Isn't that like people wishing for a more lightweight Excel not realizing the "80% of people only 20% of the features" is true but it's not the same 20%? Could you even come up with a financially viable lightweight enough Autocad competitor?
It 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.
I don't know if it's any cleaner internally but Dassault produces the free (2d focused) DraftSight which is very much on the level of like AutoCAD circa 2000, don't know what the paid version is like or how well it integrates with Solidworks.
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.
I'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)
Bricscad 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 :)
AutoCAD 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.
If 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.
I know there's plugins and I don't know what the pro version is like but for instance free Sketch Up doesn't even have the ability to draw an arc from three points and while it did have two points+tangent it made some internal and opaque decision on whether it would ever snap to that tangent.
Well AutoCAD has some tools for drawing 3D but their actual 3D program is called 3D-MAX. This is derived from the old 3D-Studio program that they bought from Kinnetix years ago.
Funny thing is in the shop environment 3DMAX is not used. It is the bastard child of Autodesk.
Solidworks is predominately used in machine shops these days.They have a SolidCAM that works well for generating G code for CNC usage.
Autodesk also has a newer product called Revit. I have not used it.
Autocad'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.
Sketchup is intended as a 3D "sketching" tool. The post to go this through in detail would be quite long but the gist of it Sketchup does not scale very far in terms of model complexity. You can model e.g. a factory floor or a complex office building in Autocad while still being able to navigate the model. Not so much in Sketchup.
The road to Sausalito is littered with the corpses of AutoCAD challengers.
Generic CADD was pretty good. Bought and shut down.
I also remember Visual CAD (which I don't think is the same Visual CAD a quick google search is turning up). I forget who bought them.
There's a zillion others I no longer remember.
Unbelievably, as bad as AutoCAD is/was, Bentley Systems' MicroStation was a hellspawn of turrible.
I've never 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.
What about Intellicad (https://www.intellicad.org/ )? It seems to be pretty popular among engineers. It reads DWG/DXF (AutoCad format) pretty well.
The software itself goes by various names, because Intellicad itself is a consortium. For a nominal fee, you get access to the codebase and can release your own version with your own brand. The thing is shared source, so as a consortium member you need to contribute your changes to the core back to the shared codebase. However this is closed-source.
My condolences. I'm still flabberghasted that semi-automated file repair skills was SOP for users, because the Bentley brothers couldn't figure out how to reliably save files.
Sadly I have to work in one of the sectors. It is very common for geometric design of roadways. I think it is a result of State Departments of Transportation buying into the system and never wanting to change.
The only way to change that- is to actually pretend alternatives are not used- meaning they have to mimick the output exactly- even the flaws. Then after 5 years or so- the department anounces- oh- and by the way, we completely replaced xyz.
Ya. You reminded me that any Excel clone (or interop) has to reproduce Excel's bugs too.
No fun.
Ages ago, I was buddies with a guy (Dale?) who reverse engineered DWG, which I think became the code dump for the Open DWG Alliance, which may be this group today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Design_Alliance, though I don't see McNeel & Assoc listed (Rhino3D).
Dale worked for a graphics card company, Appian?, writing drivers and file viewers. He'd reversed DWG to write a wicked fast viewer. Just like those guys from Atlanta (don't remember their names).
I now dimly recall that Dale's team had to also reproduce AutoCAD's rendering bugs.
> I've never really understood how AutoCAD and Office maintained their dominance.
Joel Spolsky explained it: most users use only 20% of the app. But each user uses a DIFFERENT 20%. Thus you won't go nowhere until you are almost at feature parity, because everybody will have one little thing you didn't implement, but which is critical for them.
Often it doesn't help even if you are way beyond feature parity. More often than not, it is a simple inertia, not some rational thought enumerating features.
> I've never really understood how AutoCAD and Office maintained their dominance
Network effects. Once you reach a certain level of dominance in the kind of market they are in, the fact that it easier to find staff that know the product and the people you exchange days with are using the product, the cost of unfamiliarity and potential data exchange errors means anything else has a very high barrier to overcome even to be considered. An incremental improvement isn't enough, you have to either be wordshatteringly better or have near infinite runway and some non-feature advantages to leverage (the latter is how Excel and Word dethroned 1-2-3 and WordPerfect, but who is going to play 1980s Microsoft to dethrone AutoCAD?)
