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The future of AutoCAD

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Re: The future of AutoCAD

#21

Post by Avshalom »

haberman wrote: post #8
Jamerson wrote: post #2

AutoCAD is vast, recursive, and bloated. I really hope someone comes out with a lightweight version that does less, better.

What about SketchUp? I'm very new to 3d modeling, but I've been modeling my house over the last week or so in SketchUp and it seems pretty nice. Are 2d CAD and 3d modeling different kettles of fish?

I know there's plugins and I don't know what the pro version is like but for instance free Sketch Up doesn't even have the ability to draw an arc from three points and while it did have two points+tangent it made some internal and opaque decision on whether it would ever snap to that tangent.

Re: The future of AutoCAD

#23

Post by Avshalom »

chx wrote: post #3
Jamerson wrote: post #2

AutoCAD is vast, recursive, and bloated. I really hope someone comes out with a lightweight version that does less, better.

Isn't that like people wishing for a more lightweight Excel not realizing the "80% of people only 20% of the features" is true but it's not the same 20%? Could you even come up with a financially viable lightweight enough Autocad competitor?

I don't know if it's any cleaner internally but Dassault produces the free (2d focused) DraftSight which is very much on the level of like AutoCAD circa 2000, don't know what the paid version is like or how well it integrates with Solidworks.

Re: The future of AutoCAD

#24

Post by gosubpl »

specialist wrote: post #14
Jamerson wrote: post #2

AutoCAD is vast, recursive, and bloated. I really hope someone comes out with a lightweight version that does less, better.

The road to Sausalito is littered with the corpses of AutoCAD challengers. Generic CADD was pretty good. Bought and shut down. I also remember Visual CAD (which I don't think is the same Visual CAD a quick google search is turning up). I forget who bought them. There's a zillion others I no longer remember. Unbelievably, as bad as AutoCAD is/was, Bentley Systems' MicroStation was a hellspawn of turrible. I've never r…

What about Intellicad (https://www.intellicad.org/ )? It seems to be pretty popular among engineers. It reads DWG/DXF (AutoCad format) pretty well. The software itself goes by various names, because Intellicad itself is a consortium. For a nominal fee, you get access to the codebase and can release your own version with your own brand. The thing is shared source, so as a consortium member you need to contribute your changes to the core back to the shared codebase. However this is closed-source.

Re: The future of AutoCAD

#26

Post by frankharv »

haberman wrote: post #8
Jamerson wrote: post #2

AutoCAD is vast, recursive, and bloated. I really hope someone comes out with a lightweight version that does less, better.

What about SketchUp? I'm very new to 3d modeling, but I've been modeling my house over the last week or so in SketchUp and it seems pretty nice. Are 2d CAD and 3d modeling different kettles of fish?

Well AutoCAD has some tools for drawing 3D but their actual 3D program is called 3D-MAX. This is derived from the old 3D-Studio program that they bought from Kinnetix years ago. Funny thing is in the shop environment 3DMAX is not used. It is the bastard child of Autodesk. Solidworks is predominately used in machine shops these days.They have a SolidCAM that works well for generating G code for CNC usage.

Autodesk also has a newer product called Revit. I have not used it.

Re: The future of AutoCAD

#27

Post by fsloth »

microcolonel wrote: post #11

Maybe some day you'll be able to set FACETRES above 10, or export your NURBS to something other than ACIS.

"export your NURBS to something other"

NURBS does not define a single mathematical entity, like a Bezier curve for example does. You can't convert NURBS trivially from one kernel to another. If the implementation is not exactly the same, the transform is unlikely to be mathematically exactly equivalent.

Re: The future of AutoCAD

#28

Post by spystath »

cpeterso wrote: post #17

AutoCAD "Web" is Chrome-only: "Unsupported Browser. The AutoCAD web app is currently only supported by an up-to-date version of 64-bit Google Chrome on Windows or Mac." https://web.autocad.com/

Being cross-platform and cross-browser with close-to-native performance is the primary selling point of WebAssembly. What's the point of going that way if you are supporting the exact same platforms you were supporting before? It's also funny how there is no mention of Firefox at all like it's so insignificant we won't even bother testing.

Re: The future of AutoCAD

#29

Post by fsloth »

chx wrote: post #3
Jamerson wrote: post #2

AutoCAD is vast, recursive, and bloated. I really hope someone comes out with a lightweight version that does less, better.

Isn't that like people wishing for a more lightweight Excel not realizing the "80% of people only 20% of the features" is true but it's not the same 20%? Could you even come up with a financially viable lightweight enough Autocad competitor?

"financially viable lightweight enough"

That's the catch, I think. The market is not so large for 3D modeling tools.

The second hurdle is the ridiculous amount of inertia DWG has in the AEC industry. Any solution that would topple Autocad would need to likely provide DWG and/or Revit interoperability to even have a shot at the market.

There are no good options for Revit at the moment so, that's a deep vendor lock in. For DWG there is at least Teigha library from ODA which is based on reverse engineering the DWG format and offers reading and writing of it.

Re: The future of AutoCAD

#30

Post by frou_dh »

This probably doesn't count as full-blown CAD, but there exists a cool and mature desktop 3D modelling application written in _ERLANG_! How can you resist at least trying that? It's called Wings3D:

http://www.wings3d.com/wp-content/uploads//SS01.png

http://www.wings3d.com/wp-content/uploads//Amx141prscr.jpg

http://www.wings3d.com/?page_id=84

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