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I can't read the article (server does not respond) but I believe it is not only about Autocad. I hear people complain about Revit and 3dsMax as well. What I mostly hear is: very expensive, lots of bugs, lags with new features and improvements.

The software gets the job done and is in the industry standards but people are starting to look somewhere else.

Yes, exactly. I use 3ds Max occasionally and there's no other piece of software I've ever used that crashes so often. Every time I perform an action that I haven't tried before, I fully expect the program to crash and then I'll have to spend a few hours searching for workarounds. Working with large models or scenes takes so long to reload that every crash represents around 10 minutes of lost time, and I've easily had twenty - thirty crashes on a bad day.

You talk about large models or scenes; I'm under the impression that in the film industry, they'd have workstations with hundreds GBs of RAM and double graphics.

I'm just wondering, could the issue lie in 3ds Max being optimized for a different beast of a machine..?

I haven't used 3ds Max much. My impression is that it is more heavily used in games and maybe TV/commercial work. I have over a decade of experience with Maya, which was purchased by Autodesk in 2005 and looks to have been used on every Best VFX Oscar winner since 1997. Machine capacity only relates to the amount of data you're working with (workstations can have between 16-128GB of RAM and may have a gaming GPU or a pro GPU). The crashiness often comes from other things. Maya likes to corrupt its preferences. Complaints against Maya mirror the complaints I see for 3ds Max and their CAD software.

Oh man, you're giving me flashback to days spent resetting max's preferences over and over trying to fix a bug. Like, how does the config folder keep getting corrupted? Why? It makes no sense.

I wrote a batch animation exporter shell script that had to restart max in a loop, repeatedly running a maxscript function blowChunks() to export chunks of 50 animations at a time, then restarting max to export the next chunk, because if it tried to export too many animations from the same process, max would eventually go senile and crash.

(Search for "chunks":)

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/maxscript/maxis-maxscrip...

Automating The Sims Character Animation Pipeline with MaxScript:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/automating-the-sims-character...

Maya is one of the most horrible pieces software I've used. It's also simultaneously one of the best because it's so feature rich.

That said, it's truly horrendous in a lot of ways. Simple operations can crash it for no apparent reason, even when poly count is low. Perfectly clean geometry can get corrupted after reopening a scene. Basic features are clearly neglected and have serious flows; the booleans are the worst out of any 3D modeling software. The most of the import plugins are a joke, forcing you to use a separate program to convert geometry to something basic like OBJ. The context menu on right-click is STILL terrible in the year 2020. Some settings seem to never stick. Little things like the nav-cube got removed with Viewport 2.0, which was supposed to make everything better. NURBS modeling sucks so bad that most studios don't even use it and prefer subdiv modeling. Until recently, scene objects didn't have UUIDs.

Sad thing is that Autodesk has a monopoly over this scene. It's kind of amazing that the industry tolerates this. Then again, I still use it to this day because I'm so used to it.

CAD software is hard. That's why it is expensive and has lots of bugs. It is super easy to make something that is 5% or so of a CAD program that will look impressive, will be super fast and feels like a huge improvement.

And then you add the other 95%. By that time it will be just as slow as the incumbent, even more buggy and the interface will look like crap and will be hard to learn.

As the author of a CAD/CAM package I remember clearly that the only way to stay out of that trap was to make it a niche thing. Of which there are 1000's none of them interoperable with the rest.

Well I hear a lot of praise about Fusion 360. So it's not all bad.

And I don't agree with your statement. Blender is a great example for this. Although it is not constraint based it is a full feature package which is very fast. Compare this to 3dsMax which is exactly what you describe.

Blender should be considered a true gem of the open source community. But the first UIs were confusing at best and infuriating at worst.

I believe Blender's UI is still confusing and is infuriating to me.

Disclaimer: I am an amateur when it comes to 3D modelling, but I was able to figure out pretty much everything I needed to make things in Lightwave back in the 90's, but even after watching several tutorials I still struggle with Blender.

Blender 2.8 has a new redesigned user interface that is a lot easier to use. It's definitely worth trying again if you haven't recently! It's still insanely complicated of course, but that just comes with the territory. There are many great tutorials available, but make sure you're looking at recent ones, since so much has changed for the better in 2.8.

