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Autodesk criticised by architects

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Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#61

Post by thdrdt »

jacquesm wrote: post #52
thdrdt wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't read the article (server does not respond) but I believe it is not only about Autocad. I hear people complain about Revit and 3dsMax as well. What I mostly hear is: very expensive, lots of bugs, lags with new features and improvements. The software gets the job done and is in the industry standards but people are starting to look somewhere else.

CAD software is hard . That's why it is expensive and has lots of bugs. It is super easy to make something that is 5% or so of a CAD program that will look impressive, will be super fast and feels like a huge improvement. And then you add the other 95%. By that time it will be just as slow as the incumbent, even more buggy and the interface will look like crap and will be hard to learn. As the author of a CAD/CAM pac…

Well I hear a lot of praise about Fusion 360. So it's not all bad.

And I don't agree with your statement. Blender is a great example for this. Although it is not constraint based it is a full feature package which is very fast. Compare this to 3dsMax which is exactly what you describe.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#62

Post by Keyframe »

sfvisser wrote: post #20
CaliforniaKarl wrote: post #6

I'm surprised nobody in the Eurozone has raised similar issues about Adobe.

Europe should build their own software. Instead of complaining about US monopolies the EU should stimulate innovative startups right here. Create an environment where talent doesn’t flee to the US. And if it’s not about creating multi-billion dollar/euro companies, but civil liberties and data protection: just invest some spare pennies in open source alternatives. The only reason US (and Chinese) tech companies form…

Isn't ArchiCAD european?

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#63

Post by ur-whale »

There's so many bad things to say about AutoDesk beyond the unhelpful/broken "move to the cloud" ...

But if I had to pick one, it's AutoDesk's systematic attempt to build a closed ecosystem à la FaceBook / Apple.

They do it, among other things, via tight control of the data file format, and an ever-changing unpublished specification for those.

There was a time when there was decent exporters in AutoDesk products, so you could move the data out to other (better) tools.

That era is long gone, they have been removing exporter modules to all but their own formats.

Getting a DXF or DWF into any other app in 2020 is a freaking nightmare.

One thing that I find really frustrating about this is the bitrot that ensues. Better not hope to load work you did 10-15 years ago to get something useful out of it. That use case is not part of the AutoDesk plan.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#64

Post by ur-whale »

poseva wrote: post #50

As an structural engineer and former Autodesk user, I completely agree with the letter. I always saw Autodesk as a company where software goes to die a slowly painful death. It started with Autodesk Structural Detaling. They bought the software from a small company, renamed the product... and that was it. It had the same bugs release after release... we as customers tried our best to report the bugs, but nobody liste…

> Have a bright future together

Until they get bought by AutoDesk

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#65

Post by bschne »

saeranv wrote: post #46
jacquesm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is. I've seen it used professionally at more than one company.

Depends on the firm, but it's definitely used. Specifically Rhino/Grasshopper get used a lot for concept, schematic design, and then Revit gets used for design development and onward, especially at companies that work a lot with complex geometry (Zaha, SHoP).

That makes sense, I have no clue about how architects actually work but I imagine Revit et al. have a ton of features that you would probably miss in Rhino when it gets to working out the nitty-gritty details of floorplans, generating section drawings, or working with BIM features?

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#66

Post by rightbyte »

donquichotte wrote: post #23
muska3 wrote: post #9

The thing is, with Fusion 360, they created a product so good no one can match them at this point. It's pretty remarkable how fun and easy it is to use compared to Pro/E and Solidworks. With regards to Revit, I've never used this software, but I wonder if it's a similar situation.

It's also remarkable that while in many areas with "theory-heavy" software development (e.g. compilers), the open-source solutions are arguably better than the proprietary ones, this is not at all the case for mechanical CAD software. I wonder whether the overlap of people who can program, people who know enough math to develop a mechanical CAD software and the people who care about mechanical CAD is just too small f…

I guess there is a silly amount of work to make a usefull CAD program. FreeCAD etc has no "auto dimension tool" where you can manipulate dimension or set inter object constraints as in even the worst of the commercial CADs Solid Edge. No assembly either or sheet bending tool.

I tried to use FreeCAD but gave up. It is too limited even for simple designs. I would rather use paper and ruler since you can't easely change stuff anyway.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#67

Post by nomercy400 »

asiachick wrote: post #53
numpad0 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want to establish a steady income for a stable and feature complete tool. They want to fund a bunch of developers to maintain the features customers enjoy, or catch up with breaking Windows changes they should be paid to fix anyway, as reasons why subscriptions cost the price they charge.

> They want to fund a bunch of developers to maintain the features customers enjoy or catch up with breaking Windows changes they should be paid to fix anyway That's what $$$ upgrades are for. No need for a subscription if I'm happy without the new features and happy using it on an old OS. I'm happy to pay for new features I might actually use. I'm happy to pay for upgrades for a new OS. As an example though, I used…

Why not keep using CS2 (or up to CS5), if you are not using newer features?

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#68

Post by pfranz »

BossingAround wrote: post #48
esperent wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly. I use 3ds Max occasionally and there's no other piece of software I've ever used that crashes so often. Every time I perform an action that I haven't tried before, I fully expect the program to crash and then I'll have to spend a few hours searching for workarounds. Working with large models or scenes takes so long to reload that every crash represents around 10 minutes of lost time, and I've easily had…

You talk about large models or scenes; I'm under the impression that in the film industry, they'd have workstations with hundreds GBs of RAM and double graphics. I'm just wondering, could the issue lie in 3ds Max being optimized for a different beast of a machine..?

I haven't used 3ds Max much. My impression is that it is more heavily used in games and maybe TV/commercial work. I have over a decade of experience with Maya, which was purchased by Autodesk in 2005 and looks to have been used on every Best VFX Oscar winner since 1997. Machine capacity only relates to the amount of data you're working with (workstations can have between 16-128GB of RAM and may have a gaming GPU or a pro GPU). The crashiness often comes from other things. Maya likes to corrupt its preferences. Complaints against Maya mirror the complaints I see for 3ds Max and their CAD software.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#69

Post by clusterfish »

imgabe wrote: post #5

There's easily a multi-billion dollar opportunity for anyone who can unseat Autodesk from the building design industry. Revit is the standard, and while it's improved a lot over the years it's still so ridiculously far from where it could be. I don't think people in software realize how incredibly far behind software tooling is in other industries. Take an idea like "version control for X" or "package manager for X"…

It seems to me that breaking into this industry, that is, defeating network effects that work to Autodesk's favor, would actually be harder than building the superior product itself.

Anyone on the inside, am I wrong? Would your company readily switch to a superior product, retrain its employees for it, deal with business partners who haven't heard of that new product, etc.?

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#70

Post by iagovar »

jacquesm wrote: post #30
sfvisser wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe should build their own software. Instead of complaining about US monopolies the EU should stimulate innovative startups right here. Create an environment where talent doesn’t flee to the US. And if it’s not about creating multi-billion dollar/euro companies, but civil liberties and data protection: just invest some spare pennies in open source alternatives. The only reason US (and Chinese) tech companies form…

Europe does build its own software. And anything even remotely successful then gets acquired by some US entity.

This has been a common theme. Dassault owns CATIA and Solidworks tough, and they've been used a lot in Europe.
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