The organic lining of the universe, my eyelids and the inside of my colon is quivering quite vigerously at the moment. Early this morning, T-Splines announced that it has been acquired by Autodesk. T-Splines is creator of organic surfacing plugins for SolidWorks and Rhino. Here are the details we know.
Autodesk acquires T-Splines
From Buzz Kross, Autodesk senior vice president, Manufacturing Industry:
“The technology acquisition will strengthen our Digital Prototyping portfolio with more flexible free-form modeling and will help achieve even closer integration between industrial design and engineering workflows”
and from Matt Sederberg, CEO of T-Splines:
Autodesk is currently investigating an approach to continue selling the T-Splines plug-ins. I will be joining Autodesk as a Product Manager, focusing on the T-Splines technology. I will continue to be on the forums periodically as will some of the developers you have worked with in the past.
Now, it’s not unusual that an acquisition of T-Splines would happen. T-Splines is powerful software that makes working with imported data and creating rich, complex shapes in Rhino and SolidWorks a breeze (they just needed some work on the UI side of things, which was coming last I heard), but there’s the toothy grin. T-Splines has been a tool used for Rhino and SolidWorks. Great move on Autodesk’s part though. They now have a tool that bridges the gap beautifully between conceptual surface modeling and mechanical CAD design, a tool that can be used within the same interface as the MCAD software making the creation or organic features even faster.
This tech is particularly interesting in that in has applications for the entire line of Autodesk products, from Alias and Maya to Inventor and Revit. Where Inventor Fusion eases the process for those moving from AutoCAD to Inventor and history-driven modeling to history-free direct modeling, T-Splines technology adds the ease of creating and transitioning to creating complex manufacturable geometry.
Anyway, many people will worry (myself included) that the Rhino/SolidWorks plugins are going away, even though Autodesk says they’re investigating an approach to continue selling them. Big loss/mistake by McNeel and Dassault (or others needing some slick surfacing capability) by not getting after it first. Thoughts?
