A good article over at the CADalyst site where they have performed a survey to determine the usage of 2D CAD versus 3D. The author notes:
I’ve always been fascinated by the discrepancy between how much 3D CAD advertising I see and how much actual 3D usage I observe…
Based on their survey (bear in mind that their population of readers tends to be the smaller companies using tools such as AutoCAD), they found that less than 6% of the respondents were totally 3D-based. However, nearly 70% are at least using some 3D models in their work. The flip side is that 60% are still primarliy using 2D. Most importantly the overall trend has changed by only small amounts since they conducted the same survey three years ago.
It would seem logical to conclude that there is an uptake in 3D but it’s not happening at quite the pace that the advertisers would lead you to believe.