Here are some of the details about Product Design Suite 2015.
http://inventortopix.blogspot.com/2014/03/product-design-suite-2015.html
@Anonymous wrote:
You may not want to say that, word is Microsoft might just do that...
They are thinking of selling it....
Hi jletcher,
Could you provide a supporting link about Microsoft selling Excel?
I hope this helps.
Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,
Curtis
http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com
What if you are on a multi-year subscription? When we purchased our 3 year subscription it included more software than it now has. That doesn't seam right to me.
I don't currently have any use for Navisworks Manage at all. Maybe they will let me swap that for Alias Design... Not.
No it was an insider info but they did just release office for ipad .....
They talked about it a few years ago too, that is on the web some place but they decided not too now in talks again...
But I really don't think they will...
What's interesting is that it appears that Building Design Suite 2015 still contains Showcase. In fact the "Ultimate" edition has Inventor and Showcase, maybe that's the upgrade path?
@mthomas wrote:
What's interesting is that it appears that Building Design Suite 2015 still contains Showcase. In fact the "Ultimate" edition has Inventor and Showcase, maybe that's the upgrade path?
If it was Inventor Professional ... maybe, but it's only vanilla Inventor. I have absolutely zero use for anything in BDS other than Inventor and Showcase, though, and relatively little even for vanilla Inventor.
Rusty
@Rory_M wrote:
Will Showcase 2014 import Inventor 2015 files? Does anyone know?
I wonder what would happen if Microsoft removed Excel from Office....
I can confirm that Showcase 2014 WON'T import Inventor 2015 geometry.... you will need to export it from Inventor. I will have muck about some more to see if there is an acceptable workflow.
This is my issue with Suites, there are no guarantees that products will or won't be in them. At least with Standalone products you know what you are getting, HOWEVER, everyone had the opportunity to opt out of the Suites when they were introduced. One would assume they will never remove Inventor from the PrDS or FDS suites.... It's still a no brainer to go with the Suite option over the standalone products though based on the shear value of the software you get, new customers won't miss Showcase. I think there is more to come from this though. Cloud Credits for Showcase 360? That product is the worst kept secret out there, has anyone tested it & are allowed to talk about it? If you are on subs you get an allocation of Cloud Credits and in my opinion Showcase in the cloud will be far better than on the desktop. My issue with it was always the time it took to achieve a non grainy image with Ray Tracing, the Cloud 'should' take care of that.
Also something else to take notice of is the Suite pricing. Yeah they have removed products, but they reduced the buy price as well, which is not to be sniffed at. Yeah that doesn't help existing customers, but I would imagine that the lowering of the buy price will also be reflected in the subscription costs? So that would mean there would be no change for Standard & premium customers, but potentially there could be a subs cost drop for the Ultimate customers who have lost Alias Design.
This is still an odd decision from Autodesk. I just doesn't make any sense, there must be more to it, please let there be more to it. Factory Design users are looking pretty suite right now, they even have their own forum on here. Controversial times.
Just a comment to add. Make sure you politely express any frustrations you have with your Reseller, there may be something they can work out with Autodesk. You never know, power to the people & all that. It's possible they made this decision based on CIP data, how many of you opt out of that?
Scott Moyse
Did you find this post helpful? Feel free to Like this post.
Did your question get successfully answered? Then click on the ACCEPT SOLUTION button.
Design & Manufacturing Technical Services Manager at Cadpro New Zealand
Co-founder of the Grumpy Sloth full aluminium billet mechanical keyboard project
Hmm. Some weeks ago I've been reading this:
http://designandmotion.net/autodesk/which-products-will-be-in-the-autodesk-2015-suites/
That looked well ok for me. But now I'm simply disappointed.
Walter
Walter Holzwarth
Add me to the disappointed camp.
we all know the raytracing in 2014 is fubar'd so I tried Showcase for some product renders and was really impressed by the results. So, I was happy there was a decent alternative. And, now it's gone... A conspiricy theorist would joke they've done it on purpose... lol. God help the flack and abuse if the built in raytracing is still screwed in 2015.
As an engineer and product designer I find the inclusion of 3d Studio unnecessary, but I still need a way to create nice renders one in a blue moon - certainly not regularly enough to justify a subscription. Showcase seemed to have better control of material look/finish, so unless that functionality is added to Inventor then it's a backwards step.
Alias was 1 thing I was looking forward to learning, if I ever had 5mins spare, so that option for future development has gone too. *grumble*
I can only guess it was decided by people in a meeting, who have never used the products. They've got a chart with "raytracing" and see it's ticked in Inventor and also Showcase, so they drop Showcase as it's already in Inventor. The same goes for Alias as "surface modelling" is in Inventor...
The stranger thing is... 2014 was a powerhouse of a software package to rival Solidworks, but now I'm thinking we'll have less functionality toe-to-toe. (saying this, I'm yet to pick my way through the what's new documentation, but I'm not holding my breath).
Sam M.
Inventor and Showcase monkey
Please mark this response as "Accept as Solution" if it answers your question...
If you have found any post to be helpful, even if it's not a direct solution, then please provide that author kudos - spread that love 😄
We predominantly use the real time mode in Showcase as opposed to rendering. It's so quick to get excellent results, as long as you have a decent graphics card and remeber to bake the shadows and turn the AA up.
Max is a great package, and I can use it (to a point) but I don't find it anywhere near as fast as Showcase for those quick marketing/sales images. No-one else in the office here can use Max or has time to learn it. Let's face it, it is probably overkill for 99% of engineers.
@michaeldavis7418 wrote:
Curious if my Showcase 2014 will let me work with Inventor 2015 files ...hmmmm
No dice. I tried earlier & reported on here. You can export as STEP etc from Inventor, then import into Showcase but at this point that's all we got.
Scott Moyse
Did you find this post helpful? Feel free to Like this post.
Did your question get successfully answered? Then click on the ACCEPT SOLUTION button.
Design & Manufacturing Technical Services Manager at Cadpro New Zealand
Co-founder of the Grumpy Sloth full aluminium billet mechanical keyboard project
I'm going to join the not happy camp. Personally I find myself using Sketchbook quite frequently. It's funny how these updates just happened to be overlooked when I payed for my subscription last fall.
I could think of selecting about 80% of all interesting products in the Ultimate Suite by user's own choice.
Walter Holzwarth
VERY, dissapointed to see that Showcase & Alias are no longer bundled. Apart from Inventor itself, the rest of the package is now of no use to us. I've been using Inventor since release 4 and Showcase is one of the best visualision products on the market. This strategy has my company looking over the fence to see what the competion can provide........
Shame. Why break something that is working so well?