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AliasStudio 2008 (Cadalyst Labs Review)
1 Jan, 2008 By: IDSA ,Mike HudspethSoftware combines 2D digital sketching and solid-like 3D surface creation.
If you've ever done any industrial design or dealt with industrial designers, you undoubtedly have at least heard of Alias. For years it has been the de facto standard for Class A surfacing. But with various high-powered competitors trying to secure a piece of the pie, can Alias maintain its market share? With a good mix of capability and ease of use, it can — and that's what I see in AliasStudio 2008. When Alias was sold to Autodesk in January 2006, I read some doom and gloom concerns that things would change. But Autodesk has made surprisingly few changes. Instead, the company is investing in digital prototyping in a big way and trying to get all the software to work together. Not an easy task, but certainly a lofty goal. Imagine — the market leader in surface-design technology matched with the market-leading CAD technology.
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For those of you out there (and there are always one or two) who haven't ever seen Alias software, here's a short rundown of some of its most important features: 2D digital sketching (not as in Pro/E but like art class), amazingly solid-like 3D surface creation, and, most intriguingly, a combination of the two. Let's take them one at a time.
2D Rocks!
Let's face it, if you have even a smidgeon of artistic talent, it's always going to be easier to pick up a pencil and draw something than it will be to model it. But sometimes, all you want to do is explore possibilities before you commit to a direction. AliasStudio 2008 has a whole suite of 2D paint capabilities that will have you happily creating in no time. As I said before, it resembles hand sketching or painting more than it does parametric modeling.
 AliasStudio 2008 |
Years ago, I went to the Alias office in Toronto to see the product. I told the staff at the time that they needed to split off their 2D bitmap creation tools into a standalone product. (Okay, I wasn't the only one who said it.) They did it, and it became their SketchBook Pro product. It had layers that you could turn on and off. Why would you need that in a bitmap? Imagine doing the line work of a product and then having a different layer for text variations and others for color choices. Imagine also that you had all kinds of different drawing tools (ballpoint pen, markers, airbrush, etc.). AliasStudio 2008 has a Hotspot menu (accessed either by right-clicking or hitting the spacebar) that is very similar to SketchBook Pro's (figure 1).
 Figure 1. AliasStudio 2008 has a new interface. The Hotspot menu lets you pick and change tools from wherever you are in the graphic window. |
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