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cadalyst labs review
Successor to Vellum Solids provides strong support for surfaces and solids.
XENON V4.2
Solid-surface hybrid modeler
star rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
pros: Advanced NURBS surface and ACIS solid modeling; workflow history; integrated LightWorks photorealistic rendering and Apple QuickTime animation; runs on both PCs and Macs; no hardware lock; great price for included feature set.
cons: No simultaneous multiple views; no automatic dimensioning of 2D drawings.
price: $2,495
Ashlar Inc.
800.877.2745 or 512,250.2186
www.ashlar-vellum.com
There is no shortage of midrange solid modeling programs aimed at mechanical engineers and machine designers, but few are ideally suited for the more specialized field of industrial design. One notable exception is the Designer Elements product line from Ashlar Inc. Ashlar's Vellum 3D and Vellum Solids products have been popular with industrial designers for years. in In LD. Magazine's 2001 awards issue, thirteen winners in five categories (consumer products, furniture, equipment, packaging, and student work) used Ashlar Vellum software. Unlike the design-by-numbers approach taken by many modeling programs (perfectly reasonable given their audience of mechanical designers and engineers), Ashlar's modeling tools encourage you to tweak, nudge, twist, and pull design elements.
Industrial designers start with tangibles such as form and texture. Once they're satisfied there, they start creating dimensionally accurate and manufacturable models.
Ashlar has revamped its product lineup to turn a middling-to-excellent trio of drafting and solid modeling programs into a suite of five truly useful programs at attractive price points.
This review covers Xenon, one of the five programs in the new Designer Elements series. But first, let's look at where these programs originated.
ASHLAR'S VELLUM HISTORY
Previously, Ashlar offered two drafting programs, Vellum Draft and Vellum 3D, and one midrange solid modeler, Vellum Solids. Ashlar's first program, Vellum 3D, was released in the late 1980s. Vellum 3D was first developed for the Macintosh and ported to Windows in the early 1990s, Ashlar's original programmers struck gold with an early feature that's been carried over into the entire product line. That feature is Drafting Assistant, and its two functions are to display the name of the snap point (endpoint or midpoint, for example) when the cursor rests on an object and to project temporary construction lines along orthographic and userdefined axes.
Vellum...