AC 8.1R1 Educational

[Eduardo Rolon]

Just a quick post to notify that the E and U versions of AC are out (at least in Puerto Rico).
The nice surprise is that my students received a copy of the upgrade even though they bought the student version of AC 8 and I though they were going to have to buy 8.1. This is not the normal way that most companies do business and it is commendable to see Graphisoft investing effort on creating new AC users.
This differs to Autodesk method since we just bought 20 AutoCAD licences for our lab, they are release 2004 and 2005 is comming out in about 3 weeks and Autodesk will not upgrade our recent purchase (we have to buy them again) so even though we just bought 2004 we are already behind again. So our plan is to return them to the dealer and wait.

[stefan]

We received the upgrade for AC 8.1 too.

And we are in the same situation with ADT 2004 😉
At the moment we had to decide, buying a subscription version for AutoCAD/ADT was not better then buying a single version. But then everything changes: they go to yearly releases and all of a sudden subscription might have been cheaper in the end... I'm not going to re-design all the tutorials we just updated from the older versions.

[Eduardo Rolon]

I decided against buying subscriptions to either AutoCAD or ADT because the basic price that Autodesk was asking was $12,000US per year which is ridiculous when compared to AC's 50 licences for $150.00, Sketchup's $450.00 initial and $10.00 per licence yearly and Abvent's $650.00 for 15 licences.

So right now I am redesigning my classes to take advantage of Sketch-up and AC as modelers and construction docs programs with Artlantis and C4D for rendering and Photoshop and Illustrator for image processing and layouts, each as a basic and advanced class.

As to AutoCAD I already informed my dealer that this is going to be the last time we buy software from them either AutoCAD, Revit, 3d Studio or ADT since they are too expensive and not worth the effort. I will still keep an AutoCAD and 3dViz elective since those are the programs that are more predominant in architecture offices down here, but since I taught AutoCAD using R14 for the past 6 years only showing my students what differences they could expect from the newer versions I don't think there will be trouble only using 2004 up to the point that it will stop being the "standard".

At the end what the Autodesk rep never understood is that the architecture students that graduate from now on know how productive AC is and they will start changing the way offices work and what software they use. Another story about Autodesk rep was that when I was dealing with him about our school price and why Revit was not available for sale in P.R. I told him that even though I already have versions of AutoCAD, ADT and Revit I bought my professional licence of AC and that is the one I use, he said only: What of it? I had to explain to him that when students or other professionals ask me about software it was obvious which one i would recommend. He never got it.

BTW have anybody read the white paper on AutoCAD 2005? My impression is that they only copied PlotMaker and included it in the program and that is the only change.

[stefan]

AutoCAD 2005? No real opinion about it now. And this might not be the best place. At least the file format didn't change.

We used ADT (only AutoCAD stuff) + VIZ Render with our students and I'm planning an ArchiCAD-workshop, to show them an alternative. Time planned for CAD is limited, so we have to make choices.

We start with SketchUp (I introduced it last year) and continue with AutoCAD, VIZ and Photoshop+Illustrator. I haven't been able to introduce ArchiCAD, although we have the license and the software is installed in the classroom. Maybe after some hands-on experience, a few students might open their eyes (and from their work maybe some teachers as well).

[Eduardo Rolon]

I introduced AC as an elective for the students in our masters program and the demand has forced me to tech two sections.
The way I have it structured is that i have a basic AC class ( intro, basic tools, custom objects, terrain, etc.) in which they create the model of their project. The other class then goes into PM and more construction documents technics.