Just in case people are not familiar - Autodesk owns a considerable share of cad market (which is far more encompassing than just Autocad) and they've palmed few of the biggest 3D modeling suites - Maya, 3DMax and (sigh ) XSI.
Their DWG format (Autocad's native databaseformat) is a binary blob that still has a huge impact in construction industry and is a major PITA unless one is using Autocad tools.
They are a huge player with many expensive software suits. But they are not very innovative.
XSI was originally from Softimage. Softimage sold out to Microsoft, which had no idea what to do with a high-end product other than to make it run on Windows NT. That ended SGI's reign in Hollywood; between 1998 and 2001, studios moved off SGI onto PCs with lots of memory and graphics cards that rapidly got cheaper.
Microsoft sold Softimage to Avid. Avid wanted Softimage because they also had a good non-linear editor, Softimage|DS, which was a threat to Avid's business. Avid used to sell furniture; they built computers with lots of accessories for handling video into wooden desks. These were called "editing suites", and cost upwards of $100K. Softimage could do that on commodity hardware.
Avid had no idea what to do with the 3D product line. It was a product Avid was stuck with, and it had its own team in Montreal. In 2008, Avid sold that to Autodesk.
Autodesk had developed its own 3D system, 3D Studio Max, which is still around. They bought Alias/Wavefront Maya from SGI when SGI tanked in 2004. That's how Autodesk ended up owning the 3D animation business.
Big studios didn't convert to NT, they converted to Linux. SGI ended their own reign by not being able to compete with Nvidia and AMD/Intel. Even now all those studios use csh since that was the default shell that came with Irix.
SGI made a few NT computers as an attempt to sell PCs which of course didn't work out due to not offering much except for a name an inflated price. Linux was coming around at the time, but SGI wouldn't have been an early adopter of Linux by any means since Irix was one of the jewels of the company, and helping adoption of Linux would have helped people transition to commodity PCs.
NT was a part of the transition for much smaller groups or individuals since they could buy a dual processor pentium II/pro and put a decent amount of RAM in them along with an Oxygen card that would accelerate OpenGL.
Large studios had a huge amount of infrastructure built up in pipeline scripts and workflow, proprietary software that might have used POSIX APIs and GUI libraries that weren't on windows, and big network file systems that tied things together.
I was working in the industry at the time, and my feeling was that while a few big studios went with Linux the vast majority of studios (especially among the smaller studios) went with NT.
Every big studio and the majority of medium studios converted to Linux once Houdini and Maya were ported. At the time the industry was dominated by five big American studios and 3-5 big London studios, all of which went the Linux route, not the NT route. Maybe you worked on multiple small studios that jumped on windows, but that wasn't the norm nor was windows the driving force is providing a smooth path from Irix.
By buying Softimage, Microsoft wanted to develop a high end product, to demonstrate to the world that its OS was powerful enough to compete with high end, software specific machines, at a lower cost. In that regards, I believe they succeeded.
I remember Softimage XSI, that was a beautiful system and I loved working with it back when I was playing around with some 3D stuff. They used to have great deals on pricing so it was also much more affordable than a lot of the other professional systems, but still seemed to provide a lot of the same functionality.
In 1995, SGI bought Alias and Wavefront, each with their own animation systems. Impressively, SGI got their people to work together and produce Maya. But it was close to the end of $10,000 to $20,000 graphics workstations; around 2000, the gamer graphics cards became good enough to run the high end software.
SGI thrashed around for years trying to find a niche. They bought Cray, for supercomputers. Didn't work out. They bought Intergraph, which built expensive CAD workstations. Dead end; PCs could do that. They got into servers, but 1U commodity servers crushed them. They made a big commitment to the Itanium, Intel's attempted successor to x86. Failure on all fronts. SGI was in the expensive computing business, and expensive computing was over.
That's what worries Autodesk's Carl Bass. Autodesk was originally, in the early 1980s, the price leader in CAD. The competition was selling high-end workstations bundled with a CAD package. The original big achievement of AutoCAD was cramming large drawings into a 640K DOS PC. It was kind of clunky, but way ahead of manual drafting. An AutoCAD setup was originally about $1K of software and $3K of hardware.
Autodesk has been trying to come out with low end mass market products for years. But there are only so many design engineers and architects. Years ago they had Autodesk Kitchen Designer, for laying out cabinets to fit. Now they have Autodesk Homestyler[1], a phone/tablet app which takes a picture of your room, builds a 3D model, lets you add furniture, and provides photorealistic renderings. It's free, supported by sales from the furniture for which it has models. It's a great piece of technology that's not very successful. IKEA has a competing product, which of course only has IKEA items, and that's more successful.
Interestingly, SGI seems to be doing alright with their supercomputer business, such as UV. The market certainly shrank on them, but what's leftover doesn't look like commoditized or cloud computing will be able to compete it away any time soon.
I agree they made poor acquisition choices, but not that "expensive computing [is] over" -- it's just not the consumer market people thought it would be.
To be fair, it's not the original SGI anymore. In 2009 Rackable Systems (a cheap commodity server company) bought what was left of SGI and renamed their company SGI.
So, it's not quite the same lineage.
