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The future of AutoCAD
- Jamerson 8y agoAutoCAD is vast, recursive, and bloated. I really hope someone comes out with a lightweight version that does less, better.
- chx 8y agoIsn'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?
- Jamerson 8y agoIt would be a long shot. But until something changes, Autodesk is just going to keep layering tools, buttons, and menus on top of each other. It's such a rubber band ball now, they would have to start over to make something efficient. But there's no real competition, because even though it's incredibly cludgy, it will work if you learn it's labyrinth.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Avshalom 8y agoI 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.
- fsloth 8y ago"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.
- rurban 8y agoAnd there is the revived GPLv3 LibreDWG, which can read most DWG versions. And write support is pretty close. https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/libredwg/ https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/libredwg/
- pfranz 8y agoI've been perfectly happy using Google Sheets for 10+ years even though I'm sure it's no substitute for someone in finance. (I don't think CAD software has the same wide appeal, though)
- casylum 8y agoBricsCAD is pretty popular. https://www.bricsys.com/en-us/bricscad/ https://www.bricsys.com/en-us/bricscad/
- Jamerson 8y agoWow, $600.
- zokier 8y agoFor reference, AutoCAD base offering is a $2k/year subscription.
- mickduprez 8y agoBricscad has everything AutoCAD has and more such as mechanical design (Inventor like) and sheetmetal and full BIM for things like Architecture and all are still just .dwg! I have been developing on Bricscad for years and it is far faster with a much less buggy API as well. Bootup times smash AutoCADs :)
- haberman 8y agoWhat 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?
- takk309 8y agoAutoCAD and Sketchup are very different. AutoCAD is vector based for starters. Zoom into a curve in Sketchup and you find that it is segmented. Solids in Sketchup are made up of triangles. In AutoCAD they can be actual solids.
- Jamerson 8y agoIf you're making 2D things, like blueprints for a human to make something, SketchUp isn't as useful. I admit, I haven't tried it in a few years, but when I did before its fundamental purpose was almost polar opposite to my needs.
- Avshalom 8y agoI 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.
- frankharv 8y agoWell 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.
- fsloth 8y agoAutocad's main customer base is the AEC industry, while 3D-MAX is used in video game and visual production. Solidworks, on the other hand, is used for modeling mechanically detailed structures - like you would produce in a machine shop. Revit, on the other hand, is used for building information modeling. It's main domain is designing buildings. Except for Revit and Autocad, which are somewhat interchangeable within their users' domain, none of these products really serve each others core userbase well. Hence, they are not really comparable. It's like saying Word is a bit like Excel since you can compose tables of numbers in each. If you were to offer one to the core user of the other they would complain as much as if you were giving a steak for a vetenarian to cook.
- LeoPanthera 8y agoSomeone taught me recently that if you type "<product> vs " into Google, all the suggested autocompletes will tell you what the competition is. It works amazingly well.
- specialist 8y agoThe 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 really understood how AutoCAD and Office maintained their dominance. Conventional wisdom is control the file format. There were so many efforts to open up DWG/DXF. But I don't know that interop ever mattered. I think it's just been inertia. Nothing since Generic CADD has been enough better to warrant the switchover costs.
- gosubpl 8y agoWhat about Intellicad (https://www.intellicad.org/ 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.
- specialist 8y agoThanks. That looks bitchin. Will check it out. Looking at its stock UI, I'm reminded of one of my basic grievances with CADD of the AutoCAD model: I hate layers. When doing architectural plans, which layer does the electric water heater go onto? 'ELECT', 'PLUMB', or a special case 'ELECT-PLUMB'? Much better would be something set based. (Today we'd probably call them tags.) Instead of toggling visibility, views should be queries.
- fsloth 8y ago"MicroStation was a hellspawn" I think you mean is a hellspawn. I think they still have a solid foothold in some sectors.
- 8y ago
- pkaye 8y agoDon't they have AutoCAD LT?
- CamTin 8y agoRecursive?
- zokier 8y agoMaybe a reference to AutoLISP? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLISP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLISP
- f2n 8y agoThe owner of this website (through-the-interface.typepad.com) has banned your IP address Whelp, I guess I didn't care that much.
- haberman 8y agoSketchUp has been running in the brower for the better part of a year (or at least their free version does): https://help.sketchup.com/en/article/3000315 https://help.sketchup.com/en/article/3000315 I wasn't able to find any technical information about whether SketchUp takes the same approach of compiling their desktop code to Emscripten.
- phkahler 8y agoSketchUp is very cool, but it does not have a constraint solver. If you want to know what that means, try SolveSpace for an easy-to-use CAD program that has one. When you reach its limits switch to FreeCAD which is far more feature complete but harder to learn and use (IMHO).
- ozten 8y agoI found the web version unusable and had to revert to the desktop app. Buggy user interaction was a deal-breaker.
- microcolonel 8y agoMaybe some day you'll be able to set FACETRES above 10, or export your NURBS to something other than ACIS.
- fsloth 8y ago"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.
- microcolonel 8y agoI confess, I left that partially as bait, because I know it's hard (I'm currently trying). It's infuriating to have so much ACIS geometry that is so far away from being available on the well documented kernels without licensing it from Spatial.
- cpeterso 8y agoAutoCAD "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/ https://web.autocad.com/
- spystath 8y agoBeing 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.
- kalleboo 8y agoChrome is the new IE
- arbie 8y agoIf IE received monthly updates and had one of the fastest JavaScript engines around, it would still be the dominant browser.
