Once submitted, it’s added to the queue and you get feedback on how long it’ll take. The Fusion Cloud Render dialog – based on A360’s rendering service, gives you all the controls you need over aspect ration, image size, DPI and to a nice selection of presets for different media/devices and such Hit this, and you’ll get a technical drawing as well as a drop down that shows the formats available. If there’s CAD data available, you’ll see a small symbol indicating that it’s available. Once you’ve found it, click the part number and you’ll get to the part details page.

You’ll then use the usual filtering, browsing and searching tools to find the component you need – in our example, an M8 x 25mm socket cap screw. You’ll find it under the Insert menu (Insert McMaster Carr) and that’ll kick off a Fusion window that connects directly to the website. What Autodesk has done is integrate the company’s existing online catalog directly into the Fusion interface, with some clever jiggery pokery that makes the whole process much slicker. While it’s a predominately US led sourcing operation, McMaster Carr is renown world wide for supplying all those fasteners, gears and a whole host of other components. We’re highlighting 6 of the big ticket items, but there’s a good anount of documentation for each release, available in the online help ( which is here). So let’s begin with a look into what the March update of Autodesk’s Fusion 360 has to offer.

If there’s one change that the rise of cloud-based applications will bring, it is the need to stay on top of things – annual or service pack releases force you to look at what each contains and find areas where you can change your workflows – when those updates happen pretty seamlessly, that’s going to become more of an issue when they’re every month or so. In a bid to keep you up to date with what’s going on with the various cloud-based services and applications, we’ll be taking a more regular look at each major release or update as they roll out.

Rendering fusion 360