The new SGI does seem to have some nice gear, but I don't know how much secret sauce there is. I've never used it, but it looks pretty commodity to me. (Not that there's anything wrong with that).
When Microsoft bought Softimage, SGI freaked out, they feared MS would pull something awesome and make everything switch to x86 for editing.
Then they bought Wavefront and Alias separately, and forced the two to merge, Wavefront had a cool suite of editing tools that was award winning in the movie industry, Alias had a competing suite, the suites had lots of stuff unique to them, they merged the suits and created Maya (example: some of binaries that ship with Maya came from Alias, another ones from Wavefront, the GUI if I remember correctly was designed by Alias, the scripting language and the file formats by Wavefront, and so on...)
Autodesk then just reaped the mismanagement of MS and SGI
Just wanted to point out that 3ds max used to be named "3D Studio MAX" and grew out of an even older DOS software called 3D Studio. Autodesk bought it somewhere around when it got ported to Windows NT (maybe 1997?).
"There is orders of magnitude more computer science innovation in Autodesk than in the average "unicorn"
I was under the impression that they've bought most of their marketable innovations. I realize this was not a fair comment to current employees there - yes, the software suites are impressive and Autocad reseachers have produces very nice things. I would still categorize them as a huge corporation with vested interests rather than an innovator in themselves.
Now, offering stable products is a good thing for many people. Owning DWG gives them an underhanded advantage though, and slows down the evolution of computer assisted design as a discipline, IMO. The DWG situation weights more in the anti-innovation camp more than a hundred clever Maya plugins.
DWG is considered a "standard" while effectively it's just a black-box binary blob. The prevalence of the DWG format means that either new players in CAD need to licence the RealDWG suite from Autocad, they can use third party reverse-engineered libraries like Teigha or they can hack their own. Teigha has been at it with several hired developers for a decade and they still lack bug-free support for the format. The fun part? Autocad can very well deny RealDWG to anyone they don't like. How's that for a market space for disruption.
It's nice to see there are new things happening in CAD world like OnShape (https://www.onshape.com/) that is not yet bought by them :)
As someone who works with AutoCAD nearly every day, I would love it if they opened up the DWG format. There are quite a lot of tools that AutoCAD produces to customize AutoCAD though.
Interestingly AutoCAD was originally written in lisp and a lot of the drawing objects are represented (or can be accessed) as lisp lists in AutoCAD's own lisp dialect (AutoLISP). It's pretty confusing for anyone not familiar with lisp though and fairly limited compared to other lisps (no macros, as far as I could tell, though I'm sure someone could probably find a way to implement them)
Autolisp was added to Autocad when it already existed. They took the free XLisp (written by David Betz in the early 80s) and integrated it into Autocad. The XLisp of that time was a small Lisp dialect written in C.
Some years ago the old Autolisp implementation was replaced with a different (but compatible) Lisp implementation, which Autodesk bought. That was then called Visual Lisp.
That's a pretty hasty generalization. As someone who works for a product at ADSK that has frequent collaboration meetings with our biggest competitors, I can point to at least one significant example of innovation via connectedness. Our philosophy is that our customer is going to pick the tools that work best for their specific workflow; since as a larger company we can't support every niche market, the best thing we can do is help people connect the dots between our software and their other vendors.
Niche markets are fine and good since they are not encroaching on the biggest mainstream user markets.
"the best thing we can do is help people connect the dots between our software and their other vendors."
Yes. And the worst thing Autodesk has done is try to inflict costs to this "connecting the dots" - namely, denying realDWG support for those they consider a strategic threat. Since there is Teigha this is not financially an unsurpassable problem but it's a pain in the ass for anyone who can't use realDWG.
Autodesk is in a position to wield leverage through DWG, they have the financial incentives to do so (and have done so) and for a company this is quite understandable.
Construction industry software is so ready for disruption.
A hint for any ambitious software engineers with a penchant for linear algebra - grab a few beers with some buddies who are trained construction engineers, ask to observe their work for a day with any software they are using, and observe how simple the principles underlying most CAD software is and how obnoxiously expensive and low quality most of such software is. Grab the construction engineer buddy, a computer graphics engineer and an applied mathematician. Start from a. performance b. quality c. shareability. Rule the market.
Yeah, on the gamedev side there's never been proper Collada support from Maya, it's very much low on the support totem despite being a pretty solid standard for tooling interop.
BIM software like Revit is pretty clever and would be difficult to build from scratch. AutoCAD is horrible but a lot of the horribleness is difficult to get rid of while providing the same functionality. So, I'm not sure I agree with your take.
They bought Revit and have somehow managed to regress it. Before owning Revit, and therefore only owning a small percentage of the nascent BIM tool marketplace, they drove the creation of IFC classes to ensure interoperability between BIM platforms. Now they practically own BIM, support for this has gone.
Auto desk are a vile company. A serial monopolist that make any of the othe offenders look tame. I'd love to see them go out of business. That said, I hope those that have lost their jobs find new ones soon.
I was commenting on "most CAD software", not just Autodesk products. Autodesk is not a sexy company (monopoly or otherwise) but I really wonder whether DWG/AutoCAD's key market, architectural drafting (as opposed to architectural drawing) is ever going to be a rewarding activity for anyone.