- frou_dh 8y agoThis 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//SS01.png http://www.wings3d.com/wp-content/uploads//Amx141prscr.jpg http://www.wings3d.com/wp-content/uploads//Amx141prscr.jpg http://www.wings3d.com/?page_id=84 http://www.wings3d.com/?page_id=84
- fsloth 8y ago3D programs target different domains. Wings is mainly for creating renderable meshes. A CAD software's main usage is in modeling physical structures.
- convolvatron 8y agoanother major point of distinction is free form sculpture vs engineering parts. the tools made for either of these domains is largely useless in the other.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bluedino 8y agoSolidWorks, you're next!
- jack_h 8y agoThat already kind of happened. A couple former SolidWorks CEOs started OnShape which is a CAD webapp. It's not as mature as SolidWorks which has been around for 20+ years of course, but it's a very capable CAD application.
- nickthegreek 8y agoI believe onshape is developed by ex-solidworks employees.
- bluedino 8y agoYou would think, if you wrote a hosted CAD program that ran on large compute instances in AWS, you'd really lock the market down. No more buying expensive CAD workstations, way less graphics drivers, just fire it up. Need more power? Just pay more each month/day/hour. Plus you could host all your giant CAD files in the cloud, no more buying storage and easier to share across remote teams.
- fsloth 8y agoThe hardware is cheap nowadays compared to the software. Any sub-1k dollar/euro PC will handle most things one would use Autocad for. It's the software that is expensive.
- bluedino 8y agoNot if you’re doing 3D. ISV certified laptop with GPU and enough RAM is going to be $2,000
- myegorov 8y agoThe price you quote is the cost of yearly subscription for just a single program (per station). An architect or engineer will use ~5 such programs on a daily basis for various modeling/analysis tasks.
- patrickg_zill 8y agoYes but Solid Works or Siemens PLX starts at about $3500 per seat, so the laptop is still going to be only a percentage of the total cost. You can run on GeForce gpus for about $1000 but run the risk of something not being guaranteed.
- fsloth 8y agoWhat "ISV certified" means depends quite a bit on what is required. For a lot of the workloads a sub 1000 PC is enough (I'm in the AEC software industry and am quite familiar what we are talking about). Take into account that most software in the domain we are discussing is decades old. Some things would work just fine on the lowliest PC you can buy from the cheapest vendor. And yes, sometimes even the most beefiest machine is not enough.
- zmix 8y agoI hate webapps. What will happen to scripting, application automation? Just have a look, how dumbed down most webapps are when compared to their desktop parts or similare programs as desktop version.
- msla 8y agoPeople say the same things about GUI desktop apps being dumbed-down versions of command line utilities and tool ecologies. Command line tools are still here, and we have more of them compared to the Old Days; it seems focusing entirely on the newest thing provides a skewed view of the totality of what's available, as pre-existing technologies tend to not only not go away entirely, but continue to evolve. (I wonder if anyone thought command lines were dumbed-down versions of punch-card batch setups.)
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoIt was either Diajkstra or Hoare who supposedly lamented programming students not being as careful when they got to use a terminal rather than punch cards. Web apps, however, tend to have fewer features and are more limited than desktop apps. Their only advantage being the ability to run in a web browser.
- fsloth 8y agoThere is a large category of users, for whom effortless access through a browser offers great value. For example, in the AEC industry there are lot of roles where one needs to access the 3D model for review purposes and not modeling itself. For these roles a webapp that is quick to open offers actual value (and is not just a cheap gimmick from the vendor).
- godzillabrennus 8y agoI hate desktop applications. They take a long time to install, they have local file storage that requires me to spend time backing the data up, they eat up disk space on my computer system, they aren't accessible to me if I need to use another computer system, they need to be manually patched and updated, and if I am dependent on them they could restrict my choice of operating system on my desktop. Web apps aren't perfect either but they have a lot of value to offer users.
- bitL 8y agoWhy can't they just wrap it into Electron or Meteor and go full circle desktop-web-desktop, all in C++, just eating a few more gigabytes for V8? It's so super enjoyable to see Chrome header, buttons etc. on top of any desktop app, really! Something in our industry went horribly wrong, investments going to self-serving "innovations" instead of needed areas. This is probably an attempt to turn a full-blown desktop app into a SaaS-bound, remotely-delivered app without much concern for users. I guess we will have to get used to it; next is likely going to be Photoshop & co.
- 21 8y agoNow they are ready to port the WebAssembly to run in Electron.
- mathnode 8y agoSomething similar existed years ago with ME10 running on HPUX. Many similar things existed. Workflows centrally hosted, on site, with terminals or workstation clients. Literally many engineers could work on a single drawing or design and individually created or updated. And of course the updates would synchronise between clients. Nix hosted, colloborative workflows. What is old is new again. Personal Computer software like Solidworks or Maya might seem "cool" or cheaper; I once made money as a contractor recreating what companies lost from older solutions and refused to pay for from platforms like Catia. These frustrating paradigms are not excuslive to CAD or DCC. So many designers and architects I know still use pen and paper more than software, I am not sure if the tooling advancements in PC hosted software has outweighed what was lost in centralised, transaction backed, collaborative workflows.
- rurban 8y agoThe future of AutoCAD is certainly not web, but BIM. Their biggest problem is that BIM standards are national, so have to be provided by third party devs. Which does not allow coming up with proper general solutions for the more technical challenges of working with large BIM projects. Web is only a toy, like the first internet connected AutoCAD versions 2000.