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Autodesk criticised by architects

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Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#141

Post by prox »

krautsourced wrote: post #101
thdrdt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for Revit but people are looking to switch to Blender from 3dsMax. The problem is not that Blender can't do what 3ds can but it lacks industry standard tooling compatibility. But still a lot of people in the industry are starting the switch to Blender. So change is coming.

People are always talking about switching to Blender (me included) - but they don't. Because as sad as it is, once you start to actually work with it in serious projects, you noticed all the things that hobbyists who hail Blender as the second coming never care about. I wanted to give Blender another got at replacing Cinema 4D for us (since their new licensing). I got used to the UI, though it's not nearlly as intuit…

Out of interest : did you try 2.7x or 2.8x , the latter is a major step up.

That said, C4D has always been pretty performant when I still used it, more than Maya or Max.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#142

Post by fsloth »

Animats wrote: post #35
fsloth wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite hard to develop software by just throwing money at it. And even harder when the domain is a bit niche and a bit esoteric so your hiring will be even harder. The optimal person would be a game dev with a penchant for math and a MSc in an engineering field. And you would like to have a team of these, please. Completely doable, but very much non-standard so if you have no inhouse experience to start with you'…

Autodesk has gone "software as a service". For a long time they sold boxed software. But that market is over. So they went to "software as a service". That can get very expensive for users. That's apparently the real customer complaint. I don't really know about the architectural tools. I've used Inventor, Fusion 360, and Maya. Autodesk became a leader in 3D animation software because the animation software companies…

Lots of AEC users actually would prefer subscription model. The hand-wavy economic main reason is subscriptions go from opex and purchases would go from capex and companies generally prefer opex to capex.

The business model of large AEC companies is a bit different than that of hollywood VFX subcontractors. The projects for one are already expensive and the data itself is a critical part of the deliverables (instead of just a rendering of the data).

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#143

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

jacquesm wrote: post #76
thdrdt wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Blender should be considered a true gem of the open source community. But the first UIs were confusing at best and infuriating at worst.

I am just a rudimentary 3D artist. I’ve used Cheetah3D, which is basically a “toy” app, for some branding work; but that’s about the extent of my exposure. I have never used Blender, or AutoDesk.

I know some folks that are a lot more experienced than I am, with 3D modeling, and they all say that Blender is very powerful, but the UX is incomprehensible. At least one of them is MENSA-level smart, so that says a lot.

I’m wondering if Blender is sort of like X11, where people have been declaring the end of the Microsoft/Apple hegemony for decades, or GIMP, where people have been declaring the end of the Adobe hegemony for years.

I will say that I am very impressed with the quality of the 3D work being done, these days. I see works like Worth Enough?[0] (which is actually over a decade old), and believe that 3D art is now every bit as valid as “classic” media. I suspect that the tools are a big reason for that. When oil was added to early media like tempera, the quality of art improved. I think that Blender is used for a lot of this work, so it can’t be that bad.

[0] https://www.deviantart.com/radoxist/art/Worth-enough-7324787...

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#144

Post by rightbyte »

imtringued wrote: post #96
rightbyte wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. Unfortunately since I have only used FreeCAD and no other CAD tool I may not know what you are talking about but it is possible to create a spreadsheet inside FreeCAD and give each cell an alias which makes the spreadsheet basically act like a hashmap/dic…

Ye I agree. I tried the assembly addon but I could not get the flow and it did not feel native to the app. If I remember correctly the wiki named three alternative addons.

Honestly my biggest problem with FreeCAD might be that I have already learned Solid Edge and Solid Works in school and at work.

Learning to use CAD software is a nightmare and I rather not do it again.

Since I only do wood work out of work it is just simpler to draw by hand than trying to learn FreeCAD properly to maybe learn that it can't do what I want anyway.

The "auto dimension tool" (I do not know the real name) is a magic ruler that let you change dimensions and inter object relations by just clicking stuff. It introduces constrains too. I understand why it would be a nightmare to program.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#145

Post by jasode »

Hokusai wrote: post #133
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"…

> There's easily a multi-billion dollar opportunity If I was able to build such a software that has potential on stealing Autodesk software. And Autodesk showed at my door with $50,000,000 in cash. I would sell it so fast that I would be flying in a hired private jet to some island free of the pandemic by next morning. The rational is simple. I will make up some numbers: If I have 1 chance in 1,000 to get 10 billion,…

>If I was able to build such a software that has potential on stealing Autodesk software. And Autodesk showed at my door with $50,000,000 in cash. I would sell it so fast [...] The rational is simple. I will make up some numbers: [...]

