The thread for silly Alias questions...

Not sure what your point is, but in Solidworks (the app I’m used to), there are also a huge amount of ways you can build the same thing, but unlike Alias, it has an excellent UI, and gets better and slicker with every release (I’m still on 2009, but that was a huge improvement over 2008, with the context sensitive quick tool popups that displayed the most common and relevant actions you might want to perform on the thing you just clicked on).

In alias, however, I even find the radial menus cumbersome (which people hail as proof that Alias does indeed update its UI), and I’ve opted to map single stroke hotkeys for my most common used actions instead (C for CV, N for nothing and M for move, for example).

Which brings me to my next question:

Spacebar, the largest key on the keyboard… is it used by anything in Alias by default?

Not sure how to map it to anything either (I’d like to map it to “pan” so I don’t have to press two bloody modification buttons in order to just scroll a viewport).

Space bar acts like “Enter”. I just whack it to accept any and all commands that require a confirmation. It gets a lot of use during sessions with a lot of trimming, trim divide, etc where it maintains you’re most recent option, but still requires a confirm.

the Space bar brings up the Painting HOTBOX when working in the Paint Layout window and a Pencil is selected.

Ok, so I’ve properly begun my Alias training now, and I see that some of the questions I asked doesn’t make sense. Kudos to those who managed to answer them anyway! :slight_smile:

Next question is still (unfortunately) a keypoint curve question:

How can I “lock” the center of the radius of an arc to a certain position? (I know I can move the pivot at then reposition the arc at my specified fixed point, but I would like to be able to edit the arc in place without having the center of the radius ever move.)

But I also have one for the surface geeks out there:

How can I increase the accuracy of trimmed surfaces? I have tried to rebuild the originating surfaces and curves in a few ways, but nothing seems to matter in this particular instance. It’s also weird that the surface evaluation tool complains about angle deviations in tangency alignment, but the surfaces are only aligned with position.

PS. Wow, Evangelist, did you model that head in Alias, or are you just painting it in Alias? Either way seem rather masochistic, though. :wink:

Eobet,

Not 100% positive on what you’re trying to ask for the arc question - when you say you want to “edit” the arc without the center, what kind of edit?

Regarding the trimming issue - my bet is you’re just running with the default tolerances which are too loose. I attached a screen shot of my tolerances. Try updating them in the contruction settings, specifically the fitting options.

Let me know if that helps.

im pretty sure ( i dont use keypoints for construction) the behaivor of the Circle is what you are looking for. its the only keypoint “arc” that the radius is based on the center NOT the sweep inputs.

Surface Geek stuff.
im very doubtful that your surface is moving. trimming does not rebuild or reinterpret the shape. what you are possibly seeing is the Draw Precision of the surface change after the trim. try this. CONTROL PANEL > QUALITY > DRAW PRECISION set this to 1 and see if the shape looks better. my fingers are crossed for ya. if so, everything displayed in a computer is a polygon or polyline. after you trim, the flag segment might be showing right where you trimmed. setting this to 1 is the maximum number of segments to draw a shape. set it to zero you will see the segments very clearly. BTW: this is not set to 1 by default because it will slow the display down especially for super dense models.

i could get into tolerances if you need but i would first start with the display.


Masochistic. Thanks: ) but i did not model this head. it is one of the human models that came on the 3DCD (if anyone remembers that) once upon a day, Alias was called Power Animator and was a real hit in Hollywood hence all the animation tools still in the software. if you want to see some of the first uses of Alias, check out Abyss(the water creature) and im pretty sure Terminator 2 (the chrome guy).

Thank you for the tips!

Turns out, it’s not the trim that’s inaccurate, but actually the projection, and it didn’t matter that I used your construction options:

Granted, that’s an enourmous zoom, but still… I was able to spot it at normal zoom without even using evaluation.

Absolutely no idea how to make it go away.

Regarding the arc… when you create a three point arc, you get a fourth as well… that fourth point is the center of the radius, and that’s the one I want to lock down, so when I drag the three other keypoints, the “origin” stays put.

Whoop… an answer while I was posting the second one…

Thanks for the tip! Unfortunately, on the OS X version of Alias Automotive 2010, that option doesn’t seem to be availible. There’s only a “tolerance” setting and a tessellator toggle, and those does not seem to have any effect at all.

Hopefully you are right, and it’s only a screen artifact. We’ll see when I’m starting to fillet (though I’ve heard that fillets can actually fill in gaps in Alias, which sounds nice).

EDIT: Never mind! It worked! Thank you!

But I will leave my original answer above just as a testament to the absolutely HORRID user interface in Alias. The problem is the small black arrows which points down in front of the “Quality”. First of all, since there is no outline around the collapsed menu, I sometimes have trouble reading it as a menu at all. Second, a down arrow in my mind means that the menu is opened. I know, I know, it’s an ambiguous solution. Hmm… could that be why some applications use a RIGHT arrow instead?

My teacher showed us Alias 2011 and I just had to laugh. The only UI “update” I saw were that the buttons were slightly shaded… looked about as good as Windows 95 did… in 1995. It’s not even a step up from the Windows 3.x styling they use now. Autodesk really needs to fire all of their UI designers… but then again, I suspect they have none, and what they really need is to hire some (hey, I’m available in 1.5 years time if they want to). :slight_smile:

EDIT 2: I don’t know if I should laugh or cry this time… when you click the “down” arrow to open the collapsed shading menu… there is an actual bloody right arrow at the very bottom… which not only is in a completely different style than the other arrows, it doesn’t have any accompanying menu label as with the rest… only a single black line which goes right through the arrow… ok, I’m crying now.

