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Autodesk criticised by architects

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Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#251

Post by Dork1234 »

dirtyid wrote: post #93

Most buildings today can still be effective designed and constructed from pen+paper drafting technology that adhere pre computer-revolution standards. They're not F35s. My understanding from architects/professors 20 years ago is the education pipelines has dramatically shifted away from practical training (i.e just solid drafting skills) while remaining some of the longer professional/masters programs. Most graduate…

Depends on the firm. Zaha Hadid software requirements would make your head spin. You are clearly not producing any of her (and her teams) buildings with only Pen and Paper.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#252

Post by Dork1234 »

fsloth wrote: post #8
bfuclusion wrote: post #3

I can 100% believe that Autodesk isn't great at responding to customer requests, but presumably these firms would have enough budget to pay for devs to write a solution that works for them. Including making an open file format, EU specific data centers, etc. It would probably even take less time and money than trying to lobby the EU to legislate what they want.

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'…

You do realize the whole history of Revit started with a small team at an Architecture Firm. You have to start somewhere, I think bringing software back into architecture firms could be a good thing, even if it is just Grasshopper. All buildings are starting to look the same, and I blame the fact the tools (Revit) lead you in the direction of making those styles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMW_Architects

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#253

Post by alkonaut »

rurban wrote: post #211
alkonaut wrote: post #150

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 c…

LibreDWG comes to rescue, and for better formats JSON is widely used.

There are multiple open reverse-engineer efforts, but Autodesk changes the format every single year, and customers expect to be able to read drawings immediately in the latest format. This is deliberate by Autodesk I think.

LibreDWG is also GPL I believe with no option for commercial?

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#254

Post by cenal »

mattkevan wrote: post #225
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…

> I always saw Autodesk as a company where software goes to die a slowly painful death. There's a really nice lightweight vector design app for Mac and iOS called Graphic [0]. It was one of the first fully-featured design tools for iOS, and still the best to use. It was bought by Autodesk back in 2015, who promptly did nothing with it at all. Pretty much all development ground to a halt. From being updated every few…

Adobe bought Macromedia and killed off fireworks. I still run the last version they made.

I know your pain.

Once you learn how to do everything in an editor and they stop supporting it you need to either reinvest time into learning a new editor or in supporting the obsolete one.

I’ve chosen the latter for now mostly because there doesn’t seem to be a clear winner in the market and I hate to keep investing time in learning new workflows every couple of years to do the same task when I can just keep a VM operating to support an obsolete editor.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#255

Post by user5994461 »

clusterfish wrote: post #69
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.?

I think not, because making the product is much harder than that. Lots of difficult 3D work, reverse engineer very complex file formats, specialized domain knowledge for some features. There are work for a whole team easily, it's really not a two people startup.

Selling the product to some smaller companies is probably easier. I have some family working in industrial drawing, I think it's doable if you sell hard enough, as long as the software is as good and can import and export seamlessly.

I think it's quite doable overall but it's a 10 year endeavor. Need to start with $10M and a couple developers and play the long game before you can replace autocad at Boeing/Airbus.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#256

Post by jfindley »

twelvechairs wrote: post #182
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…

Its not just Autodesk, all big software shops tend towards low innovation. Look at Adobe, ESRI, even Microsoft office etc. Core products often haven't changed appreciably in 20 years - the business/money isn't in innovation, it is in having proprietary file formats that are industry standards and bundling big packages of software together that makes it hard to shift off the platform.

Whilst that's true, there's also a question of degree. Revit, which is the source of complaint here, takes long enough to open your file you might as well go make a sandwich while it does so. The developers only found out that CPUs have multiple cores somewhere around 2017, and still haven't really worked out how to actually use more than one core for anything much. They still appear to be largely unclear what a "GPU" is, so don't bother putting anything fancy in your workstation.

It also likes to crash a lot, often taking a bunch of work with it. It's slow in a way that's probably entirely foreign to most readers of HN, and even compared to things like adobe photoshop or ptc creo, the rate of improvements is most kindly described as "glacial". In 2020, revit finally learned what a pdf was for example. Sure, large enterprise software development moves slowly. But there's slow, and then there's Autodesk.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#257

Post by whywhywhywhy »

sprafa wrote: post #148
prox wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dec…

Makes me actually feel a little sick with how bad After Effects is these days, used to be such a godlike application 10 years ago.

Cavalry is interesting and does a lot of things a modern professional app should do but it really isn't anywhere close to an After Effects competitor.

AE isn't just for animating some vectors, AE is non-destructive Photoshop with a timeline it's possibilities are absolutely vast.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#258

Post by fsloth »

rurban wrote: post #216
fsloth wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Getting a DXF or DWF into any other app in 2020 is a freaking nightmare." At least you can do it on a non-Autodesk affiliated software stack that more-or-less works https://www.opendesign.com/

Nowadays you don't have to pay ODA anymore when can use GPL-3 LibreDWG. In the end opensource CAD will win, but it's still a long march.

If the options are to hook up to GPL-3 or pay ODA quite few software products probably go the ODA way still. ODA has quite a large development org to support their stack. I presume if maximum feature parity with DXF was a requirement then ODA would still win.

Open source is really great for innovation. I don't see much innovation or excitement in reverse engineering a stone-age proprietary black-box format.

It would be much better if those efforts were spent in an open source data interchange format.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#259

Post by snoopen »

syshum wrote: post #186
twelvechairs wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not just Autodesk, all big software shops tend towards low innovation. Look at Adobe, ESRI, even Microsoft office etc. Core products often haven't changed appreciably in 20 years - the business/money isn't in innovation, it is in having proprietary file formats that are industry standards and bundling big packages of software together that makes it hard to shift off the platform.

I agree, but to defend them somewhat long established products like MS Office suffer from 2 competing interests, people that want innovation and people that want stability For my core users any change at all to MS Office is met with frustration and huge amounts of backlash, even something as simple at changing the icon shading is a problem Many people are robotic when it comes to using these products, going through t…

MS Office, or at least Word and PowerPoint have lacked innovation to the user experience on a fundamental level. Years ago they overhauled the UI because people weren't using many of the features on offer. What they failed to do is make those features easy to use. Prime example is numbered lists in Word which is still unnecessarily complicated to use. This isn't a compatibility issue, purely UX. Numbered lists are also buggy, like they were 15 years ago, and are still the best way to corrupt your document.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#260

Post by mroche »

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…

> I always saw Autodesk as a company where software goes to die a slowly painful death.

https://www.cadnauseam.com/autodesk-graveyard/

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