Autodesk Fusion 360 Ultimate gets first update

Autodesk has announced that it has released its big November update to Autodesk Fusion 360 Ultimate. There are loads of new features. Importantly, Autodesk has extended its offer for those who are existing Fusion 360 subscribers, they can now have access to Fusion 360 Ultimate (for the price of standard Fusion 360 for life). That offer is now extended to 13 December 2014.

What’s New in Fusion 360 Ultimate First Update

With the latest update to Ultimate, the creation of drawings can now be done offline. There a range of improvements in the area of collaboration, including improvements to the Data Panel. One such item is a new More link that allows you to see all the members a project in the side pane.

A big usability addition comes in the form of two now workspaces when you create a new Fusion 360 design. There are the modeling workspaces and a new Animations/Explosions and CAM workspace, respectively. This replaces the old workflow where you switched tabs to move between CAM and modeling. There are a number of new improvements to the Grid for better identification and a Timeline replay function.

01 – Autodesk Fusion 360 Ultimate receives first update. (courtesy of Autodesk, all rights reserved)

The new Animation workspace is a big new feature. Animation and assembly instruction authoring tools have been added to allow the creation of 3D exploded views and animations. These help tell the story of how products are used, assembled and maintained. Automatic explode tools allow users to quickly base explosions on assembly hierarchy levels.

Story boards help organize explosions and animations into a coherent story structure. There is also Camera recording and Annotations to pin text to particular geometry to add textural information.

The new CAM workspace improvements add consistency with Autodesk CAM desktop solutions—HSMWorks and Inventor HSM. On the Mac it is possible to create and edit new tools. Drawing creation and editing is now possible on Mac OS X and has feature parity between Windows and Mac. Lastly, Python scripting has been added. A dedicated Python IDE, documentation and samples makes ramping up on the additional languages easy and familiar. Both Javascript and Python are still previews. Spyder is embedded and used for Python IDE and Debugging.

Learning More About Fusion 360

One can learn more about Fusion 360 Ultimate and its sibling apps here: http://fusion360.autodesk.com/