Autodesk Acquires Tsplines
I got an email today from Matt Sederberg stating that Tsplines has been acquired by Autodesk. This is a bad outcome for Solidworks users. The last time something like this happened Autodesk acquired Moldflow and we lost the Moldflow Express product. I have a possibly irrational dislike for Autodesk and their CAD products. A small company like Tsplines with great technology was bound to get snatched up by one of the big players. I congratulate Matt on getting rewarded for a great product, but I’m sorry that it’s Autodesk that got him.
I’m sure there’ll be more to unfold with this story.
Edit: If you read the press release, it sounds like Autodesk did not necessarily buy the company, just some of the technology. Matt’s email said he is moving to Autodesk as a product manager.
OK well false alarm the forum is suddenly back exactly 1hour later…weird…switched servers perhaps…sorry people 😉
Right then I’m getting that info before it goes again for good. I just don’t trust Autodesk…
Hmmmm well it seems Tsplines YouTube channel went recently and also now the Tsplines website seems to have been taken down.
I was looking at the forum at 11.30pm 31st Utah time, navigated to another page and the whole site suddenly isnt available…hasn’t been for 45mins now. Didn’t see any post of planned maintenance anywhere either.
Kind of annoying because my last post asked for advanced notice of the forums disappearing so I could copy some of the most useful posts for reference.
If anyone preserved the Tsplines post listing what was new/fixed in 3.3 and would like to share it around I would be grateful.
Assuming the website really has gone for good….
If it has that must rank as one of the worst handling of a takeover ever as far as considering existing customers.
@Neil
Great Love it. Sw Ds or any other corporate enterprise cannot stand this type of humour.
Hope they don’t dont get as far as the dispencers. Don’t wan’t to experience a roasting coffee splash/crash.
@Neil
I think your writing was just fine, Neil. I’m afraid the folks at SW, like most of us, have very little sense of humor about their own baby. Thanks for posting it here!
Jerry Steiger
Thanks for keeping my post Matt. Richard removed it ‘For obvious reasons’. I know the SW guys all have a great sense of humour and can laugh at themselves so it must be my poor writing skills letting me down again. Punctuation and stuff. Richard sets pretty high standards I know. Things have to be just so before you can get a laugh out of him even during the festive season. I admit though sometimes I read back my posts and I offend myself by the way they turn out.
Probably that will be my New Years resolution. Improve my writing so that the humour flows better.
If I keep the post tucked away out of Richards view I can have something to refer back to to see how much I have progressed. Cheers to the New Year 😉 😀
I was just reading about how General Motors mishandled the development and marketing of the Chevy Volt. I was reminded of DASSAULT SYSTEMES and SolidWorks.
Devon Sowell
Any particular reason why Solidworks don’t write their own TSpline code?
It’s patented and owned by sue-happy Autodesk. Plus, tsplines took some time to develop, and if it were easy, the technology would be everywhere.
Plus, I’d be willing to bet that SW v6 is going to show something in that direction anyway. I mean they can’t be silent for so long and deliver nothing.
Thought police have removed your post Neil, surprise surprise!
Hope you don’t mind but I thought to put this here in case it is removed from the SW forum by the corporate thought police.
Someone was asking for SW to comment about Tsplines and I couldn’t resist poking fun by answering on their behalf.
