I have been using formZ for architecture for years and years, since before it was even available for the PC, so I can tell you a little about it having used it for so long.
First, it really makes a difference what you want to use it for. If you do architecture, or things that don’t require nurbs, or very dynamic shapes it’s really great in terms of the ease you can select things on a topological level, like say grabing all the point of many objects and stretching evything at once. It really doesn’t give a damn about what you do to an object that a parametric modeller would, because it doen’t think of it those terms, objects are just points connected to other points or not.
It’s also god for dealing with models with a great number of objects, like a building while most 3D programs seem to be focused on modelling a few objects but at greater levels of detail.
The real problem with it is that it is crashy and buggy, and the support their is useless. It doesn’t matter what system I use, there are always crashes, to the point that you just get used to it and it becomes part of your day. If I email tech support, they never admit there’s a bug, they ask if you installed it with virus protection turned off, then when you say you did (assuming you know since the IT guy probably installed it), they claim they’ve never heard this problem before and can’t duplicate it on their machines. This is BS, because often I will be the one asking over and over, year after year. I’ve had issues that I search for and find have been persent for years. Rather than fessing up and fixing it, they claim this is all news to them. BTW, why can’t I have virus protection tuned on when I install it, like any other software? I don’t think it matters, it’s just a way to put the blame on the user, not theem. Also, they take down criticism and bug reports from their forums so you don’t see the problems when you search. Actually, if you can find a cracked version, they tend to be much more stable.
I wish they would get bought up by some company that would invest in re-writing the code, or making it really stable rather than living in denial because it really is a flexible modelling program, just frustrating to use. I think it’s just a leadership problem there. They would rather add new features and sell a new release than fix the bugs that just seem to stay there year after year.
They also need to get with the times, many of the frustrations are just a lack of implementation of things that are pretty much commonplace in most modellers, like the fact you have to go into a a seperate module to edit parametric objects, the same thing for mapping and previewing maps. You should be able to do this on-the-fly like any other program.
Well I could go on and on about it’s deficiencies, but the fact is there’s nothing else as flexible in terms of manipulating large polygonal models. This is why I wish it could be re-released by a company that knows how to code.
Actually, the reason I’m in this forum is that I want to get good enough with Rhino to replace FormZ. Not because I want to learn Rhino, but because I’m sick of FormZ’s crashes, and Autodessys’s BS. If you have a software company and people who use and know your software are driven away from it to something else to do the same thing, not because the new one does different things or is easier, just that you are fed up, you’ve got a real problem.
So bye, bye FormZ, hello Rhino.
