5 Essential Alias hotkeys

Hotkeys are an incredibly useful way to speed up your workflow and Alias helpfully allows you to customise them as you need (Click here to find out how). Here are 5 of my favourites that I use everyday. When assigning a hotkey, try to think of a combination of keys that’s easy to reach, most of mine pivot around the alt or ctrl keys as that’s where my left hand is most of the time to move the model around so keeping my thumb on Alt and reaching to a nearby key is easy and doesn't stretch my hand to much.

1 - Alt Key:

Not really a hotkey as such but when switching stages, press the alt key when you click on a stage to set the working level and visibility to that stage only as if you only had one stage open. This works in both the drop down stage list and the stage editor.

2 - Cv's On and Off:

Apart from Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V these are possibly my most used hotkeys. I set Alt+A and Alt+S to switch the control points and Isoparm’s on and off for the selected objects.

3 - Toggle Tool Window:

Similar to a query edit the toggle tool window allows you to edit an object with history by bringing up the tool options. To save time set the toggle to an easy hotkey, select an object and press the hotkey to edit the object.

4 - Blend curve alignment:

A useful one if you use blend curves a lot. I often need to switch a blend curve from its default G2 setting to G1 or sometimes G3. To do this quickly, select the blend edit point and hit the hotkey, I set a hotkey of Alt+1, 2 or 3 for constraint continuity for G1 to G3 respectively.

5 - Toggle Visibility:

If you often use "hide unselected" this one can be really helpful. Set a hotkey for toggle visibility so when working on some isolated surfaces you can quickly toggle back to the hidden objects to pick some extra surfaces or objects, make them invisible, and then use the hot key to toggle back to your isolated surfaces.

I hope these help with your daily workflow. Try to think of things you do all the time that could be simplified by using a quick hotkey and remember don’t overstretch to reach them!

Work in progress

The Not Yet Finished One:

After finishing the IAD Alien I was thinking of some ideas for what build next when I found some old photos of my final year project at university, a modern Auburn 851 Speedster. The car was to be an electric hybrid aiming to show that environmentally friendly cars didn’t need to be boring. While the idea is common nowadays in 1996, when I started this project, it was not much more than a pipe dream. Armed with a bunch of photos of the finished model, the last few remaining sketches from an old portfolio and knowing i had originally used a 1996 model year Corvette as a reference for wheel base and overall package I set to work.

This is work in progress and a long way from being finished, but I will post more updates here as I progress…