GAMING

TORONTO, CANADA -- Alias/Wavefront(TM), an SGI (NYSE:SGI) company, announced today that it is shipping release 10 of StudioTools(TM), the company's computer-aided industrial design (CAID) software. Major enhancements include a high quality paint box that integrates with 3D models, improved usability, increased modeling efficiency, plus a PRO/Engineer(R) interface which is included at no extra charge. "This major release delivers a complete, integrated 2D/3D design solution that frees industrial designers to apply all of their creativity to new concepts, while remaining confident that their designs will hold true throughout the engineering and manufacturing processes," explains Peter Mehlstaeubler, vice-president, Product Development at Alias/Wavefront. "We've built greater modeling efficiency, improved data integration with CAD and made StudioTools easier to use, whether you're creating a simple object or working on the most advanced automotive concepts." Darren Blum, resident Digital Designer and Alias(R) guru at Pentagram's San Francisco office says, "I love this new release. Alias/Wavefront has made major functional changes such as the implementation of Undo in many critical tools and the option to use Simple vs. Advanced functionality for surfacing tools. Along with these, more subtle improvements like Expand Instances and a vastly improved Help interface insure that beginners will learn quickly and experts will have at their fingertips more powerful surfacing and rendering tools than ever." Unique 2D/3D Design System StudioTools 10 delivers a complete set of high quality integrated paint tools, created specifically for design-focused sketching. These tools enable designers to sketch concepts from a blank screen or using imported 3D CAD data as a reference. The software's unique paint and shapes functionality enables designers to quickly create and iterate on concepts early in the design process. The brushes for 2D painting and sketching are extremely fast while providing the quality that designers require. StudioTools 10 delivers many new paint functions including flood fill, masking, hide and show, blur, sharpen, smear and clone. For tighter, illustration-like 2D drawings, a new Shapes feature combines the quality of the paint functions with the power of StudioTools curve tools. The new paint and shapes tools are a powerful 2D complement to the 3D tools and allow very rapid concept development that flows right into the 3D modeling workflow. Greater Modeling Efficiency Design modelers typically spend over 75 percent of their time modeling transitions between the main surfaces of their model. Enhancements to modeling tools such as Fillet and Align in StudioTools 10 allow designers to achieve the look and quality of these surfaces much quicker, increasing their productivity. In addition, the enhanced Draft/Flange tool lets a designer grab handles to push and pull depths and angles, a particularly useful aid for injection molded applications. Enhanced Ease of Use New controls streamline the user interface, improving the efficiency of experienced users and shortening the learning curve for new users by only displaying the tools required for the task at hand. The enhanced interface includes menu presets for 2D design, modeling and rendering, plus simple and advanced modes for square, rail, align and fillet tools. In addition, separate modeling and paint panels speed access to commonly used tools. Improved Data Exchange with CAD Tight integration with downstream engineering software allows designers to take full advantage of the digital design process. Chief among the enhancements in this area is the completely new PTC(R) Granite(TM) interface that makes it possible to directly transfer StudioTools 10 files to other applications that support the Granite interface, such as Pro/ENGINEER and Pro/DESKTOP(R). While Direct Connect options for CATIA (R), Unigraphics (R) and IDEAS (R) continue to be available separately, the Granite interface is included in StudioTools 10 at no extra charge. Alias has also improved industry standard transfer methods. The IGES import/export is as much as ten times faster and the STEP translator is redesigned for better handling of analytical data. A new CheckModel feature will review a model for potential data transfer problems in such areas as rational geometry, multiple knots and short edges. Price, Availability, System Requirements StudioTools 10 is available now, with prices starting at $7,500 USD. International pricing may vary. Products in the StudioTools family are DesignStudioTM, StudioTM, AutoStudioTM and SurfaceStudioTM. The software runs on Windows(R) XP, Windows(R) 2000, SGI(R) IRIX(R), Sun(R) Solaris(R) and Hewlett-Packard(R) HP-UX(R) operating systems. Visit www.aliaswavefront.com for more information.