Experience with Fusion 360 MANUFACTURING integration of Formlabs printers?

I designed a prototype in Fusion 360 and printed my parts directly out of the DESIGN module. This worked fine so far with invoking Preform from the tool bar. Now I prepare the model for manufacturing, which is milling in my case. While exploring the MANUFACTURING module I learned, that you can create a SETUP for additive manufacturing and my Form 3 is included in the preset machines.

I really like the idea to be able to make adjustments in Fusion 360 to the original model before printing and manage various manufacturing models in the MANUFACTURING space without changing the original design.

However this part of Fusion seems to be quite buggy and not very well thought out. The placement of parts is clumsy and if you have multiple parts in one component you can only move them all at once. And once you move something the depicted build platform just vanishes and leaves you guessing, where you placed the parts. And you cannot call Preform directly from the manufacturing model like you can in the DESIGN space. You have to export your work to a .form file and load it manually into Preform. That in itself wouldn’t be that big of an issue, but in Preform you cannot do anything with the data but sending it straight to the printer. No movement, no support structures. Very disappointing.

Or am I just to dumb to understand how this is supposed to work? Anyone here using the Fusion 360 MANUFACTURING to print on a Formlabs printer?

Thank you for starting this conversation. I am happy to help clarify some things and make sure we fix issues that may come up as a part of this discussion.

In Fusion 360’s DESIGN workspace, it is always a good practice to create components for each part. In Manufacturing we move / orient bodies based on which component they belong to.

When you first enter the MANUFACTURE workspace of Fusion 360, you automatically get a copy of your design this is generally named CAM Root assuming you did not save / name your design. Before creating additive setup, it is always a good idea to create a “Manufacturing model” for each Additive setup. Each “MFG model” is also a copy of the “CAM root”. this way you can use the MFG model 1 as the source of Additive setup 1 vs MFG model 2 as the source of Additive Setup 2 etc.

Sualp Ozel
Senior Product Manager
Fusion 360 Additive MFG.

If at any point you need to make a change to the model for manufacturing purposes, you can do that by editing the manufacturing model.

Here is an example edit where i am adding a couple features for manufacturing purpose without modifying the actual design.

The loss of the visualization of the build platform after moving components in MANUFACTURE workspace within an Additive Setup sounds like bug. I just tested it and did not experience the issue on my end, but we will keep an eye on it. If you keep experiencing this issue on your end there is a simple workaround. Simply turn the platform visibility off and back on again using the “eye” icon next to the machine in the browser.
Visibility
And finally don’t forget that you can also create support structures with all the customizations allowed in the support dialogs directly in Fusion.

You can then save those as templates,

and reuse them in future additive setups.

Wow nice breakdown. I just recently switched to using Fusion 360 and this is very helpful.

Still getting use to it.

:slight_smile:

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