Autodesk Mockup 360: Design Collaboration Simplified

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28

Special thanks to our Guest Post Author, Peter White.

Peter White is a Product Manager for 360 manufacturing services at Autodesk in San Francisco.

Now, onto the show...

Autodesk Mockup 360

With the announcement of several new Autodesk manufacturing cloud services a couple weeks ago you may have noticed an interesting one that aims to improve the way people work together on CAD models. Mockup 360 is all about easy collaboration on your 3D models….with everyone: suppliers, customers, engineers, designers, even your non-CAD proficient friends can collaborate on 3D models! It does not aim to replace your existing CAD tools, but rather replace the inadequate tools people currently use to share CAD data like e-mail, flash drives, FTP, and even generic online file storage (like Dropbox).

The first thing most people discover about Mockup 360 is how easy it is to get started, quick download, no install, login with your A360 account and you are up and running.

The sample mockup after you log in is this cool RC car. It’s really easy to drop pins on the model to share notes with others in context, giving design feedback or requesting changes. These notes also serve as a running history of the design decisions you make.

Once you’ve played around with a mockup yourself for a while you’ll want to bring some other people in on the fun. To do that, you can just choose to add a collaborator and enter the e-mail address of the person you want to invite. Since you won’t want everyone messing with your designs you can set what level of access different collaborators will have: View, View & Edit, or Administer.

Getting data into Mockup is easy since you can insert practically any type of CAD data (Inventor, Solidworks, STP, IGES, the list goes on….) into your Mockup from either your desktop or A360. You choose the file and the cloud takes care of any processing needed to get it into your mockup! Here is an example where a chassis from Navisworks, a housing from Inventor, an engine from Solidworks, and a bucket in STP format have all been brought together for one mockup of a front loader. Any engineer who has had to work on a project with many types of CAD data will appreciate the value of this.

Another major convenience is that Mockup 360 is fully integrated into Autodesk 360 so you can see all your mockups right alongside your CAD data and share or open mockups directly from there.