showcase exist in 2016?

[juliangalar]

will showcase in 2016 with something new?

please yes.

thanks

[botman]

I've got a feeling Showcase will be discontinued on a mid-term notice.

Showcase 2014 was the last version with some new features, Showcase 2015 only has a new splashscreen.

No more new features, tutorials..... 

Marion Landry switched to Max Design for I can see....

It's just a feeling, I have no proof whatsoever.

Maybe somone from AutoDesk can give us a hint?

Best regards

Stefan

[juliangalar]

Thank you very much for your sentiment.
I'm afraid you're right. And it's a shame.
I tried several soft (Lumion, Twinmotion, 3ds max, Vred ...) and I think Showcase should be continued and improved.

It can be very good.

Good luck to all.

[cikho]

it's not the first time a question like this is risen.
what we know from the past is that nobody in autodesk, neither marion, will tell you the plans from autodesk..
We had the feeling already in 2014 that showcase could be discontinued/merged with another software/ redirected to certain workflows-work areas..
for example it looks like showcase, for its simplicity, could be moved to an architecture environment more than a design/engineering one.. (in the beginning it was not even included in the design suite, just in the architecture suite 2015.. meh..)

Vred is more automotive oriented, but is way complicated software, personally i have a copy of vred 2014 and it does not feel as comfortable as showcase..

as stated by botman, the 2015 release did not even bring major updates/fixes to the 2014 one, even tho several were known/needed/proposed..

the general impression is that autodesk does not want to invest much in new features or development.. basically milking the cashcow as much as possible..

so, imho, the answer could be:

yes, 2016 will exists, no, it won't have any particular improvement from 2015, beside bringing with it the updated direct connect

[botman]

It's a loss when Showcase actually shall be discontinued.

I allready ditched Max for Blender and I'll probably switch to Keyshot if Showcase has reached it's end of life for as far as Autodesk is concerned.

That's the downside....

The upside will be that I'm forced to find other solutions and I'm pretty sure I will succeed and might find better alternatives.

Helping me out by holding me back....that's odd....

[cikho]

actually showcase and keyshot does not have 100% features in common..

the good thing of showcase is its almost stunning realtime capability with hardware shade effects.
which keyshot is actually missing, it always raytrace the scene..

in our case, we manage several scenes for customer presentation in realtime, so there's no way to switch to something else..

also the quick managing of alternatives, sections, animations is something that showcase handles with ease and good outputs..

viceversa, with raytracing quality and speed, probably keyshot is more effective and, of course, in continuos development.


the only software which is 100% comparable to showcase is RTT Deltagen.. which cost twice as much as showcase (or even more), and, once again, does not have the same ease of use..

showcase is a very good compromise actually.. if only autodesk invests on it..

but autodesk is more focused in buying things to enlarge its portfolio rather than having small ammount of softwares that does the job in an effective and uptodate way..

blender is one huge example..
does the job, doesn't have a cost, it's updated and fully comparable with both maya and 3ds max

[botman]

You are absolutely right: Showcase and Keyshot don't compare 100% but for my line of work it's the best match I can find for now.

Deltagen looks great but mostly focussed on Automotive (maybe I'm mistaking..)

Still, Showcase is really great (I'm rendering an animation full of behaviours as I type this reply) and I don't want to switch at all.

On the other hand: I'm not willing to be hostaged bij AD either by looking at some blur future.

I will keep my focus on the current workflow, introducing a parallel workflow for the time being to switch when I have to.

I think it's strange for a professional company like AD seems to be, it's impossible to show a roadmap for their products.

Valued customer?

Meh....

[cikho]

honestly, the only road map i see for thm is "oh, look, a new software made by an independet developer is doing milions, let's buy it"
"ok what's our development plan for it then?"£
"dunno, buy it"

[ruffoc · Accepted solution]

Hello everyone, thanks for your feedback.

I work in product management at Autodesk. There are no current plans to discontunue Showcase. However the product is in maintenance mode. This means we plan to continue file format comaptilblity with the latest Autodesk software but we are not activlty developing new features. 

Efforts are underway to bring Showcase-like workflows to the cloud. Although it is very early days, you can see an example of this through Autodesk Fusion. When you sign up for a trial of fusion you have the option to use something called Interactive rendering. Basically Interactive Rendering is a real-time photorealistic-rendering environment that makes creating beautiful images and turntable animations super-easy. Ray tracing and final renders are done in the cloud. You can learn more about it over in the Fusion forum.

