UPDATE: Story amended to recognize Autodesk's previous fixed price for generative design.
In a move that is sure to make generative design more approachable for more engineers, Autodesk is lowering the fixed price to $1600 for all the generative design that can be done in one year. If that is too long of a commitment, you can get unlimited use month by month ($200/month). In addition to the all-you-can-eat options, you can also order a la carte, one at a time, but now each generative design, no matter how much computation is required, will cost 33 cloud credits (a cloud credit is roughly $1).
Why Now?
The conventional pricing of generative design ($/computation time) has proved to be deterrent to its use. Autodesk agreed and last year offered unlimited use of generative design to subscription customers but at fixed cost of $8,000 per year or $1,000 per month. That may have been too high for the normal Fusion 360 user. Current pricing for Fusion 360 is only $495 a year. We wonder how many Fusion 360 users could justify spending 16 times the cost of their design software to add generative design capability.
But the advantage of fixed pricing in general is not to be disputed. The thought of running up a bill, not knowing how many clouds credits a generative design will consume, or even how much a cloud credit is worth, makes for too much uncertainty. For the normal user, this is like being seated at the fancy new restaurant, handed a menu with no prices and sweating the enormous bill that is sure to follow.
Generative design is too unfamiliar for us to estimate its expense and computationally intensive enough to run up the bill. This industry wide pricing scheme of the pay-per-use has prevented the experimentation and trial any new technology requires and therefore hindered generative design’s widespread acceptance.
Autodesk is built on widespread acceptance, or in their parlance, democratization. AutoCAD democratized design software in the last century and in this one, has democratized simulation, pressing specialized tools for FEA and CFD into the hands of designers.
"We want to do that with optimization," says Brian Frank, Senior Product Manager of generative design at Autodesk. "Generative design is the first time the 'aided' in 'computer aided design' actually applies. We want that in the hands of everyone."
Worst Case = Best Case
Generative design is as computationally intensive as an application can get. It solves one static equilibrium problem after another, stopping only when an optimum is determined. If you thought FEA was computationally intensive, imagine running repeated FEA simulations, varying each by the smallest change in shape, without limits on time or number of variations, your dogged goal the least possible weight of a part. But you still need your computer. You still have to eat and sleep. If you are a Fusion 360 user, you turn it over to a number crunching computer on the cloud.
Will all-you-can-eat pricing be a good deal for Autodesk --or the equivalent of a hungry diner pulling a chair up to the seafood at the buffet and bankrupting the restaurant? A lightweighting perfectionist could conceivably run generative design on every part in the inventory overtaxing Autodesk’s rented cloud servers every hour of the day, every day of the year. Surely the nightmare scenario must have been considered. But asked of built-in limits or if brakes would be applied, Autodesk said only that they have ways of detecting users who are abusing their license.
Autodesk cannot say what is the average size of a generative design as measured in cloud credits because there is too much variation between those doing trials and those with real project use. However, their monitoring of student activity gave them confidence that unlimited use for the fixed price will not break the bank. Students have unlimited use of generative design – but not unlimited time.
“Students have other projects to do,” said Seth Hindman, Senior Manager of product design and manufacturing solutions at Autodesk. They will move on.
“A student project is roughly 30% of the size of an industrial generative design project,” said Hindman.
A Good Push into the Mainstream
We get the impression that Autodesk is only too eager to have users jump in the pool. The more crowded the pool, the better and overuse is a good problem to have. Autodesk has been the most vocal champion of generative design of the Big Four design software companies, pushing generative design from the fringe towards the mainstream, all the time hoping users will adopt it as a standard part of the design workflow.
However, users have held back. Reasons for hesitation can be technical (robustness of solution, manufacturing of generative design parts, etc.) but also economical. Our own trials of generative design would have cost us hundreds of cloud credits had we been an industrial customer. We have been wary since a scary example at an Autodesk conference of a generative design with thousands of “outcomes” that would have cost $15,000. We imagined the unlucky engineer having to explain that to their manager.
Fixed pricing simply blows away the price uncertainty. Lowering the fixed price drastically (80%, from a $8,000 to $1600 a year) helps even more. If the price reduction is enough to attract the usage Autodesk is seeking remains to be seen. We expect an engineer with unlimited use of generative design at low enough fixed cost to have no qualms about using it more often, as each additional design exacts no additional expense. Should they select the wrong settings, hit the start button and go home, oblivious to a runaway optimization, a chain reaction, the office will still be there in the morning. There will not be a pink slip on the desk. They will adjust the setting and try again. Live and learn. Isn’t technology wonderful?