What! A House in Fusion?

One of my responsibilities is product design, working on injection molded nursery products. I started my career in software and IT, so learning Computer Aided Design (CAD) was a mid-career pivot. And it is different that anything I'd done before, more visual and spatial.

For mechanical design, I was an early adopter of Autodesk Fusion. The hype train on this product is strong, but that wasn't why I picked it. I was/am a Mac guy and SolidWorks isn't natively supported there. So I ran with Fusion.

Fusion is cloud native, unlike older CAD offerings, offering web embed links and cloud team services. SolidWorks is industry standard (at least in my area) and innovation begets innovations, so for all I know they have similar features now. I don't track it. Here's an Fusion embed:

At first, I only dabbled in CAD. It wasn't until recently, that I focused on proactive and comprehensive design for our products. I ended up taking a bunch of classes in the Computer Aided Design & Drafting (CADD) program at Portland Community College (PCC). This is an experience I highly recommend.

Autodesk has a generous Educational offering, and PCC uses Fusion in the core classes (such as fabrication and simulation), while still requiring classes in Inventor and SolidWorks.

In a Fusion class, I wanted to design a tiny house as my final project. Fusion is for mechanical design (MCAD) and not architecture like Revit or Archicad. Stubborn me wanted to do it anyway.

My design ended up with hundreds of components. I finished it on vacation in a hotel room with an ocean view, connecting my Mac to a USB-C external portable monitor. Loading that assembly crushed Fusion and I stopped counting the crashes after a dozen or so. I dutifully reported every single one.

My favorite part of this project was the resources I was forced to find to learn how to model a tiny home. There really are amazing visual guides to construction. My primary source was, The Complete Visual Guide to Building a House. Foundations, trusses, rafters, rake, sheathing, decking etc. There is a lot of specialized vocabulary in housing.

Naturally the project feedback from my instructor was, "Wow... you know there is software for this right?"