Fusion 360 Machine Simulation Preview

 In October of 2020, Autodesk acquired technology from a company named CAMplete.  The technology was capable of several functions, one of the most notable was running your CAM simulation in the context of the CNC machine.  When I heard of the acquisition, I was pretty excited because I knew that this would be a great addition to the CAM workflows I was familiar with in Fusion 360 and Inventor.  My only questions were how the functionality was going to be rolled out to Fusion 360 and/or Inventor and what it would look like.

I believe we have seen the beginning of that technology being rolled out to Fusion 360.  There is nothing in the documentation that says this is the CAMplete technology, but it is pretty obvious that the new Machine Simulation Preview in Fusion 360 is based on that CAMplete technology.  

Since this is a preview feature, you will have to enable it in your Fusion 360 Preferences.  At the bottom of the menu in the left pane of the Preferences dialog is Preview Features.  If you click on that, you can then look through all the preview features or filter by Workspace.  You will be looking for the function called Machine Simulation.

Once that is enabled in your Machine Library dialog, you will now see a filter option for Simulation Ready.

If a machine that is simulation-ready is defined in a Setup, you will then see the machine when the Setup is selected in the browser or when you are simulating a setup.

That is all you need to do, you can just program your toolpaths like you would normally do.  I really like this new function.  I think it will give CNC programmers more clarity into what the toolpath will look like when running the program on the machine.

If you would like to see this preview function in action; here is a video demo I created to show how this works.