I've got years of diverse experience in the field of architecture and software, and Revit seems like a very clever toy but not a substitute for endless labour over details. Good architects draw every brick (or equivalent), and/or they also work in close experimental collaboration with the people fabricating the building elements. I'm thinking in the first case of Caruso St. John http://www.carusostjohn.com/ drawing every brick
and in the second of a practice like Grimshaw http://grimshaw-architects.com/ using lost-wax casting (investment casting) to make components. The trade or craft knowledge involved means there are effective constraints which cannot even be expressed in Revit (individual bricks are not really an option in Revit, and you definitely wouldn't want to design a metal casting using Revit... It's an Autocad job, or better, a job for something more expressive like Maya or Mudbox (or whatever it's called) or whatever tool suits your aesthetic. You can't get to Rodin from Autocad.)
They also do a lot of interesting work via Autodesk Research (including on some things you might not expect, such as synthetic biology): https://autodeskresearch.com/
Compared to SolidWorks, SketchUp, and even parts of MS Visio. The UI and meta-data handling is very cumbersome and every time we use it we think how much better some parts could be. As with many mega-corps they tend to follow or buy the innovations of others, eventually.
Hmm, I tried to use SketchUp a month or so ago, after being a proficient AutoCAD user but not touching it since around 2005. I'm curious what parts of the UI are more usable in SketchUp than AutoCAD. For 2D drafting, I got up to speed fairly quick in SketchUp but it became apparent to me that in terms of drafting productivity, SketchUp in 2015 couldn't really compete with AutoCAD circa 2005.
Sketchup is designed for architectural sketches. The modeling grammar is nice for some operations but Sketchup is not really a well rounded modeling package. They are trying to move into construction.
IMO, main advantage of Sketchup over Autocad are a free API to access the model (although the domain model is not entirely well designed) and a fairly limited context of user interface operations (which makes the learning curve lowish).
The most critical difference though, is that Autocad supports actual analytic shapes while Sketchup handles only boundary representations (i.e. polygon meshes). No real cylinder for you! This may or may not be a problem.
IMO, Solidworks was more innovative than AutoCAD in the 90s and early 2000s. AutoCAD followed their lead by making Inventor. Today OnShape is innovating and AutoCAD is following with Fusion 360.
Actually, I believe Fusion 360 was around first. Having said that, trying to learn Fusion 360 was one of the worst experiences I've ever had learning software, while learning OnShape actually made me enjoy using CAD. Once OnShape gets to the level of maturity that Fusion 360 has, I am hoping they will be better at all levels.
I found learning Fusion 360 was painful. I'm dyslexic and need the big picture to understand how to put the individual pieces together. Fusion 360 uses terminology that is not defined anywhere. I worked with some of the support staff and they agreed that they lack this sort of documentation. It seems that some of the people I know that use Fusion 360 just hack around with it till they get it right. I don't have the time for that. Too many projects going at one time. I will ahve to look at OhShape. Thanks.
> Compared to what? "Disruptive" social sites and Uber for X?
I can't comment on CAD, but in the world of 3D graphics I find SideFX's Houdini and The Foundry's Modo to be way more useable, extensible, and feature rich than Autodesk's Maya.
I can't speak to the entirety of their empire, but as far as their rendering command stream: not innovative. Well...maybe 30 years ago. To be fair, that's most of the workstation industry.
They are a leader because everybody uses them and if you need to collaborate (which you do, as architects, engineers, contractors are all separate companies) you need to use what everyone else is using.
Revit has come a long way and it's starting to fulfill it's promise, but it's been a slow road.
I worked developing a Revit plugin for one of the biggest furniture manufacturers in the US for the past six months and despite the fact that Revit has a really good UX for people who is used to it, the development side is not as good feeling like they have been bringing the same stuff forward for the last ten years which turns their API into a bloated unfriendly piece of software.
Now we are starting to develop a replacement using Configura which is a swedish company working on the same space for the last 20 years or so and although they have a proprietary language and no documentation at all, still makes for a much better developer experience and game changing UX where users can design, render photos and produce movies of their project from within the tool. It's a whole different world.
However, both tools are, in my opinion, stuck in the past since I expect to see some competitor coming up in the next few years bringing the same experience in a web environment.
I rather liked working with their stuff but converting from their ever-so-slightly-different BIM format to standard BIM format was not 100% (I was using a library), wasn't the worst though.
Tools for modelling matter at the nano/molecular scale. Seems pretty far out to me, I get it's just research right now but not many other groups working on this.
I believe there is still much to improve in the way computers are used in the design of structures. The default modeling experience in Autocad has not really changed ...since when? Yet, it's one of the largest softwares out there. I think the modeling paradigm is flawed because it originates from a need to fit lots of data into a tiny ram, and the whole workflow is built around this. Yes, there is the APi - but the differnce between a good UI and an API is the difference between Photoshop and ImageMagick.
Project pipelines: Design information is passed between specialists and project offices. Here DWG - being as popular as it is - is used like a checkin of a git branch - it is as well suited for this as a docx document. People manage, though, with a bit of manual project specific work thrown in. No amount of fancy viewers is going to fix this.
