Use the different short menu sets for different workflow tasks

For example, selecting Preferences > Workflows > Paint switches you to a 2D paint interface, which removes all modeling, rendering and animation functionality and changes the default Alias colors to suit working on white paper. Switching to the paint interface also sets custom 2D marking menus and shelves.

Customize the tool shelf

Customize your shelf set to streamline common workflow practices. Painting and sketching is a very artistic occupation, so it’s important to spend the time to customize tools to meet your specific style and workflow.

Save your shelf set with the name User-Default.scm. When this file is present, the shelf set will always be the same when the application starts until you manually re-save this file. If this file is not present, the shelf set is automatically saved with the “last used” shelf settings. Again, some people like the shelf set to be exactly how they last used the product; others prefer to always start with the same shelf each day. You can choose your style of working.

Shelves now have cascading menus and spacers. You can create cascading menus on your shelves by adding tools above other tools. This enables you to create groupings of tools, and better organize your workflow. Cascading menus are indicated by a small yellow arrow. For further information about how to create a tool cascade, see Create a cascade in a shelf.

Spacers enable you to create visual gaps or groupings on the shelf by using non-functional icons that further help you to organize your shelf.

For more information on using the spacers, see Preferences > Interface > Shelf Extras.

Streamline your marking menus

Customize your marking menus to meet your specific workflow. Drag and drop any tool or menu item into the marking menu editor.

Streamline your hotkeys

Customize your hotkeys to meet your specific workflow. If you’re a 2D user, you may want Copy Image to be +C (Windows) or +C (Mac) instead of + + C (Windows) or + + C (Mac) , and Paste Image to be + V (Windows) or + V (Mac) instead of + + V (Windows) or + + V (Mac). Hotkeys can be customized using the hotkey editor.

The Special:Paint section in the Hotkeys/Menus editor also contains many brush modes, brush parameters (such as radius, opacity, etc) that can be mapped to hotkeys.

In particular, if you use high resolution canvases and want your brushes to keep the same appearance as on standard resolution canvas, you can scale several properties of your brush at once, by using the Size hotkey. By default it is mapped to the letter S. Choose a brush, press the S key, and drag the mouse to scale the Min/Max Radius, and Max Opacity of the brush at once.

See Create and edit hotkeys.

Set your Wacom tablet buttons

The Wacom editor allows you to send hotkey events to the host application. Buttons 1 to 27 on the tablet can be used to quickly access common functionality like Canvas > New Canvas by mapping the tablet buttons to Alias hotkeys.

Set your Wacom stylus buttons

The Wacom editor enables you to map the stylus switch buttons to left, middle and right mouse buttons. This is very important, because the defaults set by Wacom are not optimal for working with Alias.

Screen aspect ratio issues

If you define a hotkey (see Preferences > Interface > Hotkeys/Menus) for Windows > Control Panel, you can quickly toggle the Paint Panel on and off. This way, you have the screen aspect ratio suitable for side view sketches of long objects, like cars, and still have quick access to the paint tool options.

Paint panel shelf tabs

Take advantage of the Paint Panel shelf tabs. Click with the on the Shelf Options menu, to create your own shelves. This gives you more window real estate by offering a compact alternative to the main shelf window. You can have and switch between color shelves, texture brush shelves, pencil shelves, and so on.

See The shelf area for more details.

Brush optimization

• Only set a lower spacing bias (<1.0) and turn on Rotate to stroke when they are required for a specific brush effect. If non-optimal brush parameters are used, you may see performance degradation.
  • The brush parameter Rotate to stroke should only be used with texture brushes, shape brushes, or elliptical brush stamps because this requires extensive computation. With all other brush strokes, the rotation of a circular brush stamp is visually meaningless.
    
  • Reducing brush stamp spacing bias can dramatically improve brush stroke quality, but at a certain point reducing the spacing bias does not improve the stroke quality — it only reduces the performance. Increasing brush stamp spacing bias dramatically improves brush speed, but the visual appearance may not be a smooth stroke if the individual brush stamps are spaced too widely.
    
