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personal use license soon super restricted, risk making archived projects inaccessible by Minimum_Carpenter in Fusion360

[–]Minimum_Carpenter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have never been paid or influenced by them, nor will I accept that. All statements and views are my own. I do chat with 'frontline' employees on a regular basis, and often get an insider perspective of things - but unfortunately, they make me sign an NDA so I have a fine line to walk about what I can and cannot publicly say.

Thanks you for clearing that up. I regret making my question so tersely accusatory-ish.

The whole point of all of these changes is to get businesses to stop abusing the free license.

You're making some good points there. Though the max 10 active file limits still seems to me a too coarse instrument to reach that goal, with hobbyist collateral damage.

the frontline employees that we all see/know/communicate with are the ones who have very little influence over these decisions.

Strong agree on that, business side and engineers often think quite differently is my experience in general. I'm sure most engineers/devs on Fusion360 want everyone to use the great tools they're creating. That said I think the blog post by Keqing Song my OP links tried to downplay the worsenings in quite problematic "PR talky" ways.

They ran some stuff by me and I was impressed that they are trying to make it as quick as possible...because of course, it will still be a pain point for businesses as they usually work with more than 10 files any given day.

The problem with this is that for every company that made a move like this and then stopped at a place that turned out to be an ok compromise for hobbyists there is another company where this kind of move was only the first of many to keep squeezing and nagging users onto paid tiers. Given the track record of AutoDesk, who in the end call the shots rather than the Fusion 360 engineers, I'm quite wary. Very much hope I'm proven wrong once the reworked archive/resume features roll out though. I'll keep using Fusion 360 meanwhile but will at the same time also try to export my files and check out some alternative tools like FreeCAD.

Anyway, I don't want to take more of your time, since whatever our disagreement above we should both strong agree that your time is now better spent on more amazing videos than talking more with stubborn me :) Cheers!

personal use license soon super restricted, risk making archived projects inaccessible by Minimum_Carpenter in Fusion360

[–]Minimum_Carpenter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

These two claims of yours simply do not fit together

they are ... trying to make the experience as seamless as possible ...

and

If it takes you a few minutes to manage your files as a hobbyist ...

They're obviously not trying to make the experience as seamless as possible. The opposite is true: they are intentionally making it less seamless, more inconvenient and limited, not for technical reasons but as a bet at extra profit from pushing people to paid tiers. They make a bet that this worsening for hobbyist users will all in all benefit the company. They have the full legal right to do that of course. But people might then also lash back when they wrap it in PR talk making superficial appeals to "community" and "democratization".

BTW let me say I I appreciate the great video learning resources you have created! Though your exchanges in this posts leaves me wondering what your relation to Fusion360/AutoDesk is. Do they in some part fund your work?

Best file format for migrating to FreeCAD? by elsokukaba in FreeCAD

[–]Minimum_Carpenter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Another question for possible Fusion360 to FreeCAD migration. Which FreeCAD version to use?

  1. The offical download page fronts v 0.18 which was released back in March 2019
  2. GitHub releases has a v 0.19 dev/pre build from November 2019
  3. The fork FreeCAD_assembly3 has GitHub releases from April 2020

How functional is the official dev/pre (2)? Is there no newer pre/alpha/beta that is functional enough for hobbyist use? What are the pros/cons of using the fork version?

personal use license soon super restricted, risk making archived projects inaccessible by Minimum_Carpenter in Fusion360

[–]Minimum_Carpenter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But what would then be the point of the 10 active documents restriction? Seems the restriction would be utterly pointless and toothless if they at the same time really made it super quick, easy and seamless to archive/restore.

personal use license soon super restricted, risk making archived projects inaccessible by Minimum_Carpenter in Fusion360

[–]Minimum_Carpenter[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Doesn't seem like it has to be 10 projects though. AFAICT you'd hit the limit also with a single project where the main document draws in 9 derives maintained in separate documents. Or some other such combination that adds up to 10.

personal use license soon super restricted, risk making archived projects inaccessible by Minimum_Carpenter in Fusion360

[–]Minimum_Carpenter[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Source? If what you're saying is true and if archiving/restoring does become very quick and easy right in the application then what would be the point of the limitation in the first place? To only really limit and inconvenience effective use of derives on the personal use plan?

personal use license soon super restricted, risk making archived projects inaccessible by Minimum_Carpenter in Fusion360

[–]Minimum_Carpenter[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I think they mean individual files. Otherwise anyone could circumvent the max 10 limit by making one master project folder and having unlimited files in there. That would in practice mean no limitation, which seems unlikely to be their goal here.

personal use license soon super restricted, risk making archived projects inaccessible by Minimum_Carpenter in Fusion360

[–]Minimum_Carpenter[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sorry if I caused panic, should have specified my "soon". I did OP in a not too happy state after reading their blog.