People have started to notice that good graphics are available from 'off the shelf' and that handling the basic geometric primitives is not really rocket science. I'm confident OnShape will be followed by a sleuth of new modeling tools soon - and probabably not from Autodesk. They are too busy protecting their entrenched dominion. I might be wrong though.
I really wish all the various companies that use 3D modeling and animations software would fund and/or contribute to Blender (or some other open source 3D app)
Maya and 3dsmax are great and arguably better than Blender but it seems like if they pooled their resources they could change that and everyone would be better off for it.
Part of the trouble is that the FBX format in parts of these industries is like the DOC(X) and XLS(X) formats in office productivity software: everyone uses it, so if you want to use a tool that doesn't reliably convert to/from it losslessly you are at risk of severe friction when working with others. And like DOC(X) and XLS(X), it's a proprietary format, which creates various complications for anyone who wants to create and maintain any sort of conversion tool.
Another part of the trouble is that Blender suffers from some common ailments in the FOSS world, notably a lack of UI refinement, stability, and documentation. While there are people trying to improve these things, and over time they are making some decent progress, and it's not as if the Autodesk products themselves are perfect on any of these counts, on balance there is still a much stronger ecosystem around the incumbents. A challenger like Blender needs to be not just playing catch-up but dramatically in the lead to shift this sort of market.
I agree the Blender has problems. All I'm saying is the combined amount of money that companies like Pixar + Dreamworks + Disney + EA + Rockstar + Valve + Sony + Microsoft + all the other movie, CGI, and game companies spend on Autodesk software would probably fund 30-40 + well paid engineers and they could get an open source piece of software that they could all modify anyway they want VS what they have now, which is Maya and 3dsmax of which they are at the mercy of Autodesk AND for which they have to deal with all kinds of licensing issues.
I know it's not that simple. Each of those companies will want different features. But, with the right leadership (hardest part) it seems like it would be good thing for them to do.
Thing is, studios will use tools like Maya if they meet their needs, and if not they develop internal proprietary software that does exactly what they need. Often they use both in different parts of the pipeline. It is not obvious that there is a space for a third option there of collaborating to build a complete end to end 3d application that will inevitably require compromises.
Open source already happens with specific focused packages (OpenSubdiv, OpenVDB, PTEX etc) which can be very good at one thing. Developing a complete 3d application that meets everyone's needs is unlikely to be appealing given the diverse studio pipelines and requirements.
Despite being a thoughtful and very patient man who made a great case, Andrew was met with a lot of pushback from the community that already thought Blender's UI was easy and usable. Unfortunately in the years since not a whole lot has changed (some improvements like tabs, context menus, and not assuming users have a numpad and 3 button mouse).
Blender tries to be everything to everyone - a game engine, a sculpting modeler, a mechanical CAD modeler, a video editor, and a dozen other things. What you actually get is a mess wrapped in a UI that is alien to everyone except for the initiated. There's a reason why Autodesk and others have so many individual products catered to industries and use cases - it's because there's simplicity in specialization.
Blender definitely has a non-standard UI. There are settings that make it more "standard". You can set it to "Maya" mode for example.
But, pretty much all 3D software is hard to use and takes several weeks to understand. I spent at least 3 weeks on both Maya and 3DSMax just going through the manual a chapter at a time and working through the tutorials back in the day. There's just too much to do in current 3D software and there's no escaping that all of them are huge huge apps.
Maybe VR or AR will finally fix this?
Note: I'm not apologising for Blender's strange UI. It put me off Blender for years and I'm sure it still puts people off. That said, a few months ago I tried it again and found the "Maya" option which at least meant I could click on objects to select them and have the camera controls match. The rest is still overwhelming but that's true with all top end 3d packages.
First time I tried to do anything with Maya it was hard as hell. Then it get easier and easier and... then I was able to move to 3D Studio, or XSI, or even Softimage 3D (maybe not the deepest nurbs setting ok). They mostly all work the same, except for some outliers (because they go another direction, like in ZBrush, if it can even be compared), and after all that, you have Blender. It's not just strange : it's often backward, borderline, annoying.
A bit like Gimp is not working like Photoshop, or Corel Draw, or... it's Gimp. Some people love it, Lots don't.
Since then there has been a UI team, which has tackled the low hanging fruit... the bigger design changes probably will come over the next year or so during their 2.8 revamp... where they tackle the bigger issues with blender.
In my case, it's a "misconception" based on being the guy who has to orchestrate a production pipeline from start to finish and pay the bills for everyone along the way.
Blender's UI may be many things, but like any tool in this field, simple is hardly one of them. In any case, a significant problem in practice is that Blender's natural ways of working don't always match what is used by just about everyone else. Sometimes it's got just the right feature to model something in a certain way, but you then incur a disproportionate cost to adjust that asset so it's useful as part of your overall pipeline, and while the UI for the handy feature might be decent, the overall process is glitchy and error-prone.
This is software with a learning curve. It's set up so that you can learn it and then be very productive. From the number of Linux CLI people on here, you'll find a lot of people who are sympathetic to that.
If you want a friendly UI there's always SketchUp.
Addendum having just looked at the blender "hotkey chart" you linked: That's not a hotkey chart. That's a detailed description of every command with a hotkey.
