Hmm... interesting.

http://www.businesswire.com/multimedia/home/20110509005491/en/2313140/Video-Available%C2%A0Autodesk-Discusses-Makers-Industrial-Revolution-Wired

Now available for download.

Looks to be a light-weight version of Fusion. I'll give a better report once it's installed.

OK, so it is Inventor Fusion re-labeled with some slightly different UI elements. The *.123d file extension... is just a new file extension for... *.dwg. Currently if you save a *.123d file and change the extension to *.dwg it opens fine in AutoCAD and probably most CAD programs that read dwg v2010.




It seems as though Autodesk is going after the sketchup market with this at least to some extent with an online content repository.




I imagine at some point once the beta is done there will be a free version with limited file import/export and a paid for version with less restrictions. Something similar to how Sketchup opperates.

The current import/export options are limited to *.123D, *.dwg *.sat, *.stp/step, *.skp, *.obj, and *.123c
I found it intesting that there is no *.3dm import/export considering the models are nurbs geometry.




Overall, being based on Fusion, it is a very good program available for free (while it lasts...) and the content repository will hopefully grow with more users (most if not all content is Autodesk created at this point).

Drawbacks:
-Slight learning curve for marking/radial menu.
-Program is slow, really slow sometimes, especially compared to MoI3D.
-It's Autodesk, so I expect at some point a squeeze for money (nothing wrong with that, people should be paid for their work), but don't expect it to be completly free forever.
-What's up with the hard-to-make-out faces on the viewcube? What is more straight-forward than "Top, Bottom, Left, Right, Front, Back?"

One last observation: models are printable. I have not tried this out yet, and am not sure if I will, but I have seen the request here several times for print capabilities.

Hope you enjoyed my quick review.

http://www.youtube.com/user/123D#p/u/2/oimFBvqDyR8

Does exist a limit of the size of the Object building for save?
Or a limit for building?
Does exist an history?

Else very cool little first review!

There is no size limit that I am away of - other than whatever your computer can handle.
And as far as history goes - it only really keeps track of features. There is no history like SolidWorks/Inventor/other parametric modelers.

It does keep track of features and what they belong to.

Do you can erase something on this list?

The fillet engine looks really powerfull !

Hi Nick, thanks for the mini review!

That's particularly interesting that it supports some common file formats like .sat and .stp - it should be possible to exchange data with MoI using those formats.

I'll have to check it out a bit later today myself!

- Michael

the interface
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfrvEZgPiEg&feature=player_embedded

the composants
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEhUl8Eyfzo&feature=related

the rotations + composants
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSPdUevSMQQ&feature=player_embedded

It looks like Autodesk is trying to take it one step further than Sketchup with partnerships with a few 3D print shops/suppliers/etc.
They seem to be really hitting the "Maker" movement pretty hard. http://makerfaire.com/ They should have done that with Freestyle before it went belly-up. <shrug>

First impression: 402 MB download!!

Why does everything have to be so enormously bloated these days?

- Michael

Maybe all is not well optimized :)

Well, it's like half of Inventor... actually, I think it's all of the direct-edit stuff that needs a large backend to be even remotely powerful and useful. I think the other major contributor is a materials library. The servers are fast, my DL only took ~15 to 20min on my crappy AT&T DiSmaL.

It's taking me 1 hour to download on my DSL...

Something of that size just does not usually bode well for it being very usable on lower end machines.

Looking at some of the discussions on their group, it sounds like probably one big chunk of the download size is having the .NET framework included with it - that doesn't really have anything to do specifically with direct modeling, it's more likely to have to do with their choice of what system to base the UI off of.

I've worked very hard to avoid this kind of bloat with my own software, so every time I see it, it just is a kind of ugly thing to me, personally... ;)

For me increasing installer size by just 5MB is a big deal that I treat seriously, MoI v3 is going to have some kind of increase in size like that.

- Michael

Hi Nick,

> I think the other major contributor is a materials library.

That should be modularized then - something like include a more minimal set in the default download, and then have some option to download the full library later on when you might want it, if it's going to be something like 100MB in size.

- Michael

No, it's probably not going to run very well on a 3+ yr old lower-end machine and netbooks are definitely out of the picture... Like I said, it's slow, sometimes too slow on my laptop. I haven't tried it on my workstation yet.

The other annoyance is lack of custom-ability/hotkeys/keystroke shortcuts, but it is (supposedly) aimed at home-owner joe types? I am used to professional grade software that lets me configure it exactly how I want. So I am not sure if this is good or bad considering the market. I have been harping on Adsk for over a year now regarding the lack of a mouse zoom direction option in Fusion and this carries directly over to 123D. I hate the default SW and Inventor zoom direction.

Actually the 400MB wasn't even the whole thing, because the installer spent about 15 minutes downloading even more stuff and spewing it all over the place onto the computer...

Anyway, it seems to run ok on my quad core machine. I'm trying to figure out how to use it by just jumping in and trying things without reading the docs first, and I'm certainly having a lot of "WTF?" moments with various mysterious things popping up and fading away, and various little icons.

At the moment I'm trying to figure out how to just rotate the view with the mouse. Middle drag does a pan, and mouse wheel zooms (also for me in reverse direction than what I'd want), and right-drag seems to drag out a kind of magic blue amoeba snake that then slowly fades away, which is kind of cool but I was hoping there might be an easy view rotate method on one mouse button...

It will probably make a lot better sense after reading some of the documentation.

I'd say it would be a huge stretch to call this "easy to use" though... But there seems to be a lot of power in it.

- Michael