I’ll generously step in to comment in my capacity as shadow CEO while the regulars are on holiday. Dear SW customers, while we have been oh so busy cutting down Catia over 5 years, to be the ‘not so powerful to compete with ourselves’ basis of our wonderful cloud based products, we have stopped thinking about SW. We foolishly thought our carefully cultivated community hype and our bulletproof self belief would carry us along until we had our captive pay as you go scheme in place. Our development staff are fully dedicated to working on alternative browser skins tailored to your zodiac sign rather than be worried about tweaking old tech like SW. Its a matter of priorities. All of your subs money is tied up in the casino derivatives market shorting DS, and well frankly we are too bored with traditional engineering to care. Now our great rival for world domination, Autodesk, has unexpectedly pulled our pants down and slapped us black and blue (great competitve spirit) by boarding our grounded ship when we werent looking and making off with Tsplines. We have nothing to say at this time about that but we promise 10 amazing ways to social network while you should be working, in the near future. How near we cant say but you will love what we have for you. We cant give details not because we are coy but because we really do have no idea what we are doing or if it will even work yet. Rest assured it will install on any hardware including smart kitchen appliancess, have no security problems and make your coffee, black. This is CAD the way you always wanted it to be and were afraid to ask. Actually you didnt have to ask, we gave it to you anyway. Probably our cloud products will be available via dispensing machine at some stage so there need be no embarrassment. At DS we are excited about your future and our guaranteed income. Geometry is for dinosaurs, you know that. Merry Xmas from the DS Board and may your New Year be prosperous enough to pay for any other vendors software you have to buy because we slightly stuffed up and it ruined your business. All said and done it is the season to be jolly so I dont want to hear any more silly complaints from ungrateful customers. Sh*t happens. Keep buying our great product SW until we tell you otherwise.
Very depressing, I’ve invested time, energy and money on T-Splines along with Rhino. Goodbye tsElements you will be missed. I think I more annoyed with SolidWorks for not buying them than any other reason.
I was hoping that t-splines would enable more reliable surfacing in Solidworks. Lost hope.
I just had a complex surfaced model of a seaplane sponson fail to rebuild. It rebuilt yesterday, then no changes it is destroyed. Sections have lost a few pierce constraints, trims flipped, and combine has problems with a zero thinkness surface. I re-created the features from the sketches and at the last step of combine surfaces of the solid have gone invisible from some directions. Never throw away work; my CAD.
As someone who’s used Inventor for the last 8 years my primary hope is that this gets integrated into Inventor. I can do a lot with surfacing, but there’s always more that can be done. Oddly enough 95% of the models I make require no surfacing at all, but I do enjoy making surface models when I have the time.
My own view with this is that Autodesk will integrate this into the core Inventor and core Revit – they two applications that are crying out for more freeform type modelling. Added to that Autodesk have Maya and 3D Studio Max (which combined probably cover 75% of the CGI business). Tsplines used to offer a Maya plug in, so it is no stretch of the imagination that this will return in the short term.
In the long term though Autodesk are sitting on a pile of radical modelling technologies now. They own their own kernel, they now have T Splines, they have the technical surfacing masters Alias, they have tons of ploygonal technologies from Mudbox to 3D Studio.
Where I see this in a few years is an integration of polygonal and nurbs modelling in the core kernel – which will be utilised by all their products. Think of the implications of that for a minute. Autodesk dominate AEC, general engineering and CGI. Their products are used to design factories. Alias is still the dominant A class surfacing product.
No, T Splines was a very very smart move. Now that the might of the Autodesk machine is behind the product you can expect to see new features, new advances and probably stuff you and I cannot even contemplate yet.
No-one is safe.
Autodesk has bucketloads of cash and buys companies and their cool stuff all the time. Some of that stuff ends up being well-integrated into existing products. Some of it ends up as individual Autodesk products. Some of it ends up shoddily added to existing products and ignored by users in droves. Some of it ends up being killed (quietly or otherwise), i.e. it’s a purely anti-competitive move.
I suspect Autodesk’s intent here is the first option. If it doesn’t work out that way, the fall-back position is the last option, and Autodesk will still consider it money well spent.
@Mark
Sorry if I wasn’t specific. What I mean is that Dassault is trying to use a single kernal (V6) to merge all their products. I don’t see Autodesk currently going in this direction. I’ve seen some interfacing with fusion but it looks more like a translator. If Solidworks V6 is anything like Catia then the T-splines acquisition doesn’t matter anyway. Perhaps Rhino will switch to the CGM kernal (V6)? You will have to forgive me because I’m no expert on this, but it is my observation.
@Matthew 2
Are you out there buddy? I hate to take you away from your spreadsheets on Xmas eve…
I guess we now know – as I said – continuing to develop Tsplines(TsElements) for SW users is *not* worth doing…because SW sales are flat lining, SWv6 will have no use for it, and they were unwittingly being used to extend interest in a dead product…and so the code has now been sold on for mutually beneficial strategic reasons and it has a healthy future…
The Tsplines guys obviously got savvy despite your bravado and finesse with statistics. 😉
@All.
