All around the world, a big part of architecture students use Mac as their system. When I started studying people highly recommend Mac for architecture and I bought one. After five years using it for everything (Mostly rhino and AutoCad), still have some problems that Windows users don’t 'cause of compatibility in plugins. If the majority of architecture students have Mac, why don’t you develop Datasmith yet? Think about the future… Be open for Mac, and a lot of Mac user will join the community. Maybe the reason that you have not complains about Mac users is that you don’t have many… I use Unreal when I can but importing from rhino takes for ever without this plugin.
Will be released some day? Do we have any other solutions mean while? (not parallels, not bootcamp )
Not sure what part of the world you’re in, but I have rarely seen a mac user for architectural or high-end game development (which is necessary for high-end architectural real-time visualization) and I’ve been doing this for 15 years. Perhaps these students are attending institutions that refuse to use industry standard hardware which are windows based systems?
I recently finished architecture school in the US two years ago. Maybe around a third of my classmates had macs. Nothing to do whatsoever with the institution as the school itself clearly recommended windows, they just liked macs. Not a majority of students, but certainly not insignificant, especially if Epic is interested in promoting unreal at the university level.
There are quite a few notable architecture/interior architecture & design schools around the globe that either have Macs in the studio classes, or the students bring their own. This is a huge disservice to those students and their preparedness for entering the job market later. The biggest reason it’s a problem is Revit - by far the most used piece of software for mid-to-large scale projects. It’s not Mac native and probably never will be… in fact, it’s still shocking how many architecture schools around the world still don’t use Revit.
I wholeheartedly agree with Teriander: I work on global projects all the time and 99% of arch firms use Windows. The only time I’ve seen Macs used are at very, very small residential architecture firms; where coordination with other trades/consultants like MEP, AV, Civil Eng, etc isn’t a top priority. That hugely important need to share background drawings with other consultants (who are always using Windows) and vice versa is another reason Macs aren’t used.
Sorry to say, but whomever told you that Macs were great for architecture are either not that well informed, or work in very small niche offices.
The reason we haven’t rushed to put Datasmith on Mac is:
At least 80% of the demand is Windows for reasons mentioned above
Macs have generally underpowered GPUs or very expensive solutions for eGPUs
MacOS UE4 platform is not feature equivalent to Windows for various reasons, if we ported Datasmith, you’d find other things that weren’t there either, you still wouldn’t be happy
We’re a small team (Datasmith team) and we’d rather make major improvements to core data import, fidelity and dataprep problems than spend our limited bandwidth trying to solve some of the porting problems right now
There is an intent to support MacOS, but it depends on some other things happening, so we aren’t providing a timeline right now.
Where exactly are you guys getting your data to support this? My experience is that any professional worth their salt uses a mac as their personal computer. Sure, many offices use windows because it’s cheaper, but people who are serious about design work (in my experience) use mac. According to this study, even the people who use PC prefer mac 71% of students own or would prefer a Mac, claims survey | TechSpot
As a Mac user whose work centers around architectural modeling (ArtStation - Tyson Gersh) and has wanted to use Unreal more seriously for architectural work, I can say my biggest barrier has been the inefficiency of it all. It seems like datasmith would be a major improvement for my unreal workflow, but it continues to blow my mind that in 2019 a tech company this substantial hasn’t made universal accessibility a priority.
I get that it may seem to make sense to focus on your primary users, but I personally think the lack of solving this problem indicates a lack of awareness of what the market actually is. You want industries outside of gaming to adopt Unreal as a go-to platform for design and rendering work? Then cater to the demographic that early adopts what will eventually become mainstream. Unreal has potential to be a huge industry disrupter, but as someone who is already sold on the product, it shouldn’t be this much of a challenge.
I guess my point is: I love your product. I think it can enable me to create value on a whole new level. I am frustrated that it’s such a challenge for me to use your product. I want to create great things that showoff what your product can do, but it’s really prohibitive in terms of timing and interruption-of-focus to go back and forth so much. I want to get other people to use your product too, but it’s hard to sell them on it when I’ve had so much trouble.
p.s. I am sitting at WeWork as I type this and EVERY. SINGLE. COMPUTER. in view is a mac. If you want to show the world all the creative and unique ways that UE can be used, make it easy to use for the creative world.
Most of the film industry works on Mac’s. As a set designer based in Vancouver I would like to add another couple thousands orders for mac based Datasmith !