XSI for VFX & Film Artists
From modeling and texturing through to animation, texturing and rendering, XSI’s intuitive art tools let you work fast, so you can explore more creative possibilities in pursuit of your artistic goals.
HIGH performance core architecture
XSI’s Gigapolygon Core 64-bit architecture offers a built-in advantage for next generation film pipelines that require finely sculpted, massively detailed characters and environments. It allows XSI to load huge information models and textures and work with them. The upshot: you can move millions of polygons in real time and sculpt them non-destructively without losing UVs, shapes, weight maps or skinning information.
Artist-Friendly Tools and Workflows
XSI has been known for its elegant, intuitive interface and artist friendly workflows. From ubiquitous drag & drop operations, to multiple supported interaction models, to keyboard interactions that let you switch effortlessly between tools. ,
XSI lets you work quickly, without getting in your way so there’s nothing standing between you and your creative vision.
XSI’s interface, keyboard interactions, and navigation are 100% customizable, so you can change whatever you need to work the way you want. If you’re transitioning from other 3D package, XSI includes a comprehensive set of migration tools to get up and running in minutes rather than hours.
XSI Architecture and User Interface Feature Tour
Complete Modeling Toolset
XSI’s modeling toolset is designed for speed and ease of use, putting everything you need to work with polygon meshes, subdivision surfaces, surfaces, and surface mesh topologies right at you fingertips. All of your modeling operations, including interactive deformations, are saved in the operator stack, which records all of the changes you make so you can go back in time to adjust, temporarily mute, or completely delete them.
Modeling Feature Tour
Non Destructive Character Creation Tools
XSI’s non-destructive rigging and flexible construction modes make character creation easier. You can create fully rigged characters quickly, and make changes to them at any stage of the production. Imagine being able to make modeling, texturing, and even rigging changes to characters with multiple UVs, textures and envelope weights—even shape animation—without destroying any pre-existing details. Your changes are applied automatically, so there’s no need to re-construct bones, bone weights or shape animation, no need to reorder operators, and no more hours of tedious rework.
Non-Destructive Workflow Feature Tour
GATOR—Transfer Attributes, Reuse Assets
Using the XSI Generalized Attribute Transfer Operator (GATOR), you can transfer any surface properties between models, regardless of complexity or topology, in just a few clicks. You can transfer any attribute—including materials, textures, weights, and shape animation—even between rigged character models. You can also use GATOR to combine completed, textured, animated models without losing important characteristics.
Fast, Flexible Animation
Getting animation just right is about fine-tuning the details without losing sight of the big picture. XSI gives you superior control over your animation with streamlined workflows that make it easy to pose and keyframe highly detailed characters.
A clean, responsive curve editor and dopesheet make it easy to view and edit animation at any level of detail. Easy animation layering lets you add keyframes on top of existing animation without having to commit to changes or edits up fronts—a huge time saver when you’re dealing with complex motion capture data. Real-time playback means you can see what you’re doing without waiting for animation previews, and get more keying done in less time. And when you’re ready, you can package your animation into clips and start cutting them together in the mixer.
Animation Feature Tour
Non-Linear Animation Mixing
The mixer is the heart of XSI’s animation power. By packaging complex animation into clips that you can mix together in an intuitive editing interface, the mixer lets you create libraries of actions that you can combine into complete animations without having to go back to the underlying keyframes or f-curves.
You can mix anything from animation clips, composite clips, constraints, and expressions, to shapes, and textures. Even sync audio. Like other XSI tools, the mixer is non-destructive, so the underlying animation stays intact, but instantly reflects any changes you make to it.
The mixer comes complete with tools to easily handle motion capture sequences, including motion matching, marker placement, offsets, and frequency-based transitions. You can transition a walk to a run without slipping feet, or link one character’s animation to another’s in just a few clicks.
From pre-viz through to polished animation the mixer gives you high-level control with low-level precision.
“As we were working on Pre Viz for The Golden Compass, the SOFTIMAGE|XSI Animation Mixer was invaluable by allowing us to stage multi-'stacks' of 3D pre-viz elements that contributed to the final battle scene. These included bespoke animation files and large amounts of motion capture. This saved a lot of time by allowing us to see and work with many 3D elements in an non-linear timeline orientation--as used in the film editing or music mixing world."
