Phil Botley
Alias 2021 has been released – promising to be one of the most important Alias release for many years, Alias 2021 offers a raft of great new features as well numerous enhancements. In addition, Alias is also celebrating it’s 35th birthday this year (!) – first shown at SIGGRAPH ’85. Alias 2021 is ready for download now, but for a quick preview of ‘What’s New’, have a look at a few example movies and notes below – enjoy.
Alias 2021 Overview
We are pleased to provide you with the latest version of Autodesk® Alias™ software. Highlights to this release include a node-based display of construction history in your scene with the new History Visualizer, an enhanced Object Lister that now lets you create and manage selections sets, as well as continued refinement of the Reference Manager to improve your reference data workflow. In this release, we’ve continued to add tools to the subdivision modeling toolkit with a new Retopology tool that is based on the Quad Draw tool in Autodesk Maya as well as provided a Subdivision Modeling workflow that optimizes the Alias UI for subdivision modeling. Numerous improvements have also been made to NURBS modeling tools, such as the Surface Fillet, Freeform Blend, and Skin tools expand their functionality.
History Visualizer
Alias 2021 introduces the History Visualizer, which provides a new way of visualizing the flow of construction history in your Alias files. In the History Visualizer, construction history appears as a node graph with input geometry, tools acting on geometry, and the output of tool operations displaying as a series of connected nodes. In addition to seeing the nodes connections, you can query and edit history by modifying the inputs to a given tool.
Alias Assemblies
A Master Assembly concept inside Alias, allowing teams to work collaboratively on Alias (and non-Alias) data allowing true Alias Assembly modelling workflows. Building on the Reference Manager improvements delivered in the Alias 2020.2 Update, this release continues to add functionality that improves your reference workflows. A few additions include 1) Hierarchical reference support, which lets you create references from Alias .wire files that contain other references and 2) Layer hierarchies that contain Layer folders are now supported by the Reference Manager. This means that the layer structure shown below a reference file now matches what is shown in the Object Lister for its source file.
ReTopo
A new Subdivision Retopology tool lets you retopologize imported meshes and NURBS surfaces by generating new subdivision topology directly on the reference objects. You can also use this tool to shape and add geometry to existing subdivision models using a reference object.
Interested in learning more? Contact your local sales resource or visit Alias 2021 What’s New.