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sent-hil | 3 years ago

As someone who uses and relies on Fusion for work, it's frustrating how customer hostile Autodesk is. And this is on top of their subscription price increase they announced in March.

A part of me wants to reimplement the tool holders for ToolWall[1] in OpenSCAD[2] and be done with it with Autodesk forever.

[1] - https://toolwallhq.com

[2] - https://openscad.org

discuss

hactually|3 years ago

If you know folk in the industry - I'd be keen to know what work needs funding to be enough to move from Autodesk to OpenSCAD or similar

sent-hil|3 years ago

Fusion supports a wide range of use case from CAD to CAM and others. None of open source tools (FreeCad, OpenSCAD, Opencad etc.) come close to matching Fusion's features. I don't think most even support CAM which I need for CNC tool paths.

Happy to chat more if you're interested in it.

jker|3 years ago

I’ve been using OnShape, which is pretty nice.

seabird|3 years ago

I'm currently in an adjacent industry and used a variety of CAD packages in previous work. What you're suggesting is noble, but not really feasible. If you want specifics (and there's a lot of them), let me know and I can shoot you an email.

inferiorhuman|3 years ago

UX is probably one of the biggest stumbling blocks for two reasons:

Open source software historically treats users as an afterthought (or worse makes really terrible attempts at courting them like GIMP).

Different CAD suites use different terms and have radically different interfaces. There's a lot of (un)learning to do. Go fillet something in Fusion then try to do the same in FreeCAD. Not only is the interface ever so slightly different than Fusion, you have to navigate a minefield of bugs and limitations in FreeCAD. Yikes.

But by comparing Autodesk (presumably Fusion and not e.g. Buzzsaw or Maya) to OpenSCAD you're making an apples-to-oranges comparison. OpenSCAD is a thin wrapper around a CAD programming language, it's an entirely different than something like SolidWorks or Fusion.

ur-whale|3 years ago

> someone who uses and relies on Fusion for work

To be fair, the writing has been on the wall for a very long time.

Autodesk has been completely hostile to their customers (because said customers are a captive audience and they know it) since the 90's, so what is happening here should not come as a surprise to anyone.