The thread for silly Alias questions...

Ah, right. Thanks!

So next I should go looking for the equivalent of “keep normal constant” from Solidworks’s sweep feature. :slight_smile:

Anyway, looking back to the first question of the first page is really a facepalm on my behalf. :smiley: Not since that first page have I ever needed to do what I asked about. One should really not be allowed to use Alias without taking a few courses first (which is a statement which really takes an effort for me to write, being a former interface designer).

I think I may have screwed up a setting, and I can’t find it.

When I align two surfaces, and then start moving the controlling surface’s CVs around, the aligned surface’s CVs slide alongside the edge freely (see attachment).

This differs from the behavior when I’ve straight up built one surface from another (the CVs along the edge are locked on top of each surface then), and I want to get back to that behavior.

The positional influence is 1.0, so what other setting am I missing?

If you build a surface off an edge, it uses that edge as is (CV’s should be locked on top of each other).

If you align something to an edge, and then start to move something, it will allow them to move differently as long as it achieves the requested tolerance.

I’m not sure you’ll ever get to what you’re asking, but I’m not 100% sure if I follow why you’d need to?

Because I did not know about the option I just found, and tried to achieve it manually for DAYS now:

The colinear continuity option.

God DAMN!

Why isn’t that enabled by default?

The only reason I found it was that I enabled the patch precision drawing of curves within a surface, and evaluated their continuity and discovered that they were really breaking, despite the surface coming up as green, and even the shading lining up (although with bumps which I could see in the CV mesh, but didn’t know now to straighten out without turning to manual tweaking… and hence me dabbling with various align options which enabled me to retain some of my tweaking).

The levels of complexity to be discovered behind every option in this software is just mindboggling.

Keep in mind the continuity indicators that turn green only indicate the boundary is within tolerance. If you are using the wrong tolerances (IE tolerances that might be OK for a truck, but not a handheld product or vice versa) you’ll either wind up never getting continuity (without heavy complexity) or you’ll have a false sense of continuity.

Unless I managed to screw up my settings, I believe I’m using tolerances of car body fidelity:

Max gap: 0.005mm
Angle: 0.1 deg
Curv: 0.1

(Got them from my teacher in alias and he did car industry work.)

EDIT: It just hit me that I’m designing a toy right now, that measures in millimeters instead of meters…

Interesting, do you have the applicable tolerances for handheld products? Any others would be useful as well.

Tolerances are a bit of a beast with a few things to consider:

1: Scale of what you are designing
2: CAD Software your data will be translated to.

I use the default Pro E settings (since I am translating to Pro E) but have modified the curve fit and maximum gap to .001mm from .002 - have found some small surfaces get gapped when importing otherwise.

So, Alias fun again!

This time, I managed (I think) to screw up a file, and in the process, I’ve discovered that there actually several different kinds of pivot points in Alias. The problem is, in their explanation on how to move them, they forgot to mention that there is more than one type.

So, now I have a file, in which they move separately for some reason I have not been able to figure out. I also have not been able to figure out why this happened in the first place, or how to get it back to the behavior I’ve had for the past three years (and no, it’s not in the Pivot tool options, where one would think to look).

Anyone ever had this happen to them? How did you get the normal behavior back? Where did they hide those options?

So I’ve never ever had that happen, but it looks like you somehow managed to separate the scaling and rotation pivots.

When you go to any of the move pivot, set pivot or any of the pivot command option boxes there should be a checkbox for “Rotation and Scaling” and they should both be checked. Then if you center the pivot it should put them both back at the same point.

I’m not sure how you got that to happen, the only reason I could see it moving that geometry is if you have some construction history on that surface that is related to the pivot (like a revolve for example).

Thanks for the reply, as always. :slight_smile:

When both are checked, they move at different speeds. When the scaling pivot option is unchecked, the small round pivot moves without affecting the geometry. However, whenever the scaling pivot is checked, the geometry moves with the pivot. The surface does not have construction history and it doesn’t matter if I cut and past it into a new file.

If I, however, start from scratch, the same thing doesn’t appear to happen. Also, even if I press “zero transform” and then duplicate the surface using the “duplicate object” tool, it gets seemingly non proportionally scaled by more than half of its original size. Luckily, I did manage to figure out that if I pulled an old Solidworks trick and used offset surface with a distance of 0.00, I got an identical surface and so far, that seems to have resolved it!

What can I say? Alias… :slight_smile:

PS. I recently accidentally deleted all my preferences and had to transfer them again from my old OS X install, like I’ve done many times before. Only this time, whenever I launch 2013 I must manually make the shelf appear from the Windows menu, and I can no longer create curves using the “cv curve” tool, because they get locked in a -1 span setting, so I have to use edit point curves instead… I tried to go back to 2012, but that no longer allows me to save my settings and always complain about it when I try to exit the app.

Honestly not sure on any of that.

You should have been able to just center the pivot to put the scale/rotation pivots back at the same point.

Without looking at your wire file it’s hard to debug why something is behaving a certain way. Also keep in mind groupings or construction history can cause things to freak out. Try deleting your construction history and making sure your node is completely ungrouped and then see if you still get strange results when duplicating. You may have an operation (projection, trim, etc) that’s causing your issues because it’s doing something weird in the background that you’ve forgotten about.

Not sure if this works:

http://ge.tt/1abyaJQ/v/0?c

Either way, offset 0.00 and deleting the originals did the trick.

Hi All

I am a newbie in Alias, tryin to learning with tutorials. So, I am founding a lot of problems, just that this thread shows.
If somebody could help me, I would be very please. Thank you beforehand.

The question is about the Transformer rig. I watched this tutorial Help and I was amazing how this tool works, but when I have tried it with my own sample, I cannot get a good solutiion. May be I am doing something wrong.

Please, look the attached image.

The target is the blue trimmed surface. The predefined modifier origin is the yellow one, and the destination is the green one.

Thank you again

I never have used any of the rig tools, but looking at that video it looks like the tool may only work on natural boundaries and not trim edges?

Great workaround, thank you!

Aargh! They changed the licensing to activation in 2011 even on the student version, and my account doesn’t seem to work after I input my serial codes… I… hate… DRM… why companies should have more rights than you do is beyond me. Only legal customers ever get screwed, never ever pirates. Sigh.

How do you model this in alias?

looks to me as if they did a displacement map on the surface so that it shows up- or they Photoshoped it.
I would take that approach to communicate it for a concept unless you needed hard surface data… then there are several ways to do this.

What are YOU trying to achieve?

Agreed, it looks like something that was either fudged for the rendering or built using Sub-division modeling, by subdividing that patch and then pinching and pulling the points row by row.

its a produced concept, rose lovegrove renault twin’z

ok, how about something simpler, they have a nice blend toward outer pattern area