fine for simple stuff. It’s when you get into super complex geometry and massive assemblies with hundreds of parts where you start needing some more grunt.
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F360 is weird, it is not quite the web app that @dwardio suggests but on the other hand, it does hand off a lot of heavy lifting to the servers when they are available. Most functions run when offline as well. Kind of an adaptive 50/50.
Anyway, for the most bang for your buck go with a good gaming machine. F360 uses ActiveX for its video so there is no need for a “workstation” video board, just a decent gaming card.
It will run on a pretty outdated machine but the better computer you have the less that has to be handed off to the cloud.
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I would need it to be able to do decent renders and have maybe 100 part assemblies. I don’t plan to have to cabinets fully “built” in fusion, as I have Cam for that.
I do need to research it’s about to do BOMs(I know there are addons) and be sent to output variables for parametric stuff in my Can software.
rendering is slow, but that’s because rendering is always slow. There is a reason that people like ILM and Pixar have giant google sized data centers for rendering, because rendering is slow. As someone who does a lot of 3D graphics work, even on a Mac pro with 196gb of RAM, dual quad-core xeons and dual GPUs, and I can see all 16 rendering threads cranking along, rendering is slow. It’s certainly faster than on my 27" 5K iMac or my MacBook pro but, don’t expect to be blown away by that. Everything else flies along nicely…
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Fusion360 does have cloud rendering, although I have not tried it.
The most recent version of the headlamp rendering I posted in the Show and Tell thread was, I think about a 15-20 minute local render, but a lot of that time is because of the reflections and refractions within the chrome finish reflectors and glossy surfaces.
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