The thread for silly Alias questions...

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

My first attempt and method would be built using Sub-division modeling, by subdividing that patch and then pinching and pulling the points row by row.

as mentioned above.

The tooth brush is easier, you can project that grid and trim out the square holes, which gives you a 4 sided patch inside each square. You can then pull the CV’s of that 4 sided patch inward (using the NUV tool) and blend them out towards the outside edges.

As far as the Renault pattern, it seems like it would be a combination of patch modeling to build out the main spines then filling the divots in and blending them out, but hard to say without spending a lot of time experimenting with it. There are a lot of NURBS operations that will get you crazy patterns and by applying some process logic to it (such as understanding how to insert isoparms or divide surfaces numerically) you can control it fairly tightly.

It might also all just be direct modeled on one crazy ass surface patch.

At one time I found a link to a larger library of Alias Shaders. I recently lost a bunch of data; and I cannot seem to find it anymore. There used to be an Alias site that had downloadable shared resources; but it doesn’t seem to be around any longer. Does anyone know of any place that has more Alias Shaders? Also; after installing Alias Design 2016; I seem to be missing “Rubber” materials . . .

If anyone has some they wouldn’t mind sharing via dropbox or whatever; I would be grateful!

So we finally got a couple of Alias licenses at work, and I’ve been using it seriously now for the first time in a couple of years… three weeks in and I’ve already gotten two bugs confirmed by Autodesk.

Feels ( Γ˚Д˚)Γ to be back…