Start Strong in Autodesk Fusion: Settings, Projects, and Team Collaboration

Autodesk® has rebuilt the Fusion® home screen, and it now looks and works a lot more like Inventor® and AutoCAD®. That's good news for anyone moving between products. It also means the way you set up hubs, projects, and preferences has shifted since the last time many teams looked closely.

In our recent webcast, a Hagerman Solutions Engineer walked through the new interface live, from the home screen to hub administration to the settings worth locking in before your team starts modeling. Here's what we covered.

First Things First: Getting Access

Fusion lives in your Autodesk account. Sign in at manage.autodesk.com, open Products and Services, and you'll find Fusion listed with your other products. You can run it as a trial, but an assigned subscription license unlocks more of the tools and settings covered below.

One quick note: it's no longer Fusion 360. Autodesk rebranded it simply as Autodesk Fusion.

The New Home Screen

The home screen is now your central hub for data. A browser panel on the left gives you a home button, the hubs you belong to, new and open commands, My Fusion (what you've worked on recently), your project list, and Autodesk's sample files for design, CAM, and electronics. The main area shows recent project files, with search across the top.

Select any file and the Details panel opens on the right. It shows properties, the components used, where else the part is used, and which drawings exist for the model. You can open those drawings directly from the panel and pin it in place if you want it open all the time.

The home screen also lets you set defaults without digging through menus:

• Default workspace: start in Design, Manufacturing, or Electronics.
• Design type: choose part, assembly, or hybrid. Hybrid works like Fusion's original approach, with some components built in a single design and others brought into an assembly.
• Units and mouse behavior: set Fusion to navigate like Inventor, SolidWorks, PowerMill, Alias, or native Fusion.

Hubs, Projects, and the Web Client

A hub is your team's shared space. You can belong to several (one for R&D and one for production, for example) with a different role in each, and set whichever you use most as your default.

Projects in Fusion are not the same as projects in Inventor. Rather than a file that points to a location, a Fusion project is a cloud location plus the rules for what users can do inside it. Folders and subfolders keep things organized within each project.

There are three ways to join a hub:

• Automatically, when your email domain matches the hub owner's.
• On first launch, through prompts that walk you into your organization's hub.
• By email invitation. New users will create an Autodesk account through the link. Check spam folders if an invite doesn't show up.

Every hub also has a web client that opens in your browser. From there you can view designs, add markups and comments, track updates, and set notifications for join requests, uploads, and @mentions. The built-in viewer supports section analysis, exploded views, and first-person navigation.

Team Administration

Hub administrators get an admin console with real control over who gets in and what they can do. Key settings include:

• Renaming the hub (the hub URL can't be changed, at least for now)
• File sharing permissions
• Approved email domains and auto-approval for new members
• Design reservation, which locks a design to one user while it's open on their system, with no extra software required
• Inviting, activating, and deactivating members, and controlling who else can invite
• Project-level roles, up to Folder Admin, which adds the ability to permanently delete folders and projects

Preferences Worth Setting Up Front

Fusion's Preferences (under your account icon, top right) are its application options. A few deserve attention before your team gets rolling:

• Start experience: open to the home screen, or jump straight into a new part, assembly, or hybrid design.
• Modeling approach: parametric, direct, or prompt each time.
• Default units: set them for each workspace. Watch the details: choosing inches sets mass to ounce-mass, not pound-mass.
• Workspace settings: sheet metal rule libraries, post processors and toolpath options for manufacturing, drawing templates, and default materials.
• Preview features: opt in to tools Autodesk is still testing.

Preferences also show how cloud credits (tokens) work. Simple stress analysis runs free. Thermal, thermal stress, shape optimization, buckling, generative design, and large cloud renders consume tokens. Your Hagerman account team can help you plan for those.

Autodesk Assistant and Design Shortcuts

Coming from another CAD system? Press S to open design shortcuts and search for any tool by name. Each workspace has its own set, and you can pin your favorites to the toolbar (drag them off to remove them).

The Autodesk Assistant is Autodesk's built-in AI. It's still growing, but already useful:

• Tell me: explains concepts like an over-constrained sketch or adaptive clearing, using Fusion documentation.
• Show me: finds and summarizes information in your active design, like fastener count, assembly mass, or unrouted nets in a PCB.
• Guide me: gives step-by-step walkthroughs, such as how to add a 2 mm fillet. It shows you how rather than doing it for you.

Capabilities depend on your license. Paid subscriptions get the full set, while trials don't include AI visualizations.

Build Your Team's Fusion Skills

A clean setup is only the starting point. Our Fusion Design New User course takes you from never having opened Fusion to producing production drawings, covering sketches, 3D features, parameters, design history, patterns, joints and motion, and multi-component designs. We also offer a Fusion Sheet Metal class. See the current training schedule or ask us to schedule a session for your team.

If Fusion is one piece of a larger data picture, we can help there too. Autodesk Vault handles Inventor, other CAD formats, and Office files, and Vault PLM connects Vault Professional with Fusion Manage. Hagerman's own Connection tools fill the gaps, including QVP Connection for search-view-print access without CAD, Backup Connection for Vault backup monitoring, and Project Connection for managing project copies.

Not sure how your hubs, projects, and permissions should be structured? Talk with a Hagerman advisor. We'll help you set up Fusion the way your team actually works.

Watch the Full Webcast: