Autodesk Goes Christmas Shopping, Buys T-Splines’ Asset

Consumer confidence is rising, judging from the stream of shoppers crashing through the gates of shopping malls during pre- and post-Christmas sales. And consumers are not the only ones opening their wallets for good deals. Three days before Christmas, Autodesk went out and bought T-Splines’ technology assets. This put T-Splines’ lineup of surfacing plug-ins—T-Splines for Rhino, tsElements for SolidWorks—in Autodesk’s pocket.

In a letter to customers, T-Splines CEO and founder Matt Sederberg wrote:

We are very excited about what this means for the technology and products that we provide. Autodesk has a proven track record of making innovative technologies available to a wide audience and we believe the same will prove true with the T-Splines technology.

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.  

“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,” said Buzz Kross, senior vice president, manufacturing industry at Autodesk.

T-Splines’ partnership with SolidWorks, one of Autodesk’s rivals, was established in March. The handshake resulted in tsElements, a SolidWorks plug-in for importing T-Splines files from Rhino and many popular subdivision modeling packages. It’s unclear how Autodesk, now the new owner of tsElements, plans to handle the relationship with SolidWorks.

At the product’s home page, T-Splines currently displays a message that reads, “tsElements for SolidWorks is not available to try or buy at this time while our company transitions.” Kevin Quigley, a SolidWorks user, reacted on Twitter (@quigdes): “T Splines sold to Autodesk. That is definately NOT the Christmas present I was after ...”

Many CAD modeling software users rely on specialized NURBs or Spline-based surfacing packages like Rhino to create the type of complex surfaces that CAD programs cannot easily produce, then import the surface geometry to their desired CAD programs. Autodesk has invested considerable efforts to make sure that Autodesk Inventor, its primary MCAD software, can take advantage of surface geometry created in other Autodesk packages, like Autodesk Alias and Maya.