A blast from the past

Pixero

I took the evening off to become a uber geek and installed Mac OS 9 as a virtual machine with Sheepshaver. So now I am running Mac OS 9 on Windows 10 on a Macbook Pro.

Then I installed the first 3D software I ever used. Alias Sketch.
And WOW it has some great stuff that I had totally forgot about. Some tools works a bit like SketchUp but some things are way better.

It is a kind of spline or nurbs modeller with a pen tool that works like Illustrator or Freehand.
You can extrude, sweep, loft and revolve and then drag at the iso lines to model like clay.

The Match background tool is a very simple but effective way to photomatch. You just drag the corners of the work plane to match the background photos perspective.
I would like something like that as a ruby script for SketchUp.

You can create several working planes to draw upon and materials and texture mapping have some nice things like different projections.

I had a great time with this and was really surprised how well it had aged.

Here is a link to my first real 3d rendering made with it. http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=179%26amp;t=46019%26amp;hilit=+ready

And here are some screenshots.

Alias Sketch Pen tool.JPG
Alias Sketch Match Backdrop.JPG
Alias Sketch Materials.JPG
Alias Sketch Position material.JPG
Alias Sketch Texture projections.JPG
Alias Sketch UI.JPG

Pixero

...Oh, and you could also extrude with different bevels.
Alias Sketch Extrude with bevel.JPG

Rich O Brien

SU needs a modifier stack! Or at least a version with more higher level tools than Pro.

pbacot

Very cool. I remember Alias UpFront. Then DesignWorks. the 90's. And then Apple seemed to fall down in design and graphics where it was leading in the 80's. I mean it was all there but MS took the lead in the market and power users. And I guess Alias ended up with AutoDesk.

ntxdave

Thanks for sharing Pixero. From the looks of it there are some things that could really add to SketchUp. Maybe we could encourage some to merge the two tools together

Enjoyed the link to your render as well.

Just saw that this is now Autodesk so merging them will never happen. Maybe someday SU will get some of those features though.

pilou

Funny it's seems very similar with this free old one true gem! (Mac UI for PC)
Anim8Or
(first version July 1999)
The Manual is very clear!

Woks like a charm on Windows 10 !
(program file zip is something like 1.1 mega! Unzipped 2.5 megas!