Dispatches from Autodesk Manufacturing HQ: Alias to Reshape Inventor and AutoCAD

Thursday, April 8: At sunrise, as a bright blue sky over Lake Oswego dispelled reports of showers, I joined roughly 25-30 tech reporters and bloggers (some from as far as China and India) in Autodesk’s Customer Briefing center in Portland, Oregon. We were there for an early look at the 2011 product line.

Buzz Kross, the company’s senior VP of manufacturing solutions, asked rhetorically: “Why should a $5,000 CAD product give you worse graphics than a $50 video game?”

For that matter, why couldn’t you create the kind of curves and surfaces that make up a Vulcan warship or an Orc’s helmet in an expensive CAD package like Autodesk Inventor or AutoCAD? Why should you be confined to working with lines, arcs, and primitive shapes only?

Not that you’d ever be tapped to design an intergalactic gunship or an Orc army’s armor (that would be true only for the lucky few who work for J. J. Abrams or Peter Jackson), but you might want to use the same expressive lines and forms in the hood of a race car or the blades of a turbine. To make this possible, Autodesk is uniting its manufacturing solutions with their close cousin from the industrial design family: Autodesk Alias.

Alias Sketch for AutoCAD

Available now from Autodesk Labs as a free download, Autodesk Alias Sketch for AutoCAD is a plug-in that brings some of the painting, drawing, and sketching functions from Alias SketchBook into your AutoCAD environment. With Alias Sketch, you could use raster images as underlays, create shaded and colored 2D drawings, and incorporate them into your AutoCAD workflow. Since SketchBook is designed to work on a tablet PC with stylus, Alias Sketch makes it possible for you to literally draw in AutoCAD—something you couldn’t do before with the software.

AutoCAD has always been Autodesk’s premiere software (it also ranks as one of the most pirated packages, along with Microsoft Windows and Office). But the success of AutoCAD is a double-edged sword. Over the years, it has come to be regarded as the de facto 2D program for shop drawings and schematics. Even with NURBS, Splines, and surface modeling (with G2 continuity), breaking out of its mold as a precision-drafting program proves difficult for AutoCAD. The introduction of Alias Sketch goes along way to encourage AutoCAD users to rethink the software as a concept-creation program capable of producing a much wider range of geometry.

Furthermore, a segment of AutoCAD users have been exporting their works into image-editing programs like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to add artistic flair to their drawings (for example, to superimpose them on site photos or to apply brush strokes). The Alias Sketch plug-in eliminates the need to accomplish these tasks in a separate program.

Alias Design for Inventor

A mechanical modeler at its core, Inventor is no match for purpose-built surface modelers like Rhinoceros when it comes to creating and editing organic shapes. For the segment of MCAD users who need to create complex shapes, that meant shuttling their models back and forth between their favorite CAD modeler and surface modeler. Judging from the consumers’ newfound appetite for curvilinear geometry (seen some of the futuristic automotive designs popping up lately?), the need to incorporate free-flowing forms into traditional mechanical modeling techniques is expected to increase.

The introduction of Alias Design for Inventor, a plug-in derived from Alias Surface and Alias Automotive, is expected to appeal to those who’re currently relying on other surface modelers. Installing Alias Design adds an Alias tab in Inventor, allowing you to apply shape symmetry, edge manipulation, G2 surface curvature, and vertex-based editing. (For G3 continuity, which belongs to the kind of Class A surfaces demanded by Automotive designers, you’ll need the more expensive Alias Surface or Alias Automotive products.)

Autodesk Alias Sketch for AutoCAD is a technology preview, available for free from Autodesk Labs.

Autodesk Alias Design for Inventor plug-in is part of Alias Design 2011, available for $4,590 with subscription or $3,995 without subscription from Autodesk online store. The plug-in is not available by itself.