One of my long time dreams has been to have Alias Studio running on my Mac. I’ve been using Alias since ’96. Life wasn’t so bad when it primarily ran on SGI hardware. SGI’s were fun and esoteric enough to maintain my interest. I didn’t ever really wish to run the Class A modeling software on anything else until Alias (now Autodesk, but I’ll still call them Alias) ported Studio over to the NT platform and my SGI’s were replaced with hardware that cost a tenth as much. Not that cost had anything to do with it, but anyone who weathered the transition knows how rocky it was – especially if you were quitting SGI’s cold turkey and suddenly had half the features you were used to and a buggy GUI among other things.

I had been using Mac’s since ’85 and Alias’s migration away from IRIX (a flavor UNIX) coincided with Apple’s migration toward Mac OS X (also a flavor of UNIX). It seemed logical that eventually Alias would port their preeminent industrial design software over to hardware that won the most design awards. Well that’s the way it worked in my world.

It never happed. Or, at least it hasn’t happened yet.

Until now. Well, sort of.

My wife and I purchased a new MacBook Pro to replace an aging iBook. Within the first week of having it, I couldn’t resist loading on a copy of XP via Boot Camp just to see how it ran Alias.

I have been really impressed with the results. Considering that it uses an unsupported ATI GPU, I have been very pleased. I have completed a couple projects for Teague from the comfort of my couch and returned to a few projects for myself that I’d started over the years. It’s been a total joy.

At work, I’m currently running a Dual Woodcrest PC with two SLI Quadro FX4500 graphics cards. The little MBP doesn’t support much of the real-time visualization that I can achieve with the nVidia’s, but for most modeling needs, it really rocks! Definitely a mobile CAD solution if there ever was one.

I’ve been pleased with it’s ability to tumble large assemblies, even in shaded mode and with real-time reflections turned on. This makes modeling smooth curvature continuous surfaces very effective and efficient – one of Studio’s strong points.

I’ll continue to post my experiences as I live with the MBP and Alias solution. My preference would still be to have the software as a native Mac OS X application, but for now, Boot Camp and XP works well.

PS: Yes, I tried CrossOver first, but Boot Camp worked the best. I could never get CrossOver to launch past the splash screen.

Tags: Alias Studio, Apple, Autodesk, CAD, MacBook Pro

This entry was posted on Monday, December 4th, 2006 at 1:49 am and is filed under Blogger, Design, Learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.