Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

22 July 2001

MWNY: Ashlar announces new product line

One of the biggest highlights of this year's show was the unexpected announcements from Ashlar, the good folks who recently moved down to Texas (Austin) and the makers of the venerable Vellum line of software.

A Whole New Lineup - Five New Products!

The folks at Ashlar have been secretly hard at work on five new products for the Macintosh platform (and Windows too). It was such a great surprise to see this new announcement at the show. We had a chance to talk about these new products, why they made them and their future. In this report we'll summarize the new products and in a future report cover some other notes including their Mac OS X plans.

Graphite

All of their new software is based on the venerable Vellum line, a product suite of apps designed for the technical CAD and 3D solids-modeling markets. These products take advantage of powerful NURBS, ACIS solids modeling, CAD symbols technology, the Lightworks rendering engine and topnotch Macintosh/Windows Interoperability.

Graphite is their new technical 2D/3D CAD product. Claiming the fastest and easiest CAD drafting, Graphite leverages the revolutionary Vellum Drafting Assistant (intelligent cursor technology that started at Ashlar). We were given a brief demonstration of this software running under OS 9 and were impressed with its easy 2D/3D drafting abilities and its ultra clean and uncluttered interface (UI). The new Graphite cost $995 US.

Argon

Argon is a new 3D modeling tool offering powerful and easy to use freeform Wireframe, Surfacing and solids modeling tools. Claiming to be capable of making virtually any shape Argon may challenge a number of advanced modelers in the market with its breakthrough price. At just $995US the new software offers a lot of modeling power for under a grand.

Neon

Perhaps one of the more exciting products to come forward from Ashlar is Neon, a new tool completely designed to address the emerging Web 3D publishing market. Neon allows you to publish your work with the new Macromedia Shockwave 3D format, in addition to the established web 3D formats QuickTime, QuickTimeVR, VRML and Metastream Viewpoint.

With Neon you can import 3D models into the program from an extensive list of other formats and tools. Then use Neon to prepare and publish Web 3D. You can prepare 3D models complete with dimensions and output the view to PDF and HTML. Neon supports QuickTime-based flyby animations and both object and panoramic QuickTime movies. And again, Ashlar has reached new values with this product, introducing it at $495US. An educational single-user license is just $205US.

Xenon

Based on Vellum Solids technology Xenon is designed for industrial designers and engineers. The product combines associative dimensioning and history-based modeling. More powerful than Argon, Xenon provides class-A NURBS surfacing. The product will cost $2795US.

Cobalt

Cobalt is a full product design and development application for industrial and mechanical design. Going beyond Xenon, everything in Cobalt is fully history driven and features advanced associativity and powerful 2D equation-driven parametrics. Cobalt, we were told, is one of the largest upgrades to the already impressive and award-winning Vellum Solids. This product represents the ultimate in the Ashlar line of advanced CAD/3D software and will cost $3995US.

All of the new products by Ashlar feature the use of QuickTime technologies for rendering animated flybys and both object and panoramic movies. They also, we were told, export out to the Shockwave 3D format, in addition to numerous other formats. The products are highly useful to both engineering and industrial design and could even be used by architecture and related environmental fields requiring powerful 3D drafting and form making abilities.

We were extremely impressed with this direction Ashlar has taken with its core CAD and modeling technologies and excited to hear about their commitment to the Mac platform. They were demonstrating their products on Apple Power Mac G4's with Apple Studio Displays and we thought their apps looked really nice.

More on their OS X plans in a future report.