If you added similar descriptions in the AutoCAD commands list it could probably hit 100 pages.
Besides, if your finger memory hasn't picked up all of blender yet, tap spacebar for command search. As long as you remember vaguely what something's called you'll find it in there.
3d modeling is not a consumer activity. You can start a Blender tutorial and start putting cubes or spheres together in an hour, or you could make 3d animated movies of the same quality as any major animation studio.
The complexity involved is not a mistake, it is inherent to the artform. Blender does a fine job of layering the tools and UI so that as you need more complicated features they are there for you.
I'm not so very sure about that; before TrueSpace (or Caligari going back to the Amiga) was mangled to look and act like everything else on the market (the move that killed it, as far as I can tell, since it coincided with its decline), it was both immensely more intuitive and more dimensionally accurate when necessary than anything I've used since. No, it wasn't Crayola simple, but it doesn't have to be nearly as hard as Blender either.
One needed all that to learn to use the old Blender. Since the 2.5x version, it got much better. UI got reorganized, keys are remapeable, and most important of all, you can search for any operator by pressing the space bar.
It is not like vim at all. Vim is predictable and has consistency in the way keybindings work. Once you understand that escape mode exists, you 're already there. Blender is a chaos of multiple window panes, buttons and options in unpredictable places, UI messages all over, inconsistent behavior of tools, and an ever-confusing window splitting mechanism.
I write faster with vim. I doubt anyone builds faster with blender.
For box modelling and poly by poly modelling, Blender is the fastest of all applications I've tried.
Blender is weird but predictable too. For example the keys GRS (grab, rotate, scale) works in different areas (3D, UV, animation, NLA, video editor) where it makes sense (in some there's no rotation). The UI overhaul of 2.5x moved stuff in a more logical order. If you understand the concept of "data blocks" and "users", you'll understand most of Blender.
I have a hard time believing that. Literally every time i had to do something i had to search google for it. Blender buttons are all over the place with no rhyme or reason about how they 're grouped. There are very few menus and in general no way to find what you re thinking about. If anything it's the definition of counterintuitive.
If you 're not working with it every single day , it's quite impossible to grasp the interface, because you simply forget where everything is hidden. It's really really bad.
Blender is no more UI-awful and no more poorly documented than any other 3D modeling package. The problem is that the entire market of 3D modeling packages are either A) massive clusterfucks of kitchen-sink UI, or B) woefully inadequate in feature selection.
Learning Maya or 3D Studio Max is just as much of an undertaking as learning Blender. There is nothing about them that make them inherently easier. But they do cost a lot of money, whereas Blender is free (and Free). So why not just start with Blender? You (the proverbial you) are probably not going to get a job in the games or movie industry anyway.
Blender's choice to use completely non-standard UI features makes it harder to approach. 99.9999% of all software is "click on object to select it" then pick things to manipulate that selection. Blender's default UI doesn't do that so where as most noobs can at least run other 3d software and fiddle with it before spending the requisite weeks learning how to use it, for Blender they can't even fiddle. The must read the manual immediately because the UI doesn't conform to any other app period.
I know at one time even the menus were non standard as in users expect a menu bar with options they can browse but Blender didn't used to have that (it does now)
The UI of Blender could be a lot better. 3D Max, Maya, CINEMA 4D, CATIA, SketchUp ... every 3D software has a sane UI that can be used without reading a manual at all. Except Blender with its non standard UI concepts. Hopefully someone sponsors a UI clean up.
It reminds me of Gimp, which had a similar weird UI where every window had its own unique menus and what not. To give them credit, they fixed the UI for the better.
The UI of Blender is excellent. The learning curve is a little steep, but it's also very sort. Once I'm over the initial hump of the non-standard UI, it felt extremely fast and smooth. It's like VIM (if vim had tooltips) for 3D modelling.
The current UI of Blender is fairly good. It is difficult because 3D is difficult. You can remap the keys to resemble other 3D packages and UI concepts. If you try to make it any easier than that, you're removing useful features.
Also, you haven't used ZBrush, do you? At least in Blender the names of things always made sense (object, mesh, scene...). The equivalents in ZBrush are the weirdest things.
That's an urban myth. The other 3D packages (most of them more featurefull) adhere to common UI conventions and guidelines. Like what happens with a left mouse click, what with a right mouse button - all mimics Win95 UI guideline. The other 3D package mentioned are therefore easy to use without reading a manual or tutorial. Everyone who used one of those programs can easily switch to another one.
Blender UI with it's non standard might be productive for certain professionals who invested considerable amount of time. But other packages have customisable shortcuts too, but offer a lot better default settings.
Blender definitely needs a UI refresh to gain more widespread adoption. Too much clutter in the tool bars and menus, navigation works like pre 1995 3D applications.
For many years there was an option to swap the mouse buttons. And it seems you can copy and paste now with ctrl C and V. What are other difficulties?
I tried to use both 3DS max and Blender (the old one which had mouse gestures and a few menus) without reading a manual when I was young. Guess what? I found out how to transform things, select vertices/edges/faces, move them around...
Yes, I had to read the manual to do more serious things, but that's no different than 3DS Max.
