Alias and VRED 2024 releases have launched with what Autodesk has called a new look and feel, while Alias sees a ‘major overhaul’ of the user experience.
The goal of the new user experience is to aid in learnability for new users of Alias, while maintaining the familiar Alias DNA that long-time users have grown comfortable with.
VRED, meanwhile, shifts closer in appearance and usability to its older sibling, with many similarities between the user experience – including the icon sets and window management. By sharing a common design language, the aim has been to make transitioning between the two tools more seamless and fluid.
Alias has also added a new onboarding screen with links to the Help system and Help videos, while new markup and animation editors have been added for improved team collaborations and presentations.
Many of the main menu drop downs have been consolidated and reorganised, while many of the shelves and inner menus are now dockable or groupable, allowing for a customisable user working environment that can then be saved as custom workspaces.
The new release also adds more surface modelling tools, including the feature modifier tool that can place features from a flat surface onto another surface, including curved surface. This should prove very useful to transferring grill patterns onto a curved part, or quick ‘cut & paste-style’ adding of single feature details to other features.
There’s also a new Class-A surfacing tool – accelerated surface – which acts as a better method to give control over the curvature at the end of a surface for a manageable lead-in and a smoother look.
To provide the most accurate renderings in VRED, Autodesk is continuing to expand its support for different material libraries. The current release includes support for the Material X libraries from AMD and MDL libraries from Nvidia.
