We made a foray into designing and building a brand new house and let me tell you, my fellow HNers, the state of affairs with the design part is ABYSMAL, even in a reasonably modern architect firm.<p>Basically you first design, for look and feel, then you calculate technical details, then you build. Or rather the architect does all three, but you would normally want to "chip in" during the design phase - change the layout, move things around, etc. That's where things get bloody awful.<p>I wasn't expecting full VR tours of the place (though it is doable [1]), but I did expect to be able to walk through the place in 3D and see how it will look like in the winter morning and summer afternoon. Hell no. What are you smoking?<p>Floor plans. Planimetric facades. Roll your eyes to the ceiling and imagine. 3D renders that looks like from the early 00s take hours to produce, so they aren't done often. That's _still_ renders, mind you. 3D walk-abouts are possible, but they look like butt and they are viewed as the final step of the process, when everything has been done and done.<p>And this is with firms where principles are in their 40s and generally computer literate. It just seems that the industry is <i>very</i> conservative with its tooling choices AND these tools are also ridiculously expensive, further stifling any desire to switch. So they are stuck with using technical design software like ArchiCAD (good for laying out piping, calculating stress, air flow, etc.) for visual design. And the resulting process is sooooo slow, small changes and iterations take hours if not days to complete, so it takes weeks to converge to a general design of the house.<p>Painful, painful process. Ugh. Caveat emptor.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.benoitdereau.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.benoitdereau.com/</a>
Unity is in a continual state of building out "shiny new toys"; libraries and modules and sibling software that work as intended for 1 or 2 release cycles before breaking and being discarded. I've seen this time and again with Unity and I think it will hurt their stock going forward as they try to convince more industries to use their tools.<p>Just in the past two years I've seen them develop, hype, and then quietly drop: their VR editor, AR preview tool, Octane Renderer, Substance integration, UNet, ML integration.<p>It's obvious they have an incredibly difficult time managing their tools when their platform is fundamentally shattered between multiple releases, versions, render pipelines, and now DOTS vs normal workflow. And it's basically impossible for other companies to manage Unity SDKs with a ground that moves that much.
There is current a war between UE4/Epic and Unity in the AEC market (Architecture, Engineering and Construction.) You need to understand this in that context.<p><a href="https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/feed/all/AEC" rel="nofollow">https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/feed/all/AEC</a><p><a href="https://unity.com/solutions/architecture-engineering-construction" rel="nofollow">https://unity.com/solutions/architecture-engineering-constru...</a><p>The first move happened with Autodesk releasing Stringray and tying it tightly to 3DS Max. Stingray was not super popular (from what I hear) but its business motivations were real -- there was real-time visualization needs in AEC. UE4 and Unity then started to build out in this area.<p>I haven't actually seen numbers to back up that there is a viable market here, but there is belief there is a market by all involved parties (Autodesk with Stingray, Epic and Unity.)
Where did the author get the info that this is open source? I haven't seen Unity state anywhere that this tool we be open source.<p>I could see them giving source code to people who pay for some enterprise license, but I doubt it will be open source. At least not the part that extracts data from BIM software.