Also, part of the reason other apps seem easier is that they add unnecessary features in menus and buttons. For example I saw a release of 3DS max where one of the new things were extending the selection in some way. You could always do that with Blender by combining two more basic features (hide what you don't want to select, then select and extend). I think 3DS is the cluttered one.
Blender has many problems, but the UI itself is not one. Default controls are bad, I admit.
edit: I also admit it's not intuitive to open/save files of other types (having to select the appropriate option in import/export).
I have a lot of seething anger for Autodesk. They have managed to achieve mindshare lockin for so many people when doing certain tasks (primarily AutoCAD variations), but their pricing is horrible on budgets. $210 monthly cost for a single Autocad license?!
Thankfully, avoidance of their ecosystem has pushed me further into Blender which I am loving more and more, but on the business side I still quietly mumble curses at them.
Which is, perhaps, arca's point---the whole industry might be over-priced for the cost to provide the software. It's scary to think how much ground people could cover in 3D design if the pricepoint for getting in wasn't prohibitive.
Blender offers a counterweight against the price running too high.
All I can add is that Autodesk has the best office layout that I am aware of. In 1990s.
In their HQ, every single employee got a little glassed in office with enough room for a desk, chair, and 2 chairs IN front of the desk. There was room for an employee to bring in a sleep bag and sleep if necessary with some privacy.
IMO much better than this open office stuff. Hopefully they still have that.
Wow... I wish ADSK had offices like that. Our office in San Francisco is now a completely open office. I don't like it much. At least Management was very thoughtful when they introduced it.
Fusion 360 is the buggiest shipping product I've ever seen. Really hoping they don't lay off any QA staff. But, seeing the shipping product so far, I'm not optimistic. :(
A department where I work (in a place that employs 1500 computer users) purchased an upgrade to Autocad one year that was a total mess. After a couple of weeks their tech support suggested we reimage the computer and start fresh. We stood our ground, stating that we weren't going to reimage a system for 5000 dollar software that can't upgrade from the previous version of itself. We were going to make them work for that money.
They did. I believe they had to uninstall the previous version and delete a lot of leftover registry keys and files. Amazing how uninstalls never really uninstall the thing. Never understood the logic in that. I've seen companies (like HP and Kofax) have to make cleanup tools for their own software because the uninstalls don't actually remove everything. I wonder if they contract their installation components out to third parties that screw it up.
Yeah, Visual Studio is definitely the right candidate for a cleanup tool. I guess Microsoft learned their lesson. It's a shame every vendor doesn't put as much effort into cleaning up their crap as they put into the installer, but maybe they figure if you're removing it then they couldn't care any less about you.
I'm just a small data point, but I had the distinct "pleasure" of assisting an office-mate in installing one of their products[1]. Now, she's not not particularly computer-savvy, but she can usually install things. It turned out they were doing some sort of absurd web-install thing -- which didn't understand non-IE logins, btw. Even worse, it turned out that if anything interrupted the install process you couldn't resume... and here's where it gets really weird: You couldn't just click the installer executable to restart the download... you had to start THE WHOLE FUCKING "LOG-IN TO AUTODESKS SHITTY SITE TO AUTHORIZE THE DOWNLOAD" PROCESS COMPLETELY OVER. You... couldn't just click on the "install" executable again. Because that's what normal people do. Over and over -- until someone who understands shitty programmers reverse-engineers the typical AutoDesk programmer's thought process.[2]
Soooo much UX fail.
[1] Can't recall exactly what it was: I think it may have been AutoCAD or Rivet, but, no matter... same company.
[2] The people who programmed this should be fired. Even if they programmed it because "management" told them to, they should probably be fired because they didn't fight back enough.
>If the product is buggy, isn't the QA to blame and should thus get the axe first?
Obviously not.
While it CAN be, one much more common issue is project managers death marching the developers with impossible deadlines and tons of hard features for the next release, and then rushing to market when it's not yet read.
The QA can file all the bugs they like and do a perfect job, but developers can't fix them soon enough, or they fixing requires working around complex architecture choices that were done in a hasty manner.
Think of open source projects with thousands of open bug reports submitted by users (thus serving as QA team in this case). Is it the fault of those users that the bugs are not fixed?
Possibly. But it could be the QA team is great but the pushback from management is to let buggy releases occur. It happens, especially when it affects the bottom line.
I've been using it on and off for the past six months, and I agree it has issues. However, it's tons better now than it was even when I started, so it seems they're quite aggressively work on it.
They definitely seem like an organisation who's dedicated to checkbox/feature-list improvements, and gaining everyone's complete data set (thus the lack of local file support). Platform stability... less of a priority. :(
Of course its not Autodesk, it does not have millions of active subscriptions pumping money into it. But it is pretty fun to play with, I made a 3d model of my house in it about two years ago. For recreational CAD it is more than sufficient.
I've been using this for woodworking projects. I have 0 CAD training, and after watching a couple youtube videos, I was able to get it working decently. In my limited experience, CAD is hard to just dip your toe into for small projects, but this bridged that large gap reasonably well.
