Alias Design For Inventor – Part 1

When checking out from the Mandalay Bay at AU I bumped into Anirban Ghosh, Senior Product Designer at Autodesk. The exchange of business cards led to a “what-do-you-do” kind of a conversation and quickly moved to a discussion involving free form modeling and control vertices, right there standing in the lobby itself. As we parted ways we agreed to take our discussion further which we did the other day. Anirban scheduled a GoTo Meeting for half an hour and we ended up talking for two hours talking about free form modeling using Alias Design for Inventor.

Freedom of Freeform

Anirban sent me this video showing how easily a mouse can be cooked up from a block.

Alias Design for Inventor is an add-in for Inventor that is installed along with Alias Design priced at $4000. You can download a 30 day trial from here.

The Workflow

The Alias Design for Inventor workflow is pretty straightforward. You basically start with some geometry and deform its edges by adding control vertices and dragging them around. There is no need to create 3D sketches, lofted surfaces and all that kind of stuff. Here is a video showing how you can take a prismatic part and deform it.

You don’t always need to have a completely modeled part to begin with. As can be seen from the first video above you can start from scratch as well. Here is another video showing modeling a free form chair by starting with a sketch and extruding it. Basically starting with this…

and ending with this…

In the next part of this series lets see how the Alias Design for Inventor workflow compares with the surfacing workflow of SolidWorks.

Part 2 >>