My Breakup with Fusion 360

I had a "Little Dictator", now I have a "Partner"

I am just a simple guy, a hobby 3D printing "Maker", I focus on making molds for ceramic slip casting. I don't need a "high maintenance" CAD partner.

Fusion 360 and I were not a good match. It was her world, Windows and Mac only - I had to live in it. She was the “Queen of Complicated”, always on the drama channel of new features far beyond what I needed, rather than refining the simple ones I did need. And she was expensive to take out, costing way more than what I needed ($750/year).

OnShape is my new chill. She will go out, at full power, to Linux and iPad. She's a keeper. I don’t need a user manual for her. She's not a princess but a partner, social not a snob. I don't feel like I am on a roller coaster without a seatbelt, rather I am with someone that is easy to be around and way more powerful than she looks.

Related Pictures

OnShape CAD is Free for Hobby Makers:

Is it as good as Fusion 360 at $750/year?

This picture has its own page with more detail, click here to see it.

OnShape is amazing. There is nothing to install, it runs in a browser tab like Google docs (see picture below). Sure, it won’t run offline, but I am almost never offline. It functions very similar to Fusion 360 for my basic requirements of making molds for slip casting. Recent experience with the complexity and slowness of Solidworks for Makers, which is total overkill for what I need, really makes OnShape look good.

My OnShape drawings are stored in my cloud account and are public. That sounded bad at first, but it also means that they are shareable with others (another person, whom I choose, can actually work on a drawing at the same time as me). The full OnShape is working in Firefox on my 2014 Mac Mini Ubuntu Linux machine. This is beyond exciting to me, traditional CAD has always required expensive hardware that is far beyond a hobbyist (of course, OnShape will also work in Safari on Mac and Chrome on Windows). A real bonus: I can edit drawings on iPad in what appears to be full power mode (although a mouse and keyboard are needed for serious work).

Besides the above, here are some of the features and advantages I am seeing:
-It opens and saves many professional CAD file types (a major drawback of the restrictions in SolidWorks for Makers).
-It is really fast, login is quick and a drawing can be open in seconds, this is way better than xDesign for Makers (from Solidworks).
-Documents are always saved, close one by simply clicking the home icon on the upper left.
-The timeline (called the "Feature Tree") can be reordered, turned back and has folders like Fusion 360.
-To 3D print a body just select it, right-click and choose to export it in 3MF or STL format, it goes into the downloads folder where it can be opened by my slicer (e.g. Prusa Slicer or Simplify 3D).
-All tools are in one long, monochrome ribbon at the top; icons look alike until you learn them. I prefer this over the large space-hogging tool icons spread across menus and workspaces in Fusion 360.
-Like Fusion 360, sketching constraints are inferred as sketches are created and applying them works in a similar fashion (although I am still looking for the equivalent of the co-linear one). Their tiny symbols display in groups and associate to the point or line by a light grey line.
-Constraints and dimensions are movable so drawings can be uncluttered for printing.
-Section analysis is in the "Camera and Render Options" popup under the view cube.
-The spline sketching and bevel tools seem to work better.
-Parameters, called variables, are more in your face, they are even shown in the timeline.
-Panning and rotating work differently and the viewcube does not rotate the object like Fusion 360. But the iPad version of OnShape beats Fusion easily in this respect.

The secret weapon of learning OnShape, if you already know Fusion 360, is an AI chatbot. Just ask any question about how to do something. Just start by creating a sketch and extruding or revolving it. One helpful migration approach is to print the sketch(es) of a Fusion 360 drawing (with constraints and dimensions) and work from that to create the equivalent in OnShape. Rationalize as you do it and you will end up with a simpler timeline and thus a better design.

Videos

Media

Drawing the Same Mold Using OnShape CAD
I will make a classic Medalta beer bottle case-mold for 3D printing (just pour in plaster and you have a mold to slip cast bottles). I will highlight the differences between it and Fusion 360 as we go.

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