I don’t mean this to be a free advertisement for Autodesk. I was looking at current pricing for Alias products and saw that the Ultimate Design Suite goes for $5,995. And that includes AutoCAD and a copy of 3ds Max (I know, it’s a piece of crap), AutoCAD 2012 alone retails for $3,995!
I’m kicking myself 'cuz just a few months ago I convinced my boss to update my AutoCAD license and for just a few K’s more I could’ve had extra copies of Alias Design and SketchBook Designer. I know, I know, that doesn’t include a Cintig tablet. I remember when Alias alone was over 60k!
You can get the package that includes Inventor in the Product Design Suite for $9,995, but I always felt that Inventor too was a piece of crap. It’s been years since I tried it, but these days SolidWorks has become the standard solid modeling tool.
I know Rhino also outnumbers Alias in the number of users, but Alias Design surfacing tools kick ass, renders way better and Rhino has no equivalent for SketchBook Designer.
I don’t really ‘get’ alias design though, I mean it has no sketching tools and no explicit control right? Then what’s the point? Might as well use Rhino. I can understand they’re practically giving it away.
Not sure what you mean by Alias not having sketching tools, I believe Sketchbook is included with Alias Design. Sketches created in Sketchbook can be transferred as splines into Alias Design. On the other hand, Rhino is strictly a modeling tool that does decent renderings. The “history” feature on Alias offers a huge advantage and saves a lot of time.
BTW, the same guy who wrote the original version of Rhino now has another NURBS modeling program called Moment of Inspiration.
Alias Automotive has integrated sketching tools that are associative with your 3d models, that’s more what I was referring to. I believe Rhino 4 does history as well but do not know how comprehensive it is.
Moi, I don’t know what to think, it’s a good little program and the developer is a lovely person (harder to find in software development these days) but I can’t really find a place for it.
Personally I find very few people actually use the integrated sketching in Alias. Their is tons of great functionality but the UI is pretty rusty. I’ve always found myself jumping into Sketchbook pro rather than using what was built into Automotive.
Plus Automotive is still $60k…so no one can actually afford to use that (we actually switched to Surface after they brought down most of the necessary functionality from Auto->Surface and its $40k cheaper)