I work in industrial design and the use of Alias for surface modeling is quite prevalent (and has been for decades). It used to be called PowerAnimator, and marking menus were first added somewhere around the release of v6 (1995). Alias/Wavefront actually incorporated this functionality into their first release of Maya several years later, trying to innovate on the feature further with the use of hotbox menus [1][2].
Since Alias corp. was later acquired by Autodesk in the early 2000's, you can imagine Fusion 360 as being the symbolical evolution of it. Especially considering the current Alias UI has not changed much since 1999! [3][4]
If interested more on this topic, fun HCI bath-time reading: Gord Kurtenbach's 1993 dissertation on The Design and Evaluation of Marking Menus [5]. Not surprisingly, from Alias/Wavefront he went on to head Autodesk Research for most of the 2000's.
Cool, thanks- I had forgotten about Alias before Maya. I was introduced to radial when Maya came out (somebody demo'd in, I was interested by couldn't afford it).
I think of Fusion 360 as being more descended from Inventor (which defined a lot of my early expectations for 3d modelling). I'm only a hobbyist and I used Fusion 360 with large (mesh) surfaces (it got significantly better at meshes recently) and it definitely got clunky, although the performance is fine when working with parameteric brep objects.
I've been using Autodesk products (starting with 2D AutoCAD on a 286 running DOS) for quite a while (35 years).
I think of Fusion 360 as being more descended from Inventor (which defined a lot of my early expectations for 3d modelling). I'm only a hobbyist and I used Fusion 360 with large (mesh) surfaces (it got significantly better at meshes recently) and it definitely got clunky, although the performance is fine when working with parameteric brep objects.
I've been using Autodesk products (starting with 2D AutoCAD on a 286 running DOS) for quite a while (35 years).