Fusion updates on a regular basis so you can see our progress with each drop.

Chris

Autodesk Product Management 

[cikho]

well, this sounds actually good, but how will my showcase scene consisting 15 milions poly behave in the cloud rendering? 😛

small question, then..

why not turning showcase into a sort of cloud rendering client..

with interactive hardware shade based on workstation gpu and ray tracing rendering based on cloud?

automatic switch to working mode (meaning pc resources are focused on client side work) and cloud mode (meaning the PC is in idle and its power is shared through cloud)..

In our office we could make great use of such a system... just adding network rendering would work actually..

i don't understand this decision of not developing further this program honestly, hope you will change idea in the future, i really enjoy working with it.. and see several small improvement that could make my and other's experience even more satisfying..

but we're a small ammount of people for such a big company i guess 🙂

[botman]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your additional info regarding Showcase. It's sad to hear there's no active developement, most of the time this is the first sign for an "end of life" status....

Still, for a company sourcefiles and libraries are essential, most of the time these are not part of a cloud-solution.

I'll give Fusion a go for sure, but for as far as I know this is only a renderengine in the cloud. How about animation, alternatives, etc.

I'm a bit sceptic since I compare this with AutoCAD and AutoCAD 360.

In this particulair case AutoCAD360 is less then 1% of AutoCAD for an experienced AutoCAD-engineer.

On the other hand: Maybe a new solution is better and can unleash new possibilities.

Only time can tell, I'd like to stay in touch to hear about the future of Showcase (and new possibilities).

Best regards,

Stefan

[admaiora]

Thank you Chris.

Showcase is a winning product that it deserve new implementations, new features, new updates to maintain his level compared to new market products. Otherwise it will be a dead obsolete software in a few years.

Why is a winning product?

We can write very long posts on it.

Big companies, for example, in MFG sector love the idea to present in a fashion way their product, but don't have too much time to invest in it, often and this is quite  a real picture, don't have operators able to do that (3dsMax, Maya...others..great softwares but almost a different job).

Most of them neither invest money/time to delegate the job to third parts.

Showcase allows this process:

-simple to learn

-simple to use

-amazing and quick results

and moreover:

-powerful with big assemblies

-great dialog with Autodesk softwares (Inventor constraints!) and no-Autodesk software

This just an example for the MFG sector.

Unfortunately if i will ask randomly to 50 big/medium mfg companies i know , "What 's Fusion?" , they will have no idea of what i talk about, neither they will ever use it in a their real scenario workflow.

[Logos_Atum]

Hello there,

I´d like openCL support.... or enabling 3rd Party ren-

derers to be used in Showcase, not unlike Max. Set-

ting up the network renderer and run distributed ren-

dering is relatively easy.

For the small scale everyday presentation material 

Showcase is very nice...and the editors performance

is much better than what I´ve experienced from Max

Design. If not for that and the pretty decent realtime

renderer, I´d not stop to use Showcase at all.

A Showcase expert can´t compete with a Max expert,

and yet there definitely are scenarios in which it just

does what it does extremely well... and that´s what

counts.

Max offers more, yet most of the times we don´t need

more than Showcase offers. Path animation would be

extremely nice though 🙂

Kind regards

Daniel

[cikho]

max is a much more complete and complicated software. and yes, what you can obtain with max is cannot be reached with the best showcase user, even if, honestly, it happened to me to reach a quite high quality rendering in showcase also.. (yes i humbly consider myself an expert 😛 )..

i see many addition that could make showcase even greater that what it is today, and we in the forum have put several threads togheter with our whish-lists of functions..

but non of them will be implemented i guess

[botman]

Agreed upon!!

It's possible to get better results using Max but the time needed to get to this level is not to compare with the time needed in Showcase. 

What I need is:

- Software which is easy to use,

- an intuitive workflow,

- not to spend time to the max (I like this one!) to get some result,

- the option to choose my hardware to get the fastest rendering

- proper animation with a few clicks

- the possibility to use alternatives

In short: I need Showcase!

How can we, being enthousiastic and daily users, convince AutoDesk to restart the development of Showcase?

I took the opportunity to check Fusion according to the reply of Chris earlier this thread.

This will not be the path for me to follow, I don't need a cloud other than being in the skies in the "real world".

A cloud might be an addition to my workflow, NOT A REPLACEMENT! 

