8 ms·

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 fe

by fsloth 11y ago

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.

vvanders 11y ago
few of? Pretty much everything in my mind. Still such a sadness that XSI got bought, they had killer engine integration(treating a game engine as first-class citizen inside XSI).
coldtea 11y ago
>They are a huge player with many expensive software suits. But they are not very innovative. Compared to what? "Disruptive" social sites and Uber for X? There is orders of magnitude more computer science innovation in Autodesk than in the average "unicorn".
- vvanders 11y ago
  Arguably most of their more innovative stuff like XSI, Mudbox, etc have all been acquisitions and not original IP.
- foofoo55 11y ago
  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.
  - peeters 11y ago
    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.
    - fsloth 11y ago
      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.
- fsloth 11y ago
  "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/ https://www.onshape.com/) that is not yet bought by them :)
  - maratd 11y ago
    > I was under the impression that they've bought most of their marketable innovations. They did, but once you buy it, it's yours? The large companies buying up smaller ones are essentially funding the research and innovation.
    - vvanders 11y ago
      Not when their goal is to lock-out all the competition in the space, which is something Autodesk is very interested in. That seems like the opposite of innovation to me.
      - neilgrey 11y ago
        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.
- ginko 11y ago
  Compared to actually innovative CAD companies. Autodesks MO for the last couple of decades is to just buy out any competitor in the market.
- krschultz 11y ago
  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.
  - bsbechtel 11y ago
    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.
    - epalmer 11y ago
      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.
- jamessb 11y ago
  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/ https://autodeskresearch.com/ Publication list: https://autodeskresearch.com/publications https://autodeskresearch.com/publications
- santaclaus 11y ago
  > 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.
- robbies 11y ago
  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.
chefkoch 11y ago
>They are a huge player with many expensive software suits. But they are not very innovative. In architecture and construction they are by far the leader in Building Information Modeling, so i think it depends on what you put in the spotlight.
- BWStearns 11y ago
  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.
- imgabe 11y ago
  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.
  - chefkoch 11y ago
    Atm there is no real competitor to revit as openbim is not really market ready and all other software lacks compability.
    - tucaz 11y ago
      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.
technotony 11y ago
Project cyborg isn't innovative: https://autodeskresearch.com/projects/cyborg https://autodeskresearch.com/projects/cyborg 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.
Animats 11y ago
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.
- bsimpson 11y ago
  Thanks for the history lesson; I had no idea Alias|Wavefront was a division of SGI.
  - speeder 11y ago
    SGI bought Alias|Wavefront BECAUSE of Microsoft. 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
  - Animats 11y ago
    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. [1] http://www.homestyler.com/ http://www.homestyler.com/
jscheel 11y ago
Man, I so miss XSI. It was such a great piece of 3d software.
rayiner 11y ago
What passes for innovative in your universe? Fancy JSON file format? AutoCAD web app?
- marshray 11y ago
  Fusion 360 is becoming a small revolution among my makerspace.
  - fsloth 11y ago
    Which features of Fusion would you consider the most important for your usage? Why is it gaining traction?
    - marshray 11y ago
      It allows people who are familiar with 3D printing to learn how to use the CNC machines without a big investment in single-purpose machining software.
- fsloth 11y ago
  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.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

by fsloth 11y ago

vvanders 11y ago

few of? Pretty much everything in my mind. Still such a sadness that XSI got bought, they had killer engine integration(treating a game engine as first-class citizen inside XSI).

coldtea 11y ago

>They are a huge player with many expensive software suits. But they are not very innovative. Compared to what? "Disruptive" social sites and Uber for X? There is orders of magnitude more computer science innovation in Autodesk than in the average "unicorn".

vvanders 11y ago
Arguably most of their more innovative stuff like XSI, Mudbox, etc have all been acquisitions and not original IP.
foofoo55 11y ago
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.
- peeters 11y ago
  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.
  - fsloth 11y ago
    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.
fsloth 11y ago
"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/ https://www.onshape.com/) that is not yet bought by them :)
- maratd 11y ago
  > I was under the impression that they've bought most of their marketable innovations. They did, but once you buy it, it's yours? The large companies buying up smaller ones are essentially funding the research and innovation.
  - vvanders 11y ago
    Not when their goal is to lock-out all the competition in the space, which is something Autodesk is very interested in. That seems like the opposite of innovation to me.
    - neilgrey 11y ago
      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.
ginko 11y ago
Compared to actually innovative CAD companies. Autodesks MO for the last couple of decades is to just buy out any competitor in the market.
krschultz 11y ago
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.
- bsbechtel 11y ago
  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.
  - epalmer 11y ago
    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.
jamessb 11y ago
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/ https://autodeskresearch.com/ Publication list: https://autodeskresearch.com/publications https://autodeskresearch.com/publications
santaclaus 11y ago
> 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.
robbies 11y ago
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.

chefkoch 11y ago

>They are a huge player with many expensive software suits. But they are not very innovative. In architecture and construction they are by far the leader in Building Information Modeling, so i think it depends on what you put in the spotlight.

BWStearns 11y ago
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.
imgabe 11y ago
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.
- chefkoch 11y ago
  Atm there is no real competitor to revit as openbim is not really market ready and all other software lacks compability.
  - tucaz 11y ago
    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.

technotony 11y ago

Project cyborg isn't innovative: https://autodeskresearch.com/projects/cyborg https://autodeskresearch.com/projects/cyborg 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.

Animats 11y ago

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.

bsimpson 11y ago
Thanks for the history lesson; I had no idea Alias|Wavefront was a division of SGI.
- speeder 11y ago
  SGI bought Alias|Wavefront BECAUSE of Microsoft. 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
- Animats 11y ago
  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. [1] http://www.homestyler.com/ http://www.homestyler.com/

jscheel 11y ago

Man, I so miss XSI. It was such a great piece of 3d software.

rayiner 11y ago

What passes for innovative in your universe? Fancy JSON file format? AutoCAD web app?

marshray 11y ago
Fusion 360 is becoming a small revolution among my makerspace.
- fsloth 11y ago
  Which features of Fusion would you consider the most important for your usage? Why is it gaining traction?
  - marshray 11y ago
    It allows people who are familiar with 3D printing to learn how to use the CNC machines without a big investment in single-purpose machining software.
fsloth 11y ago
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.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]