I started a new job back in January for a company that doesn’t really have many people who are great with computers. This year they are going to buy a CNC plasma table and a 3D printer. More than likely I will be tapped to operate them and come up with designs and such.
For the use cases outlined above (plasma table and 3D printing) what would be the preferred software suite? I have some experience with Fusion360 but a friend of mine who is a mechanical engineer recommended Autodesk. The cost of Autodesk is significantly more than Fusion so if it is a better software I’d need some pretty compelling reasons to justify it.
I have not tried autodesk, but I use Fusion all the time, for additive and subtractive MFG its great.
If you are needing full CAD files to hand off to a factory or something like that I would probably go Autodesk because translating a sketch to a printable object is easy enough, but its not really something you hand off to other companies and organizations.
What do you mean with Autodesk? They are a company that also makes fusion
If you mean inventor. It depends on how simple the models are and how often you use it. For small stuff fusion is fine, but if you need to work with larger assemblies and cooperate with others, inventor is worth the money. (Or SolidWorks, they are pretty much the same)
Fusion360 just force-upgraded itself on my windows 8.1 system, the only windows i have at home, and no i can no-longer open it or access my file because “os is unsupported”.
Between this and no linux support, i would recommend staying far away from cloud based product like 360