What a problem to have when your engineering team’s skill set are vendor locked. Not that I’m familiar with autodesk or why you absolutely have to use it, but your engineers could perhaps learn to use blender and use a Linux desktop environment and potentially save a lot of money in licenses and subscriptions.
If it’s 3dsMax yes you can switch over, if Blender doesn’t suffice there’s Houdini and many many 3d graphics studios are in fact Linux shops – Linux inherited that particular slice of the market from IRIX. Some seats will still be on windows or more likely Mac because ZBrush, AfterEffects and generally Adobe. If you’re using Maya there’s no issue in the first place as the thing runs on Linux.
If it’s AutoCAD, though, tough fucking luck. Once upon a time there was Siemens NX but they pulled Linux support and free CAD/CAM is nowhere close to production ready.
And, no, retraining people generally is usually not cheaper than paying license fees, by a long shot. Maybe if you pay out of your nose for Houdini but actually only need Blender but who does that in the first place.
And, no, retraining people generally is usually not cheaper than paying license fees, by a long shot.
Are you speaking of just short-term, or long-term as well?
Long-term for the likes of Hollywood contract studios is “till the end of the production” so, yes. It’s also insanity to switch software while a project is ongoing so you’d have to shut down the studio and then start it up again at which point they’d likely be bankrupt. They’re not even upgrading software versions.
Now if you’re the likes of Siemens or Airbus who more or less on a whim write their own CAD/CAM packages sure it pays off to re-train your engineers, using a software that was tailor-made for what they need to do was the objective in the first place, increasing their productivity. But you won’t make a Maya artist more productive by sitting them in front of Blender. It’s more like switching between vi and emacs: Both are very capable and have steep learning curves due to their sheer power and productivity focus (and one of each causes RSI. To wit, Maya doesn’t have right-click select).