I had an interview for a contract as a front end coder before Christmas and got offered the position at the end of the interview - he asked all the right questions - but after Christmas the contract details were taking a while to sort until I got a call saying the offer was rescinded. It seems this is why!
You beat me to it. Fourmilab is the backbone of my www. Been visting for twenty years - the site is still recognizably itself, and though at a somewhat slower page nowadays, still regularly manages to come up with interesting new stuff.
It's a treasure trove. Everyting public domain'ed.
My father is a quantity surveyor and Autodesk rules his industry. If you're making, sending or receiving technical drawings of buildings you use Autodesk software (and/or PDF unfortunately). From watching him work I think the biggest feature they are missing is integration with smartphones. That might sound cliche but for a surveyor having an app that helps you measure rooms (like one of these[1]) that tightly integrated with Autodesk software would be hugely useful.
Edit: Another thing they are missing out on is some kind of storage system that integrates with Autodesk. The industries Autodesk are invested in have huge archival needs, and most smaller practices have an old server in the corner running a Windows shared folder that someone set up a while back with an unbelievable volume of huge AutoCAD files clogging it up. Companies would pay a lot of money for an integrated system like that, where they don't need to worry about it and it's easy for their non-technical staff to deal with.
I also remember seeing the old AutoCAD logos around the house when I was a kid and even installed a trial on my first computer, but had no clue what the hell to do. Growing up around anyone in the surveying industry is awesome - they use huge A2/A1 pieces of paper for drawings which quickly become outdated and those are super fun to play with when you're younger (paper planes, massive large-scale drawings etc).
I would say that Autodesk problems are more macro than micro: construction sector didn't fully recover from 2007 yet. All related companies cut costs as much as they can. E.g Nowadays is possible to buy a good Autocad clone for literally 10% of the price. By the other hand, BIM, a place where Autodesk has some competitive edge (Revit) is mostly useful for large scale buildings.
Looks like this is to focus on their subscription model or something along those lines.
Haven't tried Autodesk's subscription, but I will say that I (unlike many I know...) am extremely happy with Photoshop CC. $10/mo is trivial for something like Photoshop, and it still works without an internet connection, so I'm not sure what all the hate is about. General mistrust of the business model?
(a) CC's price make sense only when compared to the price of upgrading the Creative Suite at every release (under the old model). But I did not do that; I used to upgrade every two/three releases: the Suite is mature software and in most cases there is no need to be on the cutting edge. By the way, I work in the design industry and this was standard practice. So for a lot of people the subscription model is much more expensive.
(b) With perpetual licenses, one can stop upgrading and he will still be able to open the old files in the future if a need arises. With the subscription model, you are locked out of your own files. (Ironically, it has been noted, cracked software is more reliable, as it lasts forever).
(c) Generally, then, this policy is clearly about Adobe's monopolistic greed and nothing else. There was no regard for the wish of users, as perpetual licensing was suppressed after CS6.
Because of all this, I have put Adobe in my personal blacklist. I discourage people from using their products when possible.
You're right - for a professional it is more expensive and it absolutely was a move by Adobe to capture more of the value of their products (read: increase profit).
The flip side of the argument, of course, is that more profitable companies have more room to innovate and experiment (Bell Labs, Kodak, Google, etc.) and Adobe isn't exactly resting on its laurels and allowing their products to stagnate. There is a valid argument about the additional engineering time being devoted to the necessary anti-circumvention and subscription services instead of better products for customers, but I'm not sure those criticisms stick in this particular case. I don't do much design work, so I may be wrong here, but my understanding is that Adobe products are the industry standard because they are unquestionably the best tools to accomplish most tasks.
...Adobe isn't exactly resting on its laurels and allowing their products to stagnate.
The thing is, if Adobe had been consistently developing valuable new functionality and making it available in newer versions, their customers would have been paying them to upgrade in the previous model as well. The fact that so many people didn't see enough added value to buy each major upgrade suggests objectively that the products were stagnating.
Contrary to your argument, it therefore seems that having customers locked into the subscription model so the money is coming in anyway is a disincentive for Adobe to do better now, at least as long as the industry momentum and relative lack of competition keep customers signed up.
I don't do much design work, so I may be wrong here, but my understanding is that Adobe products are the industry standard because they are unquestionably the best tools to accomplish most tasks.
How Adobe products came to dominate parts of the industry is, as usual, a combination of actually being good at what they do and other, more commercial factors. However, the switch to a subscription model has opened up interesting and viable opportunities for disruption in the market. Credible competition is starting to appear and apparently do quite well in some niches previously dominated by Adobe's big titles, so that "unquestionably" is looking more questionable by the day.
Also note, Adobe's products are known to be some of the most pirated pieces of software around. During my high school and college times, everyone I knew owned pirated copies of Photoshop or Creative Suite. Same folks now just pay the monthly fee to have the fully updated and activated product because they can't be assed to fight activation issues periodically.
That might be even worse news for Adobe, though. It's hard to find reliable information about how successful their SaaS model has been, but the most plausible arguments/data I've seen would suggest they have very roughly half as many CC subscribers by now as they sold full copies of the main CS6 suites. IIRC the figures did not take into account sales of individual CS product licences, nor allow for existing customers who had say CS5 or CS5.5 and had chosen not to upgrade to CS6.