Richard Perry & Pawl Fulker, Destroy All Monsters
Animation Feature Tour
MOTOR Animation Retargeting
MOTOR is an intelligent and dependable solution for transferring motion from one character rig to another while preserving keyframe timing. Now you can transfer motion between character rigs of all sizes and proportions. Build reusable libraries of animation by importing and retargeting motion capture data onto standard XSI character rigs.
Like other Softimage technologies, MOTOR can be extended to handle specialized content. Our Special Projects or SWAT engineering team can work with you to develop custom version of motor that suit your unique pipeline requirements.
Non-Destructive Workflow Feature Tour
Physics and Simulation
Hair & Fur, Cloth, Particles, Rigid and Soft Bodies, and more. XSI lets you simulate nearly any kind of natural (or unnatural) phenomenon.
From realistic hair, fur and cloth to particles, rigid bodies and soft bodies, simulations help bring your scenes to life. Easily configured collisions, and natural forces like wind, gravity, and turbulence, add realism to your simulations. And because all simulations happen directly in the XSI interface, you can take full advantage of all modeling, shading, texturing and animation tools, and render your simulations using mental ray.
Simulation, Dynamics & Hair Feature Tour
ICE - Interactive Creative Environment
XSI 7 introduces ICE (Interactive Creative Environment), a groundbreaking technology that transforms XSI from just another 3D product into a powerful and flexible open platform.
ICE greatly improves collaboration between artists and technical directors, allowing them to create custom tools and effects visually, see the results interactively, and do it all without scripting, or writing a line of code. Effects built or modified in ICE are performance tuned and multi-threaded, so they perform at maximum efficiency across all available processors.
The ICE environment – XSI functionality is displayed using a node-based dataflow diagram. Each node has specific capabilities. Users connect nodes to create a desired effect. A group of nodes can be packaged together into a “compound”, which is displayed as a single node. As a result, highly complex tools can be deployed and re-used without writing code.
ICE - Interactive Creative Environment
Advanced Shading and Texturing Tools
From scales and skin, to metal and stone, to cartoon ink and paint, XSI's shading and texturing tools help you get the look you want—fast. An interactive texture editor lets you unfold UVs and place texture maps precisely. The powerful render tree and texture layer editor make it easy to build complex materials. A fully integrated customizable shaderball engine renders preview thumbnails wherever you need them, and tight integration with the mental ray renderer means you can see finished-quality previews of all of your effects directly in the XSI viewports.
Shading & Texturing Feature Tour
Rendering
XSI is the best 3D animation package for cinematic-quality multi-pass rendering. Long known for its unmatched rendering workflow and shared-memory architecture with the award-winning mental ray renderer, XSI lets you render more detail using less memory than any other 3D package.
Tight renderer integration puts powerful shading and rendering tools at your fingertips. You can delve into powerful shading and rendering effects, set up breathtaking photorealistic lighting with just a few clicks, and get full-quality preview renders directly in the XSI viewports.
With the open rendering API introduced in XSI 6, our rendering technology partners are developing and integrating their own render engines into XSI with similar depth and control. You can now enjoy XSI integrations of the following renderers:
And more integrations are on the way. For more information, ask your rendering technology provider about their plans for a SOFTIMAGE|XSI integration.
Rendering Feature Tour
Integrated Compositing and Paint
Based on Avid’s Matador, Media Illusion, and Elastic Reality, XSI Illusion is a fully integrated, 16-bit 2D paint and compositing module. XSI Illusion boasts over 130 film-quality effects, including color correction, retiming, chroma keying, morphing & warping images, and much, much more. Paint tools include more than 60 programmable brushes for 2D raster and vector painting. You can use XSI Illusion to rough out final shots, touch up your textures, paint out wires, morph and warp images, create custom mattes and tweak the results of a multi-pass render – all without switching apps. XSI Illusion is fully compatible with 64-bit systems, so you can load huge effects and sequences into memory for real-time playback and interaction.
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“When you’ve got 40 people working on 700 very different shots, you need to give them tools like the XSI FX Tree that allow them to really stretch their imaginations and abilities. Some of the artists were more comfortable doing matte paintings, and they could do that in XSI. Some are more technically inclined, so they could use XSI to build their own scenes and sets and go right ahead with textures and lighting. With the adaptability of XSI, it is easy to select different approaches for a scene, and you don’t need an army of technically-inclined staff to get the very best results possible.”
Marc Bourbonnais, Hybride, Sin City |
© 2005. Images courtesy of DIMENSION FILMS /TROUBLEMAKER STUDIOS |
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Compositing & Paint Feature Tour |