The part missing from your hypothetical scenario is that founders have egos and many would rather keep ownership of their company and don't want to work for someone else. (I made previous comment about this.[0])

Yahoo made offers to buy Google and Facebook but we obviously know that Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg did not become employees of Yahoo reporting to their boss Jerry Yang. They said "no sale".

In Facebook's case of being the buyer, Kevin Systrom of Instragram said "yes" to Zuckerberg but Ev Williams of Twitter said "no".[1]

If you're a founder of a successful startup and Autodesk/Facebook/Google come calling with an offer of (m|b)illions to buy your company, you can listen to them but you don't have to sell.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21419098

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/04/the-three-reasons-twitter-...

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#146

Post by sprafa »

keith___talent wrote: post #110
krautsourced wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are always talking about switching to Blender (me included) - but they don't. Because as sad as it is, once you start to actually work with it in serious projects, you noticed all the things that hobbyists who hail Blender as the second coming never care about. I wanted to give Blender another got at replacing Cinema 4D for us (since their new licensing). I got used to the UI, though it's not nearlly as intuit…

C4D is beautiful software - Blender is making strides, maybe 3 years it would take, but Blender is in feature acquisition mode, not improving the codebase/current functionality.

C4D is really good and Maxon has been decent in making updates for it imo. They are listening to their users and updating stuff, even if more slowly than people would like.

They’ve also done of the best lateral moves of all time by buying Redshift, which is slowly becoming a serious production renderer second only to Arnold imo.

I have no idea why people have such strong reactions against the subscription model - first of all you can still purchase a permanent license of C4D, second of all, the sub model is way cheaper and actually helped me a ton since I live in a poorer country.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#147

Post by anticensor »

fireattack wrote: post #107
jacquesm wrote: post #27

Interesting that the criticism is levelled at Autodesk 'the company' rather than that it admits what people don't want to say: Autocad is pretty good, and it will take a large and well funded entity to take it on. Using anti-trust tools may be the right tool here but the industry as a whole was quick to adapt to Autocad long before it became a dominant player. Autocad - not Autodesk - has many 100's of years of devel…

>Autocad - not Autodesk - has many 100's of years of development done to it What does this mean? Wikipedia said the first version of AutoCAD released at 1982, and it was based on a software from 1977.

Man-years, not calendar years.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#148

Post by sprafa »

prox wrote: post #138
clusterfish wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.?

I only know 2 parallels, one is Blender, which is really gaining traction. Lots of huge sponsorships, increasing adoption. Thats the open source road. In Adobeland, slowly Affinity Photo and Designer are gaining foothold. I don’t think at this point it is any danger to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. But a Affinity version 2 might be pushing the monopoly back.

After Effects also has a competitor with Cavalry now. Beta is out now.

Adobe is the Autodesk or 2D world. I’ve heard they don’t even have Dev teams in the US anymore, for the most part they have teams in India. Profit maximisation at its worst, since now they no longer deliver meaningful updates to their software. I haven’t had a significant update for Premiere/After Effects that made any sense in at least half a decade. If you go into reddit/r/editors you’ll see it’s full of people working their way out of Premiere, which is garbage software.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#149

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

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…

The gold standard around these parts is purported to be Tekla Structures. No affiliation, just a structural steel guru who’s happy to work with the fabrication drawings it spits out.

I can spot Autodesk fabrication draws a mile away. Either the steel detailers don’t know how to configure it properly, it, as I suspect, it’s a steaming pile of dumpster fires.

I used Autocad for 2D CAD quite a bit, and I don’t see the appeal. There are competing products at a fraction of the cost.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#150

Post by alkonaut »

If people didn’t use Autodesk’s software I wouldn’t have to pay a surreal amount of money to use their binary API so my cad program can write DWG.

But the fact is DWG is the de facto standard in so many engineering disciplines, and that probably won’t change. The format is also so convoluted and complex that I doubt even Autodesk could ever write a new implementation of it. If someone succeeds, they will still keep changing it slightly every year, so a third party implementation would always be slightly behind.

This type of moat is exactly the type of moat every business dreams of and tries to create, and the only reason it’s bad when Autodesk does it is because they are so big it actually hurts competition on a large scale.

I can’t see a good “open” replacement for DWGs (DXF, IFC, ...) on the horizon, sadly.

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