Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Autodesk's Negative Effect on NavisWorks

Although Autodesk pledged to not change NavisWorks the effect of Autodesk is hurting the program unfortunately. It's not Autodesk that is doing the damage though, at least not directly.

This was posted on the NavisWorks site today

"PLEASE NOTE THAT SOME THIRD PARTY VENDORS MAY ELECT TO NOT PROVIDE FILE FORMAT SUPPORT FOR NAVISWORKS PRODUCTS AS OUTLINED BELOW FOLLOWING THE SALE OF NAVISWORKS TO AUTODESK. WHILE WE INTEND TO WORK TO PROVIDE CONTINUED DIRECT THIRD PARTY FILE FORMAT SUPPORT WHEN POSSIBLE, IN SOME CASES, SUCH SUPPORT MAY BE DISCONTINUED DESPITE OUR PREFERENCE. WHEN FEASIBLE, A WORKFLOW CHANGE MAY ADDRESS SOME CUSTOMER’S NEEDS (E.G., EXPORT OF FILES FROM AN UNSUPPORTED THIRD PARTY CAD PRODUCTS INTO A FILE FORMAT SUPPORTED BY NAVISWORKS). PLEASE COME BACK TO THIS WEB PAGE FOR FURTHER UPDATES ON FILE FORMAT SUPPORT AVAILABILITY."

It's unfortunate that the 'other' vendors are taking away support for native file format, this coincides with a previous post regarding file exporters,  If more vendors pull native support because they would be supporting Autodesk then we have to have the originating program to export from to get quality models. Again this forces us into the position of requiring subcontractors to purchase NavisWorks. A free exporter would alleviate a lot of my concerns.