I removed Form Z from my CAD/modelling investigations because of the price I saw displayed a number of months ago, but now they have dropped it to around $1000.
Since the price drop I have been taking a serious look at it and the software seems to be in a league of its own at that price level.
Their sub-D tool is probably the strongest of them all and would rival Creo at a fraction of the price, the software seems incredibly stable and I watched a Boolean operation with so many parts that most programs would have struggled with.

Anybody have any experience with Form Z?

Edited by user Thursday, May 12, 2016 11:55:30 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Interesting, thanks.

I haven’t tried it myself but have watched their videos and it looks very good, Shark and Form Z are actually quite similar they are both proper solid modellers with surfaces and sub-d.
I must admit that their UI is a bit weird but they seem to have the full package just as Shark has.

Thanks Garlic, seems to be that all CAD programs are works in progress, I witnessed some very angry customers over at TurboCAD a few nights back.
Form Z interface can be modified and from what I have seen on the demo they really have some nice features to make selecting different tools very easily.

If Shark's tools worked then I think Shark would be ahead of Form Z, but as it stands we have all the tools but most of them don't work, whereas there do not seem to be many issues of that happening with Form Z.
Their render and animation functions seem very stable and user friendly, don't know if they are using the graphics card for rendering but it would be interesting to find out.

Sorry to jump into the conversation, but as one who has repeatedly tried out trial versions of FormZ since v7, I have to say I'm very impressed with the ability to easily explore countless shapes. Didn't know about the lab you just posted, but I see the Primitives collection is extremely useful.

What I don't like about it is that it feels like sketchUp instead of sharp crisp lines like you find in Shark. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I'm just not used to it.

Also I find that drafting in it is NOT easy like it is in Shark.

However the developers at AutoDesSys seem to take great pride in adding so many new tools constantly and each one has a nice dialog box to allow a wide breadth of modification.

Craig, did you try this formZ performance test ?

It might give you some good insight:
http://forums.formz.com/...w-fast-is-your-computer/

regards
G

I watched every single video from FormZ's site for the Pro version. Very impressive. Though it could never replace Shark for me, I find FormZ's tools highly sculptural and seem to allow very rapid ideation of super complex forms. Excellent for the creative process but definitely not for the technical precision of Shark/VC. I can't imagine using FormZ for creating manufacturing drawings. The few furniture manufacturers I know of whose designers use FormZ always use a second cad program to create the mfg detail drawings.

I'd be pleased if Shark v9 would start to include primitives like the spherical and polyhedron found in FormZ. Among other things..

*one thing I really liked about FormZ is the sheer speed of complicated operations. Have yet to encounter a long pause, freezing, spinning circle / thinking, or crashing.. Next I plan to try Rhino for mac.. though I've heard that it is very clunky compared to the directness of Shark.

Edited by user Sunday, May 22, 2016 9:30:16 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified