Showcase Discontinued - Thoughts

[jcortelyou]

There must be some really bad hiring in management at Autodesk recently.  I'm guessing there is a pack of younger, hip, and trendy managers who were just "so sick of the valley", and were like "San Raphael is like so much more on point".  It's like there's an infectious disease that is moving through the product line to keep people employed yet never really innovating anything new - just constant reinvention, hoping the numbers will creep up - hoping is the key here...

I use Showcase for a few things - it's poorly programmed, a pain to use, not very intuitive, but it works and gives me what I need to get the job done. I was hoping for a future with showcase but per the email I just got that will not be the case.  

I want everyone at Autodesk to know that YOUR CLOUD COMPUTING SOFTWARE IS NOT THERE YET, IT DOES NOT WORK WELL AND PEOPLE DON'T USE IT IN THE REAL WORLD.  I know that this is the direction you want people to go in but it's a hassle to setup, Renders horribly, is loaded with glitches and you are trying to break the most convenient communication request "Hey can you email that to me?".

Showcase is a 3 Step process - you need to get you model set, make a video in Showcase and upload the video file somewhere to the web.  Yes it would be nice if this were simplified.  Instead of relying totally on your "Drive System" how about building the Guts of Showcase into some of your software and then have it push to the cloud or local.  

I do not want your crappy cloud software manhandling my models - I can't even get a rendering to come out the way I want it to in the cloud and now you're trying to render video and animation up there.  It's not that it doesn't work, it doesn't work well, it's inconvenient and please please please - come up with a plan to keep your product and sales lines consistent.  I am so ready to switch platforms.....

[djen]

For what we do Showcase provided a quick solution to provide renders for our customers.  The tools available inside of Showcase are superior to what is provided in either AutoCad or Inventor.  Simple things like rotating a wood grain is simple in showcase.

Yes the masters from Autodesk have provided what they deem solutions for rendering.  I now get 3ds Max as part of the  product design suite.  Don't get me wrong 3dS Max is great software for what it does.  Yet in my case it equivalent to providing a 90-story building, when all I need is a back yard shed.  The changeover is not simple, users will need to be retrained.  These software changes cost the companies which use the software needless expenses and lost time.  With showcase I can have a user up to speed in a couple days and that user is providing me the renders I need.

As a subscription customer I find the constant "evolution" of the suites from Autodesk a bit misleading.  As a customer I have purchased the subscription for the software provided in the original subscription.  Autodesk from year to year then evaluates what my company needs in the suite, as if they know my needs better than myself.

[jamesw]

I think they are looking to bring more visualisation tools into Inventor. Or maybe going to push VRed a bit more.