Food for thought. Google search gave-
I used Alias Studio for several years but decided to replace it with Rhino and V-Ray about 18 months ago. There were several reasons for this, the following are a few random thoughts.
There’s no doubt that Alias is a fantastic piece of software but it isn’t/wasn’t supported very well and development had stalled. Admittedly during the time I was using it (approximately 2001 – 2008), it changed hands several times which certainly didn’t help matters (hopefully now that Autodesk own it things have improved). My biggest source of frustration was the almost total lack of support. I work on my own and had to learn surface modelling from scratch (my background was using parametric solid modellers like Solidworks), at the time there were almost no tutorials available apart from the very basic ones included in the manual. If you tried to get help from Alias or their resellers, they were very unresponsive. It felt like a closed shop, all they were interested in was milking more money from their customers and perpetuating the myth that surface modelling is a black art. Even the Alias approved training course I attended was a waste of time. Rhino is the complete opposite; there are loads of tutorials, books, DVDs etc. available – many of them free of charge.
The annual maintenance contract for Alias was another gripe. Although optional, you had to have it if you wanted up to date software. It cost more each year than Rhino and V-Ray cost to buy outright. Some years all you’d get was a single service release masquerading as a major update. I never felt as if I was getting much for my money.
The origins of Alias go back a long way and much of the baggage from yesteryear still lurks in the program (or it did, I haven’t used it recently and Autodesk may have removed much of it by now). There’s lots of arcane features to do with the film industry still there. They don’t cause problems other than adding complexity and “bloat†but the software isn’t as focused as it could be. This issue was indicative of a lack of development; it felt like old software.
The rendering engine in Alias was good but not in the same class as V-Ray. You could produce very nice rendering in Alias but the lighting was very difficult to set up and it was slow. Another big advantage of Rhino is the choice of rendering plug-ins. I currently use V-Ray but I could add Maxwell, Hypershot or something else to my toolkit as some point. As far as I know Alias doesn’t have that capability.
The sketching in Alias is nice but I used it very rarely. It’s too slow and cumbersome to be of any real use (the pen icon would lag behind your Wacom stylus). Perhaps if you used it all day every day you’d get more out of it but a piece of paper and a pencil is hard to beat. If you must have digital sketching, Painter is a better more flexible option in my opinion. I occasionally use Painter and it is certainly much faster.
In terms of raw modelling tools, I haven’t found Rhino lacking. In fact, Rhino has several tools that Alias doesn’t (didn’t) have. The accuracy issue is a red herring in my opinion, I’ve found absolutely no difference in the tolerances achievable in Rhino compared to Alias. The IGES data I’ve exported from Rhino to produce injection mould tools has been flawless.
The only thing about Alias I miss is the interface. It is quite simply the best interface of any program I’ve ever used. It appears a little strange at first if you’re used to Windows programs but once you get used to it, it is superb; the marking menus are fabulous and I wish Rhino could copy them.
To finish (I’ve been rambling on for far too long) I must just add that I haven’t used Alias (or seen it) for about 18 months and Autodesk may have addressed some or all of the issues I mention. I wouldn’t go back to it now though, Rhino and V-Ray allow me to achieve all that I need at a much lower cost.