ADSK supports T-Splines for Rhino/SolidWorks

Just before the year-end, Autodesk announced that it had acquired the technology assets of T-Splines, Inc., patent holder of the T-Splines surface modeling technology. Many people emailed and blogged their fears that this would spell the end of the popular T-Splines plug-ins for Rhino and SolidWorks; Autodesk didn’t immediately address those concerns, which only added to the confusion. On January 3 I caught up with Carl White, Autodesk’s director of digital design products for the Manufacturing Industry, about the company’s plans for T-Splines. Here’s what Mr. White shared with me. First of all, Autodesk has no intention of doing away with the plug-ins for Rhino and SolidWorks; in fact, links to trial versions of the plugins are back on the tsplines.com site. Autodesk bought the technology assets of T-Splines Inc. but not the back-office systems or Rhino- and Solidworks-focused reseller network, which caused a brief hiccup as Autodesk figures out how to sell the plug-ins to an audience it doesn’t currently address. The plug-ins will soon be available on Autodesk’s estore. Mr. White says that Autodesk will support the Rhino and SolidWorks plug-ins for the foreseeable future: “as long they keep buying them, we’ll keep making them.” But why an acquisition rather than a plug-in for Inventor or Revit as a way to get T-Splines to Autodesk users? Mr. White said that Autodesk isn’t interested in creating an a la carte menu of plug-ins for its core products, since that makes it hard to know the right mix of options for any given user task, so a plug-in was not in the cards. Too, Autodesk sees enormous potential in T-Splines. Making it available within existing products to a large number of users and paying T-Splines Inc. a royalty for each license, whether or not the customer used T-Splines technology, would have been a very costly to Autodesk. Structuring the deal the way it did gives Autodesk the technology at a reasonable cost, and allows it to make T-Splines available to a much broader audience. The acquisition also gives Autodesk a T-Splines development and support team, as Matt Sederberg and the T-Splines engineering and support team have joined Autodesk. What does Autodesk plan to do with T-Splines? I can’t say but if you think about the industries in which Autodesk currently competes, where T-Splines are already in use via Rhino and SolidWorks and then map that against Autodesk’s vision to address large enterprises, small business, individual makers and everyone in between — the potential is impressive.