Fusion 360 used to be very buggy. It isn't anymore. Change in speed is harder to judge since improvements have been very gradual, but the days of waiting endlessly on processing that can't be interrupted is pretty much over.
According to friends of mine who do fabrication it is a lot more stable than the high end stuff they have to use which costs an absolute fortune. That stuff is, apparently, "buggy as f*ck".
I don't think Blender is an option or even a useful starting point for a replacement. It solves an entirely different problem and any similarity in problem domain being addressed is purely superficial. (Get a fabrication professional to take you through their CNC workflow to get an understanding of how it is used).
The dependence on the cloud sucks for two reasons: Autodesk can make all of your work go away at any moment and Autodesk have never done much to optimize uploads/saves so they are slow.
For the record, I actually run a CNC and a laser professionally and whilst I'm not intimately familiar with Blender, I know how other 'non-specific' software can be modified and/or used as a starting point for creating project files.
It might not perhaps suffice for the creation of a building or a jetplane, but for hobbyist use, I don't see why not.
For instance - I use Adobe Illustrator as a 2D 'CAD' program, purely because I find it MUCH quicker to work with than the likes of AutoCAD (which I gave up on years ago).
I just found Fusion360 incredibly slow. Perhaps things have changed since, but I last looked at it about 8 months ago.
I downgraded my account from a startup license to a personal a couple months ago. I went from never seeing any particular slowness in the app, to seeing a number of waiting on cloud function dialogs.
I bet all the personal licenses are running on a single cloud instance, while the paying users get reasonable response times.
If Illustrator suffices and is "faster" than AutoCAD for your workflow, then you probably don't actually have a big need for Fusion 360 in the first place. But there are a lot of people who actually do things where parametric, constraint based design is quite important for productivity.
Again.. hobbyists - but more to the point, it's perfectly possible to 'manually' do parametric constraints on moderately simple 2.5D geometries on the fly with a bit of logic using software that isn't necessarily built with that in mind. It's a cludge, sure, but if Fusion360 slows down 80% of your workflow where it's not doing much fancy, then that points to there being somewhere better, perhaps simpler, tools could be used.
-ed
Believe me - I wanted to like Fusion - I had the thing for a while and tried, but.. meh. It felt like a free product. At best.
> According to friends of mine who do fabrication it is a lot more stable than the high end stuff they have to use which costs an absolute fortune. That stuff is, apparently, "buggy as f* ck".
Ayup. I found that SolidWorks+MasterCAM was continually a disaster and crashed all the time.
Fusion360 works really well for a non-professional level CAD and CAM system (and, to be fair, it will carry you a long way toward even professional use). I used to run rings around the Solidworks/MasterCAM people on the Haas CNC at our makerspace.
While I understand the complaints of everyone here, the equivalent in SolidWorks land is almost $10K (SolidWorks+MasterCAM+a couple extras).
If Fusion360 really is too expensive, please go use FreeCAD--they need users, tutorials, coders, etc.
According to friends of mine who do fabrication it is a lot more stable than the high end stuff they have to use which costs an absolute fortune. That stuff is, apparently, "buggy as f*ck".
I don't think Blender is an option or even a useful starting point for a replacement. It solves an entirely different problem and any similarity in problem domain being addressed is purely superficial. (Get a fabrication professional to take you through their CNC workflow to get an understanding of how it is used).
The dependence on the cloud sucks for two reasons: Autodesk can make all of your work go away at any moment and Autodesk have never done much to optimize uploads/saves so they are slow.