In other words: Keep on working on Fusion AND Showcase at the same time.... 

[cikho]

or find a way to integrate fusion in showcase instead of developing them separately..

in the end, a massive cloud rendering capability could turn showcase to impressive results 🙂

[sam_m]

Showcase is an important package that needs to be considered as such by AD and not just overlooked.

Look at the feedback last year when it was announced that it wouldn't be included with the Product Design Suites - a lot of feedback by users requesting it to be included, as it was in 2014.  That shows it's used by a lot of people, across many industries/disiplines - possibly not as most users' primary software package, so possibly not used daily or weekly by most, but it's still v much required when easy and quick visualization is asked for.

But, that doesn't mean it's ideal as is and doesn't deserve improvements - if only shown by the post about the 2015 release:

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/general/showcase-2015-what-s-new/td-p/5029578  There are a lot of valid requests for improvements, so why is it considered "complete" and left untouched by AD?

Or, all the posts over the last year or so, about parts disappearing after closing and re-opening assemblies.  I know I've been plagued by this bug the last time I was using Showcase in anger.

Also - Cloud is a massive negative for us (and probably a lot of others).  Ignoring the argument about data security which will never go away, we simply don't have the internet bandwidth to have anything processed offsite.  We're an engineering company in a major city in the UK and have a typical internet connection - but it's still common to buffer YouTube vids (before trying any hidef options)...  At times our connection isn't quick enough to allow internet radio to work (which is why it's now banned, along with video streaming), let alone trying to stream a video signal - and that's before you think about any hi-def offsite rendering and therefore transmitting hi-def (and 4k in the near future) images (in real time) over the net...  It just cannot happen for all your userbase - and surely that needs to be established before moving to such a system?  Yes, years down the line I can see offsite rendering being viable, but not in the near future.

So, any future "cloud" package isn't a suitable replacement, as far as I'm concerned.

[botman]

Hi Sam,

"Showcase is an important package that needs to be considered as such by AD and not just overlooked."

Fully agreed upon, but how to convince AutoDesk to start developing this nice product?

The only option we have is to let AutoDesk know we would really appreciate re-developing by using these forums!

Will this be sufficient? Only time can tell...

Regarding the Cloud-business: We do have a proper bandwidth at our disposal but still I'd like to work locally.

Options and procedures offered by cloudservices are never sufficient compared to the real-deal (local software.)

Cloudrendering? I don't need this to be honest. 

Somehow this cloud-thingy get's a bit cloudy so to say. It has become priority nr.1 for most software companies so it seems.

Adobe, Microsoft, etc. they all bring these clous solutions as the only option. Why?

A cloud-service can be complementary to local software but is best to be left as e free choice for as far as I'm concerned...

[Anonymous]

Chris- I hear you saying you know of no Autodesk plans
to discontinue Showcase. But my worries are that WHAT
IF it is discontinued and there is no 2016 stand-alone
version. Does that mean I would loose the ability to

purchase a license for Showcase 2015 as well?

That's the way it works with Revit. If you don't by a

license for the current version of Revit before the new

one is released, you can no longer buy a license for

any other version. And since this late in the year we

are not getting confirmation from Autodesk that there

WILL be a stand-alone 2016 Showcase, should we take

a GAMBLE and not buy 2015, and wait and hope for a

2016 to show up, or should we buy 2015 in case there

is no 2016, EVEN THOUGH we would much rather have

an improved 2016 version?

Also, does the fact that there has been no update work

on Showcase 2015 mean there would be no improvement

for 2016 anyway, even if there WAS a new 2016? Or have

they been secretly working on Showcase and just want to

surprise us all with improvements at the time of the 2016

release? But I've never seen Autodesk do anything like that

before.

I just don't want to loose the ability to purchase a license

for a stand-alone Showcase. I've seen in the last few years

Autodesk trying to control our computers via the internet

nothing could be more annoying.

[botman]

Hi,

You might consider other rendersoftware when in doubt, for you will not receive any confirmation from AutoDesk regarding the new 2016 software in advance for as far as I can imagine.

(even if you think you're a valued AD customer... )

In my opinion it's allways good to check other suppliers aswell, for example Artlantis.

We use Artlantis to visualize our Revit models and it blows Showcase away in many ways.

Showcase on the other hand is brilliant (and I say it once more: BRILLIANT!) software for engineering.

Only time can tell....