Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Autodesk criticised by architects

extranetevolution.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 387 posts

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#371

Post by pzone »

sprafa wrote: post #151
asiachick wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is one of those places where open source probably doesn't work. Maybe it would require a change in culture. I don't know CAD but in 3D software for movies/games most studios use expensive software (Maya, 3DSMax, Houdini, etc). The market for that software is relatively small and the effort to create and maintain it larger than many many other projects. So, the price is high. But, if they didn't make…

As far as modelling goes you can now model in almost anything you want (Blender/Maya/whatever). Maya is the default for animation pipelines, since it has the more robust animation tools. Houdini is for FX and sims, and Houdini is STUNNING in its development speed at the moment. Each of their software updates has 100+ features a year, and these are complex overhauls or entire new toolkits. I don’t know anyone in 3D wh…

Houdini has also cracked the market open to indie pricing. Autodesk has finally offered $250/year subscriptions for Max and Maya after sustained pressure from SideFX’s offering.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#372

Post by shash »

taneq wrote: post #90
gorgoiler wrote: post #26

I don’t really understand SaaS for such mature products. My work (woodworking) is about making pieces of furniture. Using software is only a part of the process. It is not the actual goal. I want to pay a one off price for a stable and feature complete tool. I don’t want to fund a bunch of developers noodling around with new features I don’t want, or fixing bugs they should be patching anyway, as part of the original…

> I want to pay a one off price for a stable and feature complete tool. I don’t want to fund a bunch of developers noodling around with new features I don’t want, or fixing bugs they should be patching anyway, as part of the original price of the software. Of course you do. So do I! However, the bunch of developers wants you to fund them noodling around indefinitely, and sadly they're the ones that choose the busines…

To be fair, FreeCAD has been improving quite rapidly over the last few years. To the extent that I'm able to use it for the few small things I need to do.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#373

Post by shash »

snarfy wrote: post #281
taneq wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want to pay a one off price for a stable and feature complete tool. I don’t want to fund a bunch of developers noodling around with new features I don’t want, or fixing bugs they should be patching anyway, as part of the original price of the software. Of course you do. So do I! However, the bunch of developers wants you to fund them noodling around indefinitely, and sadly they're the ones that choose the busines…

The problem with FreeCAD, and open source CAD in general, is we have two choices: OpenCASCADE and CGAL. FreeCAD is based on OpenCASCADE. I've used both libraries and OpenCASCADE really left a bad taste in my mouth. It's not a project I'd want to contribute to due to the technology.

I share your frustration with OpenCASCADE. OCC has become marginally modernised with v7, abandoning that weird macro-template system and gaining support for real C++ smart pointers, etc. But it's still an early 90s framework with all the warts.

Still it's like that Churchill quote about democracy being the worst form of government apart from all the other ones we've tried. I don't have all that much experience with ACIS, but I happened to look at the API once a few years back. OCC looks like heaven compared to that.

I keep toying with the idea of writing a CAD library every few months or so. Sometimes I even write a bit of code. But OCC is always "good enough" for the task at hand, so I just bite the bullet, start typing BRepBuilderAPI_Make* and get on with life.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#374

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

krautsourced wrote: post #153
jfkebwjsbx wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which license change? Last year? Blender technical and financial situation has changed very much since then. Last year was the transition period to the new UI, new renderer and everything else. 2.80 was not polished at all. Since then they got access to way more funds from major FAANGs (NVIDIA, AMD, Microsoft, Intel...) and announced and release the first LTS which are the ones intended to be used by commercial studi…

The Cinema 4D licensing changed to subscription which caused many people to look for alternatives. I'm not arguing against Blender being an alternative eventually, it has great features. It's just not there yet as a complete replacement. For me at least.

I was mainly replying to the "only used by hobbyists which don't know what they are talking about" argument.

If it were true, then they wouldn't have the $110k a month in funding they have now.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#375

Post by geokon »

dang wrote: post #341
geokon wrote: post #25

Does anyone know how caches and the internet archive are legal? I mean like some dude wrote this article (to I guess drive traffic to his website or freelancing work or for whatever reason) and then people are just straight up copying it over to their servers and redistributing his work. I'm just wondering what the legal mechanism is

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24034596 .

thanks! didn't mean to derail things. It grew bigger than I expected. Thought I'd get a short quick link

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#376

Post by runxel »

imgabe wrote: post #366
runxel wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No wonder all the smaller AEC software firms out there are pushing OpenBIM very hard. If you think you need to convert an Archicad .pln into a Revit .rvt you're doing it wrong and essentially playing into the hands of Autodesk. We really need to stop with all that siloing going on. OpenBIM with IFC and BCF are the only way of going forward. Revit is a mediocre product in all categories, but that's the thing: People a…

Yeah, IFC is the format I had experience with trying to coordinate between ArchiCAD and Revit. There's probably a better way to do it than the way we did it at least at first, because initially Revit imports the IFC with everything as a generic "object" family instead of windows, doors, ceilings, etc. which make it impossible to configure views to show the correct things. There are probably settings in ArchiCAD that…

It's a Revit problem. Autodesk is known for hating on OpenBIM, since it threateans their hegemony. I've never heard of anyone saying everything went smooth when dealing with Revit + IFC. It's still not certified for IFC 4 and 2x3 support is lacking at best.

True however, you need people who know what they are doing :)

Btw I'm glad we have options in the market. Same as with browsers, OS, etc. Mono cultures are hurting everyone.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#377

Post by austhrow743 »

gorgoiler wrote: post #26

I don’t really understand SaaS for such mature products. My work (woodworking) is about making pieces of furniture. Using software is only a part of the process. It is not the actual goal. I want to pay a one off price for a stable and feature complete tool. I don’t want to fund a bunch of developers noodling around with new features I don’t want, or fixing bugs they should be patching anyway, as part of the original…

Do you want it enough to not only pay as an upfront price what your lifetime value would have been as a subscription customer, but also cover the difference from other people being unwilling to?

A lot of people will subscribe for $50/month for something they'll be using for the next 5 years but won't pay anywhere near $3000 for it.

Particularly for work, where smaller monthly purchases are a lot less hassle to make than big once off purchases. It can be the difference between chucking it on the work credit card and having to go through the purchasing people.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#378

Post by tonyedgecombe »

cenal wrote: post #254
mattkevan wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 lea…

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

At least you can do that, with the shift to SaaS people are going to be out of luck when these projects get abandoned.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#379

Post by tonyedgecombe »

esperent wrote: post #364
mcguire wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Photoshop is extremely stable software. Other than a couple of new features and UI changes, there's not much difference between Photoshop now and ten years ago.

That wasn't the case before Adobe switched to subscriptions. Just look at all the shit they poured into Acrobat to keep selling upgrades.

Re: Autodesk criticised by architects

#380

Post by fendy3002 »

grawprog wrote: post #300
snoopen wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

It's not just lists, just about all word's auto formatting is buggy and unintuitive. Page numbers, tables, headings, tables of contents, paragraph layout on pages with pictures, just putting pictures in a document can be a pain in and of itself. Pretty much anything you do in word above some simple formatting starts to get buggy and unpredictable and the more of these things you have in a document, the more painful e…

The problem for microsoft, it's not a simply "fixing the auto formatting", but "changing how auto formatting behave". Nowadays the buggy auto formatting may be expected by some people and changing (fixing) it may distrupt their workflow (xkcd reference).

Moreover I don't think there are "best" specification for those auto formatter, even a "better" one.

Post reply on HN