I am just a rudimentary 3D artist. I’ve used Cheetah3D, which is basically a “toy” app, for some branding work; but that’s about the extent of my exposure. I have never used Blender, or AutoDesk.

I know some folks that are a lot more experienced than I am, with 3D modeling, and they all say that Blender is very powerful, but the UX is incomprehensible. At least one of them is MENSA-level smart, so that says a lot.

I’m wondering if Blender is sort of like X11, where people have been declaring the end of the Microsoft/Apple hegemony for decades, or GIMP, where people have been declaring the end of the Adobe hegemony for years.

I will say that I am very impressed with the quality of the 3D work being done, these days. I see works like Worth Enough?[0] (which is actually over a decade old), and believe that 3D art is now every bit as valid as “classic” media. I suspect that the tools are a big reason for that. When oil was added to early media like tempera, the quality of art improved. I think that Blender is used for a lot of this work, so it can’t be that bad.

[0] https://www.deviantart.com/radoxist/art/Worth-enough-7324787...

Blender and Fusion on the geometry editing level are completely different beasts. Blender uses and edits meshes. Fusion360 and other CAD software primarily work on boundary representations which effectively represents a volume as a set of equations for surfaces and topological graph data. It allows for some neat operations but also makes it extremely difficult to handle correctly and a lot of the work in handling these operations is covering edge cases.

"Not constraint based" = not CAD software.

Fusion 360 on the other hand is not a scratch-built product, but uses the same kernel as Autodesk Inventor, ShapeManager - which is based on ACIS, of which version 1.0 was written in 1985. That gives you an idea of how friggin hard it is to write a decent CAD kernel - all the commercial ones are decades old.

The only real free software CAD kernel is OpenCASCADE.

The best parametric 3D CAD kernel now has SolveSpace, and it's open source. Much better than ACIS and OpenCASCADE. It's very young though.

From the letter that I saw (link's not working for me now) the criticism was specifically about Revit their BIM platform.

Yes, which of course re-inforces their position. Note that it was acquired and then tied hand-and-feet to the whole suite. Essentially, if you want 100% interop you're going to have to buy in to the whole eco-system. This is the crux of the anti-trust angle but I don't see what remedy they will want to make things better. Complaining is easy. Short of breaking up Autodesk it will remain the way it is and that is something that the EU will not be able to effect anyway since Autodesk is an American company.

Most people in the industry see it as the equivalent of the Microsoft tax: it's a license to do business.

You're funny.

Nobody cares about AutoCAD any longer. For whatever task you have at hand there are better alternatives. Only people stuck in a time loop use it.

That being said: The AEC has a deeply troubling problem – It's full of people living in yesterday. There is no innovation. Technical advances are ignored.

In the aviation business CAD was started as early as the 60s, with the auto business following soon. Architects still drafted buildings with a pencil in 2D until the early 2000s. There is just so much resistance burdening everything.

>Autocad - not Autodesk - has many 100's of years of development done to it

What does this mean? Wikipedia said the first version of AutoCAD released at 1982, and it was based on a software from 1977.

I think they're saying if you put together the hours spent by all developers who have ever worked on Autocad, it would add up to hundreds of years of work.

Oh I'm sure it's a hell of a lot more than 100 years of work! Especially if you count all the third party developers.

Here's John Walker's history of Autodesk:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/

The Autodesk File: Bits of History, Words of Experience

The Autodesk File chronicles the history of Autodesk, Inc. and its principal product, AutoCAD, through contemporary documents edited and annotated by Autodesk founder and former CEO John Walker. The book traces the company from the first glimmer of an idea in the minds of the founders, through start-up, initial public stock offering, and growth from a loose confederation of moonlighting individuals to a leader in the industry of computer aided design. The book is available in several different editions, suited for on- or off-line reading with various tools. Click on the titles of the section describing the edition you prefer to view it or download to your computer.

Man-years, not calendar years.

But what value does it bring, especially for architects (the topic of this discussion)?

Buildings are getting worse and worse, perhaps people should be creative again, throw their computers away and literally go back to the drawing board instead of pushing buttons.

Okay, well that can be your startup's idea, meanwhile Autodesk will keep chugging along with CAD.