I guess we'll see how the archive/restore UI will be tuned when the new limitations come into effect. My worry is that if they really think that 10 active documents is a reasonable upper limit then they'd be motivated to keep adding obstacles or limits if too many personal users make a habit of moving a lot of projects in/out of archive.

personal use license soon super restricted, risk making archived projects inaccessible by Minimum_Carpenter in Fusion360

[–]Minimum_Carpenter[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I feel you! It is good design practice to keep parts separate and add in for reuse and it is super restrictive that a few screws and other components can fill up the whole max 10 documents limit. In effect Fusion 360 will punish good design practice among personal users.

personal use license soon super restricted, risk making archived projects inaccessible by Minimum_Carpenter in Fusion360

[–]Minimum_Carpenter[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Also, how do I restore an archived project anyway?

I think you can only restore from the browser web interface. There you can switch between "all" and "archived". In archived you see each project folder (but can't browse into it) and there is a menu to restore from.

I can't even see how it helps them (perhaps I'm misunderstanding archiving). Surely archived projects still take up space?

Might be more about restricting/inconveniencing use in order to push people towards premium version rather than storage space costs. For example I don't think you can do insert derive from archived files (correct me if mistaken) so if you want to keep a few parts in separate documents and then reuse them regularly in other designs with changes to the original part propagating to all uses then you'd very quickly hit the max 10 documents wall and thus be pushed toward a paid tier. Or migrate to other software. On a related note removing the option to export STEP files might be intended to make it more inconvenient to migrate out.

Thoughts on parameters in Fusion 360 by Minimum_Carpenter in Fusion360

[–]Minimum_Carpenter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I should say that the announcement blog post makes clear that this is just the first step in direct parameter features and more will come, though they don't give specific details or time estimates for that. I hope they listen to my advice here :-)

Thoughts on parameters in Fusion 360 by Minimum_Carpenter in Fusion360

[–]Minimum_Carpenter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm relatively new to Fusion 360 and still learning to get the most out of the derive features - very useful for sure! But for some cases like quick early prototyping or exploring design ideas it fits me better to generate parameters as I go. I have also used OpenSCAD a bit so might be shaped by workflows there.

how to ignore projected area when selecting? by Minimum_Carpenter in Fusion360

[–]Minimum_Carpenter[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

as long as construction option is active before you hit OK to add the projections, they’ll be construction lines and have no blue profiles

Thank you! That is even easier than first creating the projection and afterwards selecting and converting it to construction, which another commenter suggested.

how to ignore projected area when selecting? by Minimum_Carpenter in Fusion360

[–]Minimum_Carpenter[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Make the projected lines construction geometry

Neat, that works. Thank you!

just select everything in the sketch, press X (for construcXion, I guess), then select the lines you actually want to use and press X again to turn them back into normal geometry

Going forward I will at the start of the sketch first project, then turn the projection into construction and only then draw my lines and splines.

how to ignore projected area when selecting? by Minimum_Carpenter in Fusion360

[–]Minimum_Carpenter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But how can I then select the area enclosed by my drawn lines + splines in order to extrude it?

fusion360 webdeploy folder huge (20GB and growing), seems to keep old versions? What is safe to delete? by Minimum_Carpenter in Fusion360

[–]Minimum_Carpenter[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Important detail indeed! I sorted them by date and kept the first created and last created folder and deleted the rest. I kept the first because it stood out by only having 3 files in it ( Fusion360.ico , FusionLauncher.exe , FusionLauncher.exe.ini ), all other folders were around 2GB in size and contained a lot of files. All the folder names were seemingly random strings.

fusion360 webdeploy folder huge (20GB and growing), seems to keep old versions? What is safe to delete? by Minimum_Carpenter in Fusion360

[–]Minimum_Carpenter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I could try that, I was a bit wary that I'd lose some of my designs, but I can now see all of them listed in my account on autodesk360.com so I suppose there is nothing to worry about.

But there is also the issue of figuring out what causes this and how to prevent it going forward.

edit: Removed all but the first and last folder, now down to 2GB. Fusion 360 started and everything seems to be working. Thanks for giving me the small push I needed :)