I suppose this might be the first of a few 3rd party providers pulling the SW plug and moving on to greener pastures. At the moment 2012 doesnt look as though its going to be a good year for a number of reasons but I wish you all the best for a prosperous New Year where ever and who ever you are.
I really enjoyed sharing your company here at Matts blog. 😀
ALGOR is as integrated as it can be right now without adding too much cost to the Inventor product. The Inventor Fusion interface with it does help out a lot and the new Project Scout on the way does show the focus they are putting on Simulation. If they up and just didn’t care, it would be evident, it is not here.
@Mark
I run Autodesk (Algor) Simulation 2012. “Well Integrated”? You must have much lower standards than me. If the T-Splines integration goes anything like Algor, then SolidWorks has plenty of time to catch up.
@chad
Natural Sketch is neat (although it seems to have been pushed to the corner). Have you seen the integration of Sketchbook Designer into the Autodesk Product Suites? Its like Photoshop with Raster to Vector conversion for Inventor or AutoCAD sketches and is integrated right into ACAD.
Just because there are seperate discussion forums for product specific issues doesn’t mean they are diverging. In fact it is actually quite the opposite with Suites. When you get Inventor, you now get a whole slew of products and they are crowd sourcing what interopabilty the users want for each persona. The boldest move in this is the Factory Design Suite that will take interopabilty between the products in tighter areas than ever before. Don’t confuse different user personas with divulgant software direction. A Factory Design User is different than a Product Design user (just as a MFG person is not an AEC person), and they supplement those Suites with persona specific toolsets that will only continue to flourish with feedback from the user base but will keep the core products as the baseline to build from. For instance they may put the TSplines tools in the Product Design Suite and not the Factory Design Suite, because I don’t know a single factory design guy that would care about this technology in the least and would rather see their $ spent on tools just for them.
Is that divergent or merely diversification of the correct tools for the correct users that still share the core platform?
@Steve
I think this forces DS to raid Catia for functionality to stick in SWv6 they would have otherwise passed on looking to protect their product tiers.
Obviously this is something they dont want to do but it might actually good for future Swv6 users.
@Mark I dont see Alias as a midrange product or one that especially needs Tsplines.
I think Rhino will be around for a while and Autodesk could still make money out of selling existing Tsplines to Rhino users without disadvantaging themselves.
Come Tsplines 4.0 though (AutoSplines1.0) I am not sure how it will look and what it will cost or if it will still operate with Rhino.
I am sure there will be people who will be turned off or obstructed by what Autodesk do with it regardless.
TsElements is dead I am sure and this had to be one of the objectives.
DS were a bit slow there. They should have bought up Tsplines but since SW is on the way out I suspect they didnt want to spend any money on it. Of course it leaves SW in a hole if they were counting on further Tsplines functionality to fatten the lean list of new and improved things you must upgrade to SW2013 for…
As to whether I will spend money on other apps to get new Tsplines functionality – probably not – 3.3 is not too bad for most purposes I need it for. I am not sure I would continue even if Tsplines wasnt acquired.
Dassault has imagine and shape which is just like tsplines
Maybe you should criticize them for making it as a Catia only product
Companies don’t sit around waiting to be acquired maybe they approached Dassault and were turned down
@Mark
I was under the impression that they had enough talent to make something like t-splines. Dassault didn’t have to acquire anyone to come up with Catia natural sketch. There are too many products that Autodesk offers. They need to integrate on a single platform. Dassault is already starting to do this. It’s an observation that I think will prove costly for Autodesk. You can see all the differnent directions they’re going by seeing how many discussion groups they have.
http://forums.autodesk.com/
@Neil
Neil are you sure you are glad you went for Rhino and TSplines? I also went for Rhino and TSplines. When you think about it, Alias is the Autodesk competition to Rhino and there is currently no TSplines plugin for Alias. After this acquisition how much effort do you think Autodesk is going to put in the development of TSplines for Rhino or TSplines for SolidWorks?
