More details were unveiled this week announcing that the Technology Preview will be released on June 25th on the Autodesk Labs website. I haven't spent a lot of time talking about it yet, so I figured now would be as good a time as ever. So let's take some time and discuss what this might mean to an Inventor user and the future of your interaction with the software.
Originally this was called project Freeway. I like the new name much better. It is much more indicative of what the technology is portraying in contrast to what some of its competitors are trying to blindside customers with. Project Freeway started about two years ago in a secret underground Autodesk bunker with the intent to make direct modeling easier for all parties (3D CAD jockey to unskilled manager and to new users). Productivity studies were taken about common modeling mistakes, missteps, overlooked steps and general interaction with some of the other new enhancements to Inventor. They concluded the following (this is the video watching portion of the lecture):
Why the late addition to the party?
This technology has been around with SpaceClaim, CoCreate and Siemen's ST for some time now, but what makes Fusion better? Why did they wait so long to announce the project and start showing it? Well, in true Autodesk fashion, they understand the amount of early adopters in the market is relatively small in corporate numbers and transition takes some time to new technology. They also listen to the gripes of the users of the other software that demos well, but in the end falls on its face. They also look at the other mistakes their competition makes in a quick rush to push a new feature, interface, or workflow. Just look at AutoCAD, how many different ways can you still use AutoCAD. AutoCAD still has the screen menu and classic interface in it even though the ribbon has taken over most Windows based systems.
So what's different here?
One word: Bidirectional. Some of the competitors have the history free environment and it does not reflect the parametric world. This is why some of those demo well, but in the end do not stand up to the power of Fusion. With Fusion you can go back and forth and Inventor will interrogate the changes made and create/rebuild the parametric history of a part. I also like the ability to dynamically change two parts in an assembly at once!
Remember, Fusion is taking two technologies and letting them work together seamlessly which is something some competitors just can't seem to figure out. This technology becomes enormously awesome when working with other people's data in a native format. Taking other's 3D base solids and easily working with them has been a long desire of many users.
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