- Tue Feb 21, 2006 3:56 am
#121497
No experience with Catia yet, no doubt is a very powerfull system, Ricardo statement is true, Alias is more design oriented than Catia, so it is not really fair to compare this two tools..
I have been working with Alias 14 years from now, and it is everything I would ever need for doing the most complex surfaces, my very first work was a molecule for an chemistry investigation laboratory, the price of the system at that time if I remember well was over 110K $ SGI Indigo + Alias. Today you can run Alias with a Win PC and the cheapest version is about 9K $.
I dont like to think I'm stupid or similar, the real stupid ones are the win boxes and programs that you need to tell them everything they need to do.. but I remember it took me literally years to learn Alias with all the options.. so take it easy and be patience if that is the way you want to go.
Now I'm working in the megayacht industry for an european based yacht design firm, the 2D-3D conceptual sketching/surfacing/evaluation/marketing tools integration could not be better, it is with no doubt a very powerfull package, it always impress me how even experienced people in the 3D industrie seems to be fascinated every time they see something produced with Alias.
I first saw Rhino and Maya at Sigraph (new orleans) maybe in 1990??? since that it really got my attention, and was happy there was a cheap and good alternative to Alias, I admire them for the work they are doing.
In the marine industry Rhino is very popular but no doubt when it comes to composites surfaces with complicated draft angles and variable radii, Alias is much much better, the same for evaluating surfaces, and since Alias has construction history, design changes are done much quickly than in Rhino, Alias also offers lots of nice tools for conceptual sketching and texturing/mapping that Rhino does not offer.
Rhino is very capable of doing almost any imaginable shape and is also easy to learn with lots of especialized plug-ins, is also very popular this days at many professional studios and students, so thats a nice plus.
I dont want really to compare the two tools since I use both in my every day work, I have fun using Rhino it has some really good tools that I wish were some day implemented in Alias, both are really good softwares, but Alias offers very powerfull surfacing tools with options that Rhino lacks in order to optimize the surface generation process and evaluating those, that is really the core of Alias, this is very apreciated by the engineering teams who work with others systems.
I was pretty dissapointed for almost 6 years where almost no attention was taken to improve Alias studio since they seem to concentrate all the efforts to Maya, I even thought they were discontinuing the product, but the last three years there have been a bunch of new improvements that put Alias again in the top list, dont really know what will happen after the autodesk adquisition.. lets hope for the best.
Since your question is about to use Catia or Alias I'm sorry I couldnt help with that.. try first to identify your main use for the package, it is Design or Engineering? and maybe ask this same question on a dedicated Catia/Alias forum, but my advice for these complicated days we are living now, is to be proeficient with at least two or three different Surfacing packages being Alias & Rhino in my opinion the best options for nurbs surfacing, just start with one preferably Rhino and get good with it, after that you can move on to lern the other in your spare time, the principles of surfacing are very similar among all softwares.
All the best,
Rafael
(but then again, maybe not)...Considering price and ease of use agree that Rhino is a good place to start. Catia/Studio are much more up on the high end of the market, in Catia's case, way, way up on the high end for product development...
- By choo-chee
- By Mark Bell
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