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Autodesk criticised by architects

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Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#331

Post by runxel »

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…

You're funny.

Nobody cares about AutoCAD any longer. For whatever task you have at hand there are better alternatives. Only people stuck in a time loop use it.

That being said: The AEC has a deeply troubling problem – It's full of people living in yesterday. There is no innovation. Technical advances are ignored.

In the aviation business CAD was started as early as the 60s, with the auto business following soon. Architects still drafted buildings with a pencil in 2D until the early 2000s. There is just so much resistance burdening everything.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#332

Post by jessaustin »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #214
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean something a bit like - what's the word? - a patent? That won't solve the problem, because this is not a software problem. It's an economic problem. To maximise profit you need to dominate a market by 1) locking out competitors 2) forcing customers to give you money 3) spending as little as possible on continued development. This happens because that's how capitalism works. It's an inevitable consequence. Eff…

Excuse me. This is not intrinsically how capitalism works. Capitalism can exist in free and non-free markets. Capitalism in a free market is efficient if property rights which exist and are enforced, there are low barriers to entry, and there are low transaction costs. You have just described capitalism with barriers to entry. At this point you have left free-market capitalism, and entered a world with no particular…

Before prescribing remedial education, perhaps you could consider the root word of "capitalism" a bit more carefully? "Capital" has its own interests, but those don't include free markets, which latter I hope we can agree is more important for the innovation upon which humanity relies. Properly understood, all "capitalism" is eventually revealed as what you're calling "crony capitalism". Temporarily the owners of capital and their sockpuppets might have to pretend to value free markets. Unless the local political or ethical system is quite incorruptible, capitalists' true colors are eventually seen. After all, they have the money, by definition. Many people will do unethical things (e.g. write tax codes under which corporations pay no taxes) in exchange for money.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#333

Post by runxel »

aut0away wrote: post #2

It is a bit of a monopoly. I always respected people who used Rhino, while secretly thinking of them as needlessly contrarian. Now I just respect them. Besides the free Fusion 360 moat, Autodesk owns 3DS Max and Maya. Enough said.

Fun fact: Everybody who says "We are not using Rhino" lies.

All the big studios might be using Autodesk products in the front, but I know of some who have a senior engineer who has a secret PC in some attic with Rhino installed. If you need more complex tasks to be done the engineer goes to "smoke a cig". ;)

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#334

Post by runxel »

bschne wrote: post #14
aut0away wrote: post #2

It is a bit of a monopoly. I always respected people who used Rhino, while secretly thinking of them as needlessly contrarian. Now I just respect them. Besides the free Fusion 360 moat, Autodesk owns 3DS Max and Maya. Enough said.

Is rhino actually used for serious CAD work? From what I‘ve read/heard I thought it was mostly something used in student projects or design explorations because of grasshopper‘s visual programming functionality

Depends on the industry.

For automotive and even ship design a lot of studios are using it (even not openly, but in a "secret" manner).

In AEC many students nowadays use it during university. Some offices use it as well, and if only for Grasshopper. GH is a really great piece of software and you can e.g. even use it with Archicad nowadays.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#335

Post by runxel »

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…

Well, we do, and we are pretty successful.

Archicad is Hungarian, Allplan is German, Tekla originates from Finnland.

(Also please note: the offices which signed the open letter to Autodesk are mostly UK-based, so strictly speaking are not members of the EU ;))

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#336

Post by ravenstine »

pfranz wrote: post #68
BossingAround wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maya is one of the most horrible pieces software I've used. It's also simultaneously one of the best because it's so feature rich.

That said, it's truly horrendous in a lot of ways. Simple operations can crash it for no apparent reason, even when poly count is low. Perfectly clean geometry can get corrupted after reopening a scene. Basic features are clearly neglected and have serious flows; the booleans are the worst out of any 3D modeling software. The most of the import plugins are a joke, forcing you to use a separate program to convert geometry to something basic like OBJ. The context menu on right-click is STILL terrible in the year 2020. Some settings seem to never stick. Little things like the nav-cube got removed with Viewport 2.0, which was supposed to make everything better. NURBS modeling sucks so bad that most studios don't even use it and prefer subdiv modeling. Until recently, scene objects didn't have UUIDs.

Sad thing is that Autodesk has a monopoly over this scene. It's kind of amazing that the industry tolerates this. Then again, I still use it to this day because I'm so used to it.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#337

Post by mihaaly »

chrstphrknwtn wrote: post #201
mihaaly wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like economists run the company not engineers - Boeing comes to mind by some reason - where in place of competing with real inventions the money making has sole preference so killing of competition early using big piles of money is a perfectly decent and honorable way to go. Not something novel that we have never heard of btw.

Sounds like accountants run the company.

Yes, sorry, that is right!

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#338

Post by runxel »

Dork1234 wrote: post #223

I do not feel bad about these Architects, they knew exactly what Autodesk was going to do with Revit when they acquired the company. Autodesk did the same thing with AutoCAD. Reduce innovation, and increased subscription cost. These architecture firms need to diversify the their software toolset, have more in house developers, push for more open standards, and fund open source tools. Instead they take the easy route…

Was reyling on Autodesk a bad idea? Sure it was!

Do you have any idea of the AEC industry? Does not seem so.

Funny enough, those big offices signing the open letter are so big they actually have in-house devs. But this is only feasible for the top 0.1% of offices.

Architecture is badly paid and most offices are in the size range of 15–30 people working there. Also CAD programs belong to the most complex software imaginable with really big code bases grown over many years. It's not like you "just write a new one and make it FOSS". You HAVE to rely on others. Also most architects (and even engineers for that matter) are scared by code. They want someone to call and yell at, not looking for workarounds or making a bugfix.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#339

Post by clusterfish »

sitkack wrote: post #213
clusterfish wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not against subscription pricing in principle, but in practice newly introduced subscription pricing pretty much always ends up being significantly more expensive than original pricing, and that's just greed. Also there is often no longer an option to stop paying and just continue using your version, even if you've been paying for the subscription for years. Or they only let you use an old version so you'll need…

Funny you mention JetBrains, they have the best subscription model of any software company I have used. You pay a yearly fee to get the latest stuff within that year and you can use the current or any previous version forever if you stop paying. There was a bit of mob forming with JetBrains first announced the subscription model and the current one developed by working with their customers. This subscription model, c…

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

If you don't renew your annual subscription, the latest version you have installed stops working and you have to downgrade to a one year old version. Just another way they lock you in to continue paying. Who in their right mind would willingly downgrade the software they're using.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#340

Post by dredmorbius »

mcguire wrote: post #324
esperent wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was younger, I used to pirate expensive software that I couldn't afford. It's what got me into 3D graphics and graphic design at a young age. Now I'm older and using some of this software professionally, and usually, I'm more than happy to pay for it. But I'll never buy into Adobe's shady subscription model, or any other company that does this. When I pay for a software license, that version of the software sh…

The problem with this: updates. You buy a version. They fix the bugs you report and release a new version. Do you pay full price for it? No, it's just an update. You'll pay a reduced upgrade price, but you want it for free. Your price probably doesn't pay for ongoing upgrades and might not pay for the updates. So no one is paying for updates. Every new version has to be sufficiently improved to get everyone to buy a…

Progressive taxation is rents scaled to means.
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