    Tip

    When sketching, find the balance between quality and speed. While a small brush stamp bias may improve the smoothness, it results in slower brush performance; using a large stamp bias provides additional speed, but may not provide the quality.

• Texture brushes use a 64MB cache that pre-saves brush stamps in memory. This cache is dynamically saved and overwritten during the brush stroke. If the stroke varies in orientation and radius, the cache may be rewritten before the current stamp is required again along the stroke, causing the cache to be recalculated. What does this mean for you?
  • Texture brush strokes are slower when you first start using the brush until the texture stamp cache has pre-saved each texture size. If you notice a performance problem with a texture brush, select the texture brush and draw for a few seconds; undo, then use the brush normally. The initial strokes will pre-save the texture stamps in memory.
  • Large texture brushes with rotation and radius changes need to continually recalculate the texture stamp many times per second.
  • Smaller texture brushes or brushes with constant radius remain fast once the texture cache has been established.
    Tip

    Try to avoid big texture brushes that have variable brush radius or rotate to stroke turned on, as the combination slows performance.

• Brush minimum radius size should be 1 pixel; settings lower than one pixel will affect brush quality.

Windows and brushes

• Turn off all unnecessary windows before you do brush strokes. The -Spacebar (Windows) key combination removes all floating windows, which improves brush speed and quality.
• The automatic timer for hiding all the windows has a negative effect on brush quality at the start of the brush stroke. The timer can be set in the Paint section of Preferences > General Preferences. Setting the timer to 0 and using -Spacebar (Windows) to hide all floating windows provides the best result.

Geometry layers

• Manage NURBS curves with geometry layers when using curve snap with brush strokes. You will enhance performance when you assign logical curves sets to different geometry layers, and then use the layer visibility or layer state properties. Curve snap with many curves and geometries that can be snapped to will not provide real-time, smooth brush strokes.
  • Layers > Set State > Pickable means a curve can be picked and be snapped to.
  • Layers > Set State > Reference means it cannot be picked but can be snapped to.
  • Layers > Set State > Inactive means it cannot be picked or snapped to.

Snapping

• Don’t click on the , , and snap buttons (to the right of the prompt line). Learn to use the modifier keys because you then know the snap state. It’s very easy to use the persistent buttons then spend time trying to understand why the brush is drawing strange strokes. Curve snap is computationally expensive, so use it only when required. Be aware that Alias attempts to snap to all invisible geometry.

Texture brush quality

• Always create new texture brushes with 0 rotation and 1 aspect ratio. If the texture is grabbed, rotated, and squashed, the brush quality will degrade slightly because every pixel in the brush stamp will be resampled.

Stroke quality using curve snap

• When brushing and using snap-to-curve functionality, the brush stamp is placed in the same relative position on the curve each time you move the cursor along the same region of the curve. This can cause the finished stroke to look rough or poorly aliased. If this is the case, add a little spacing noise to the brush stroke to ensure uneven stamp spacing and decrease the stamp spacing.
  

Picking and selecting

• To use Alias effectively, you must learn how to use the Pick tools. These tools, found in the tool palette or on the shelf, are dedicated selection tools, but they also set a selection mask that is used by the transformation tool. For example, if you want to move a CV on a curve, you should first choose Pick > Point Types > CV, then choose Transform > Move, and then select the CV you want to transform. From this moment on, any number of CVs can be moved until you change to another continuous tool.
• The same workflow is repeated if you want to move a canvas or an image plane. Canvas planes can be picked with the Pick > Object tool, while image planes must be picked with Pick > Object Types > Image Plane. You then select a Transform tool. From now on, the system remembers the selection mask, so the transform tool will always attempt to pick either an object (including canvas planes) or an image plane.