Ok, new silly questions:

Blue lines are without history, and green are with… but what does a thicker green line mean?

I swear I at one point saw my teacher move a CV according to the normal of the actual curve itself… (though I think he moved the CV/hull of a surface, but is it possible to do this for a normal curve)?

The double thickness should just indicate a surface boundry vs a curve or isoparm…though between having AA on and having most of my layers as hot pink (only default layer color with good contrast) I don’t even remember what the heck the colors mean anymore. :frowning:

The user color menu and draw style gives you some option for that as well.

Use the Move CV tool on the bottom right of the control panel. You can set this to a few modes:

XYZ (Left click X, Mid Y, Right Z)
NUV (Left click Normal to curve/surface, mid U direction, right V direction)
Project (Lets you project according to a different hull/curve - great for getting surface tangency/curvature)
Slide (Lets you move the CV along a direction of the hull).

Yes I know the UI sucks for this one too, but it’s a great tool. :laughing:

Great.

UI
down and right arrows can both be found in UIs. what about Adobe using down arrows??? Far more creatives using that so i guess we can too. I do like your suggestion of the switch of the Arrow when open and close. I can send the UI guys your feedback.

as far as 2011, I unfortunately am not allowed to have a comment. however, making the UI more productive and consistent is always a priority for us.

BTW: i started my internship with Alias while i was still in school(11 years ago). i have been in dev., Sales, Marketing, and everything between. There is always hope for you to come on board and rock the ship!

keep posting your progress!

you might be seeing the continuity indicators. is there a P, T, or C on it? otherwise, double thick lines are surface boundaries.

there is also a TRANSFORM > MODIFY > MOVE CV NORMAL tool.

That sounds awesome! But how do I switch between the different modes?

EDIT: Ah, never mind… I figured it out… a double click opened a collapsing menu (UI feedback again… tools which you can double click on to open a menu usually always have a box in the corner in Alias… this one doesn’t… also, the menu it opens is a collapsible one and not a popup window as with the rest… I understand why it has been done, but still it is yet another consistency problem).

EDIT 2: Also, a bug that might be limited to the OS X version of Automotive 2010, but after closing the collapsible menu, subsequent double clicks on the Move CV tool only scrolled the entire settings panel to the top, no longer opening/closing the tool’s settings menu.

New silly questions:

  1. There’s a trim and untrim tool… but is is there an unproject tool?

  2. Does project - trim - project - trim yield the exact same result as project - project - trim? (ie, is the order you chop up a surface in important?)

  3. How can I diagnose the position failure further? I already used ctrl + alt to make sure both blend points are at the right positions and they are both G2.

Also, UI consistency issue again: The alignment is clearly not “free”, since it says position in the model, and pretty much everywhere else in the program. And free would imply that it would not even have to follow the curve, which is has to.

Theres no such thing as unproject. Project just creates a curve on surface. If you want to “unproject” you can select your curve on surface and delete it.

The way you chop up a surface isn’t necessarily important, but keep in mind that creates multiple trim operations in your history. Typically I will untrim my surface then trim the area I want at once so that I don’t have multiple trims in the history. Sometimes this can lead to wacky results if you start editing the history inputs.

“Free” implies that it is trying to achieve continuity, but does NOT have to (the edge is FREE to do what it wants).

“FIXED” is the setting you would use if the edge MUST fall on your curve.

Try going to “advanced” and turning on control options->Continuity check. This will show your deviations.

Thanks for the tips!

I had no idea that “free” actually differed from “position”… and I still don’t exactly understand how it works… but I guess I’ll stay away from it for now (unfortunately, “fixed” did break the continuity).

The “continuity check” only seemed to activate the surface continuity checks, but what’s failing in that screenshot is actually a position alignment that isn’t adjacent to any surface at all.

I fixed it now by deleting the blend curve alltogether and creating a new one, but I used the exact same steps, so I still don’t understand why things went wrong. :frowning:

Blend Curves can be tricky.
inside the Blend toolbox there is a EDIT BLEND CURVE tool. this brings up a manipulator that might look overly complex but is quite uesful. there will be a Green dotted line that will appear to flow along the edge. clicking on that will assure the Blend is aligned to the surface edge instead of the parametrization of the surface(which is default). inside the CREATE BLEND CURVE tool options there is a “auto align at surface corners” that will do this automatically. but keep in mind that you want this off if your not at a corner.


SQUARE TOOL (free vs fixed vs position)
Sqaure as the added advantage that you can create a surface with corner inputs only. try it, Grid snap on the grid 4 times either CW or CCW. you can use a combination of edges, curves or corners. that is why it is referred to as Free or Fixed. This is very useful for reverse engineering over scan data. you can snap the corners directly to the mesh and use FIT SURFACE to suck it to the shape of the mesh.

BTW.
the Rebuild check boxes in Square and Bi-rail are for Trimmed edges.

To confuse you even more, inside the Trim tool is a option called “3D trimming” which combines the project tool with the trim in 1 operation. select surface, select curves, choose the area to keep, discard or divide.

I would imagine the reason that it failed is because you had two blend curves that didn’t necessary have the same curvature scale. So it tried matching the curvature of your #3 edge and when it blended that to #1 it didn’t line up with where you had your curve. Then when you hit fixed it would try to match those two edges first, but couldn’t keep continuity.

If you have a wire file you can post I can try and take a look at it. I rarely if ever use blend curves though.