The webstore is already down, you can’t buy TSplines today even if you wanted to.
Are you ready to spend the necessary dollars to purchase Alias and TSplines? I know I’m not.
Jeff Ray is already there. He could find employment again as butler and groom….
What better way to spend your remaining days than tweeting your memoirs albeit to an ungrateful world and out of cell range….
@Neil
Sorry, a little slow…
Ya. HIM we could send to Elba. With his horse.
I wasnt meaning Mr Sicot…. SW Robin to DS Batman 🙂
@Neil
Neil, I think the more time has passed, the closer the SW CEOs get to Dassault. And the closer the CEOs get to Dassault, the more of a mess things have become. You can say what you want about the fact that he’s French doesn’t mean anything, but I think it means a great deal, to Dassault if no one else. I don’t think Msr Sicot is going anywhere.
Elba! Ha!
@chad
Pathetic, more like a stroke of genious! Their acquisitions have always been well integrated. Moldflow’s integration with Inventor Tooling, Logimetrix with iLogic, and ALGOR just to name a few.
Why do they need to develop the talent when it already exists out there from very reliable sources? If SW was converging, they would have purchased TSplines first. I think it is nice to see a company with the weight to throw around actually use it properly for what users ask for.
I confess I just laughed out loud when I saw it.
Well played Autodesk (scum). This cuts off DS and Seimens ID prospects at the knees simultaneously.
Must have made them a generous offer they couldn’t refuse…
I am glad though I passed on the SW upgrade and TsElements and went for Rhino and Tsplines but it wasn’t because I anticipated that particular outcome.
DS will have nothing for SW. DS are losers. SW is starving to death slowly from willful neglect and stupidity/misadventure.
All they can do now is talk about how SWv6 will be exciting for social media addicts….if it ever arrives after 5,6,7 years of toil and BS.
All eyes on SWW then. If its a no show or a lame appearance then I expect we will see a CEO replaced in short order….er…promoted to an important position at a remote geographic location …like Elba 😉
This is pathetic on Autodesk’s part. They don’t have enough talent on their staff to come up with something themselves? Autodesk continues to throw it’s weight around with all these acquisitions. It would be one thing if they could figure out how to integrate all these acquisitions but it’s been my experience they’re not very good at this. Dassault continues to converge and innovate while Autodesk continues to diverge and acquire.
Link to official press release: http://news.autodesk.com/news/autodesk/20111222005259/en/Autodesk-Acquires-T-Splines-Modeling-Technology-Assets
Although I would likely have chosen the Rhino version, I’m disappointed that Autodesk acquired them.
Likewise Matt. Kudos to Matt S and the crew – they deserve the rewards after having created a truly revolutionary product, and created a supoportive customer environment via a fantastic web site and great use of webinars etc.
Speaking personally though, as a SolidWorks user and a TsElements user this is a disaster. Judging by the prompt takedown of the TSplines store it appears that TsElements is as dead as a turkey on Christmas Day. Doesn’t look too great for Rhino either. I personally bought into the whole thing with the promise of more to come with Modo acting as my Rhino. Now it appears this is dead, so what I can look forward to is SoldiWorks 2013 offering me less functionality than 2012 (assuming TsElements is not developed for 2013).
If there is anything that will make me consider alternative CAD systems this is it. This time next year, Autodesk will have shown how TSplines will integrate into Inventor or Alias. PTC Creo Parametric will be on version 3. Maybe even Siemens will have realised that they cannot restrict SolidEdge (then maybe not as this would require NX functionality).
In short, SolidWorks/Dassault HAVE to respond to this. 2013 HAS to offer something to counter this. SolidWorks World should be interesting….
I read this yesterday too with my “bummer” face. If you remember way back, this happened too with EmbassyWorks, which was a routing/wire harness tool. Then SW piping was built up in the coming releases to include most of this functionality. Now it is time to see what SolidWorks is going to do about the loss.
.. very sad news, imho. yeah, good for the guys at T-Splines, bad for the users.
.. and now, I’m very very happy I did not buy a license! 8^)