  See Introduction to canvas and image planesfor the difference between canvas and image planes.

• To select a different type of object to transform, you must select a different Pick tool.

Shapes and multiple curve regions

• If you need to use two regions of the same curve to define a shape, click on each section while in the Paint > Shape tool, or choose Object Edit > Attach > Detach or Curve Edit > Curve Section to break the curve into separate segments.
  Note

  In the top image below, clicking once on the circle would work, but this might not always be the case for other configurations.

  

Re-use curves

• Each curve can be used any number of times to form different shapes. For example, the wheel example below shows how the curves have been used to define an image shape with a ramp fill and a mask shape.
  

Fast curve duplication

• When repeating a design theme set Edit > Duplicate > Object options to create the copied geometry as instances. This will duplicate the curve as an instance, which means when you edit the original curve the instances will automatically reflect the design change. In this example, only one point on the original curve is moved; this automatically updates the other duplicated curves, which in turn automatically updates the shape object and the shape mask.
  

Curve creation

• Use blend curves whenever possible, because they automatically produce curves with good curvature properties and these curves support relationships to other curves.
• All curves drawn in Paint mode have their CVs, hulls and edit points turned off by default.
• Active curves are drawn in a turquoise blue color (light green for blend curves) while in Paint mode, to contrast with the default white canvas background.

Curve editing

Convenient curve editing tools in Paint mode are:

• Transform CV

  CVs are turned on when you click on a curve after choosing the Transform CV tool. See Control Panel > Transform CV.

• Stretch
• Transform curve

  See Make curves intersect for details on using these two tools.

All of these tools can be accessed from the Shelf.

Curves with cusps

• When you require a curve with a cusp (sharp change in direction), learn to use multiple curves. If you want a freehand brush stroke to be snapped to multiple curves, use Object Edit > Attach > Attach with the Type option set to Connect. When creating shapes (image, mask or invisibility mask) the software internally joins the curves.
  Note

  Attaching curves using the connect option is not a good modeling technique if you want to create surfaces using these curves.

Curve points: less is more

• Fewer points along a curve is an excellent technique to learn. A novice user will typically use up to twice as many points along a curve as an experienced user. Always try to minimize the number of points that define a curve.

Curve and surface fitting tolerances

• Use appropriate tolerances when modeling to suit the downstream CAD system. Don’t use extremely small tolerances thinking this will make the model more accurate: extremely small tolerances only create more complex geometry and make all modeling operations slower.

Fast shape and mask creation tools

• Use Auto-shapes. To quickly and easily create a simple image shape, mask shape, or invisibility mask shape, turn on Auto-Shapes in the paint panel. This will allow any Alias curve tool to automatically create shapes objects. Below is a small sample of the types of curves supported by Alias auto-shape functionality.
  

Symmetry

• When an object is symmetric about an axis, use the geometry layer symmetry option. This option automatically creates symmetric curve and shape objects.
  

Curve evaluation

• Use the Alias curve curvature tools to improve the line quality of your design.
  

Real world scale

• By using the curve tools and dimension tools, you can create elevation sketches or tape drawing at real world scale. Import 3D package constraints from the engineers and sketch over these constraints: don’t start sketching orthographic views without a concept of real world size or scale.
  

Printer color space versus RGB color space

• Learn what colors work well with your printer. Use the AliasPrint Preview window to get a better understanding of RGB and CMYK color spaces – they are different. Below is a simple example showing the difference between RGB and CMYK color spaces. Notice how switching from RGB to CMYK can make a dramatic sketch look flat and boring. Every printer in the world has a unique color space in how it deals with hue, saturation and value – learn what colors and saturations work well with your printer. Don’t spend time creating a fabulous sketch on the screen that prints out or electronically projects poorly.
  

Add design detail to 3D models quickly

• Use the sketch projection workflow to add detail to early 3D concept models.
  
  
  

See the section Project a sketch to quickly add design details for more information.