If that is anything close to accurate -- and I stress the "if", because the data is probably at least third-hand here -- then Adobe would have lost more than half of their previous customer base in the transition, and still not regained them several years later. If a significant proportion of those they have gained are ex-pirates, that's an even stronger suggestion that their own permanently licensed products prior to CC might still be their biggest competition.
The situation with pirates seems less relevant for most of Autodesk's products, as their market is much more likely to be professionals than hobbyists anyway. But the implications of earlier permanent offerings potentially representing ongoing competition for their new subscription-only model even several years later would be just as unpleasant as they are for Adobe. Anecdotally, one of my companies has some big name Autodesk software for use with a specific part of what we do, and we've just decided that we'll make do with the existing systems and not buy any more or any updates if they're only going to rent new versions to us and won't let us buy any more copies of the existing version we already use. If significant numbers of larger businesses that already have spare capacity in their volume licensing deals decide to take a similar approach, that definitely won't be good news for Autodesk's new strategy, but I guess time will tell.
Given this one links to data straight from the source, I'm going to assume it's reliable and therefore the previous report I mentioned with lots of caveats was actually off by about a factor of 2-3.
The most interesting detail here might be that while they've been steadily increasing their subscriber base for CC so far, they're also still only at around half of their previous installed base for Creative Suite even today, around 3.5 years after launch. To put that in perspective, a little under half of that previous installed base was on CS6, while a modest majority were still on CS3-CS5.5. That suggests it may become harder for them to continue growing their CC subscriber base at the same rate if they approach a saturation point within the industry or at least within those parts of it willing to keep spending money on regular updates.
The other thing we should probably consider is that Adobe had almost a free ride in the early days of CC, as there was relatively little serious competition left in the industry. Now they're starting to face credible threats, albeit mostly on a small scale or in specific niches for now, and if they lose mind share and eventually the critical mass that means everyone has to use CC because everyone uses CC, that could cause them some problems.
The next couple of years will be interesting for them. Presumably time will tell whether they can find ways to drive significantly more people to regular subscriptions than they used to get upgrading anyway, and whether they'll be able to hold off any emerging competition.
David Wadhwani was responsible at Adobe for the switch to the SaaS business model. Because of that he got a job as CEO of AppDynamics, to make them ready for an IPO.
It's more accurate to describe it as a subscription model. SaaS typically means that the software is delivered as a service (hence the name) and is not installed locally. That's not the case with most of Adobe's products--although they do have SaaS elements (e.g. cloud storage) of various sorts.
CC got a lot of heat when it was introduced, a lot customers complained, but one just has to look at the numbers to see why it was the right move for Adobe, the profits literally exploded!
It's no surprise every other vendor would want to move to a subscription model. But Adobe was able to pull it off BECAUSE they have a monopoly and people in the industry are stuck with Photoshop and Illustrator. There is some competition but it's nowhere near 25 years of tech contained in Photoshop. On the other hand if one is using a product and Adobe decide to discontinue that CC product, one is kind of, f..cked, because one doesn't own the software anymore.
> Looks like this is to focus on their subscription model or something along those lines.
It also mean they might discontinue some products, which is never good for the customer. That's what bother me with these monopolies, and Autodesk kind of own every relevant 3D software in the industry.
When your company requires the software to do its daily business, any misstep by the software company is a serious liability.
When you 'buy' a copy of the software it is yours to run, and if the parent goes out of business you may not be able to reactivate it, at least it still runs.
With the rental model, you are in much the same boat as a person who rents a house, when the landlord wants to charge more you pay it or get evicted.
With the rental model, you are in much the same boat as a person who rents a house, when the landlord wants to charge more you pay it or get evicted.
Except that in the case of software, if either your data is locked up in some proprietary way or there is no competing software with a similar feature set anyway, you get evicted and there's no other landlord offering you an alternative place to live.
I thought it was way more expensive. The European website says 12e/month. I see a lot of people who could benefit from just one month of use and 10 bucks is nothing. Although it works in the case that person already knows the software. Now I wonder how much learning material they sold since the subscription model is on.
It may be better known under its pre-acquisition name Bitsquid, made by a swedish company called Fatshark. I think the engine part of the company was split off and then sold to Autodesk. Still, certainly not one of the most popular game engines (of course popularity isn't necessarily the same as being the best)
Since UE 2 was ported to IOS (Don't recall if it has an Android port also) it actually became quite popular both in porting old games and in making new ones since it's a bit more optimized and is considerably easier to use than UE 3/4.
IT doesn't help that their cash cow (media and entertainment) has been rather anaemic, along with autocad and other mains stays starting to see real competition.
Media and entertainment has never been their cash cow. It is a small and not very profitable part of the business. The money rolls in from products like AutoCAD and Inventor.
I'd say you've got it backwards - Autodesk began using the 'A' logo in the early 80's and shipped on 5-1/4 floppies - at a time when very few computer users had mice, tablets, and (VGA/EGA) graphics-capable displays.
Their DWG format (Autocad's native databaseformat) is a binary blob that still has a huge impact in construction industry and is a major PITA unless one is using Autocad tools.
They are a huge player with many expensive software suits. But they are not very innovative.