I think people get into the habit of presenting their software as uniquely capable. And wrapping up their own skills in that particular software. It is similar to a young programmer assuming that Perl (for example) is uniquely capable. In truth talent tends to transcend packages and other factors like ecosystem come in to play.
A talented CAD technician would be useful using pen and a drawing board. We are just not very good at selling those more inate qualities. It is just easier to just sell yourself as an AutoCAD driver.
Of course these sort of packages take a long time to learn, and you are much more productive using something you know. And people adapt their mental model to a particular package. So there is often little obvious point in changing software.
SketchUp 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).
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.
I 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.
Being cross-platform and cross-browser with close-to-native performance is the primary selling point of WebAssembly. What's the point of going that way if you are supporting the exact same platforms you were supporting before? It's also funny how there is no mention of Firefox at all like it's so insignificant we won't even bother testing.
This probably doesn't count as full-blown CAD, but there exists a cool and mature desktop 3D modelling application written in _ERLANG_! How can you resist at least trying that? It's called Wings3D:
another 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.
That 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.
You 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.
The 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.
The 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.
Yes 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.
What "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.
I 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.
People 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.)
It 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.
There 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).
I 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.
Why 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.
Something 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.
The 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.
80 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadThat'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.
https://www.bricsys.com/en-us/bricscad/
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 :)
Are 2d CAD and 3d modeling different kettles of fish?
Autodesk also has a newer product called Revit. I have not used it.
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.
It works amazingly well.
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.
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.
I think you mean is a hellspawn. I think they still have a solid foothold in some sectors.
Saying it's hard to write something that's 100% compatible would be an understatement.
Viewing the same document in Google Apps, Microsoft Word, or Open Office makes me think of QA'ing a website in 3 different browsers.
No fun.
Ages ago, I was buddies with a guy (Dale?) who reverse engineered DWG, which I think became the code dump for the Open DWG Alliance, which may be this group today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Design_Alliance, though I don't see McNeel & Assoc listed (Rhino3D).
Dale worked for a graphics card company, Appian?, writing drivers and file viewers. He'd reversed DWG to write a wicked fast viewer. Just like those guys from Atlanta (don't remember their names).
I now dimly recall that Dale's team had to also reproduce AutoCAD's rendering bugs.
Joel Spolsky explained it: most users use only 20% of the app. But each user uses a DIFFERENT 20%. Thus you won't go nowhere until you are almost at feature parity, because everybody will have one little thing you didn't implement, but which is critical for them.
Network effects. Once you reach a certain level of dominance in the kind of market they are in, the fact that it easier to find staff that know the product and the people you exchange days with are using the product, the cost of unfamiliarity and potential data exchange errors means anything else has a very high barrier to overcome even to be considered. An incremental improvement isn't enough, you have to either be wordshatteringly better or have near infinite runway and some non-feature advantages to leverage (the latter is how Excel and Word dethroned 1-2-3 and WordPerfect, but who is going to play 1980s Microsoft to dethrone AutoCAD?)
A talented CAD technician would be useful using pen and a drawing board. We are just not very good at selling those more inate qualities. It is just easier to just sell yourself as an AutoCAD driver.
Of course these sort of packages take a long time to learn, and you are much more productive using something you know. And people adapt their mental model to a particular package. So there is often little obvious point in changing software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLISP
Whelp, I guess I didn't care that much.
I wasn't able to find any technical information about whether SketchUp takes the same approach of compiling their desktop code to Emscripten.
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.
"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/
http://www.wings3d.com/wp-content/uploads//SS01.png
http://www.wings3d.com/wp-content/uploads//Amx141prscr.jpg
http://www.wings3d.com/?page_id=84
Wings is mainly for creating renderable meshes.
A CAD software's main usage is in modeling physical structures.
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.
(I wonder if anyone thought command lines were dumbed-down versions of punch-card batch setups.)
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.
Web apps aren't perfect either but they have a lot of value to offer users.
I like to have my stuff on my computer.
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.
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.