XSI for VFX & Film TD's
XSI helps technical directors keep complex Film and VFX productions together. With the industry’s most flexible character rigging tools, completely open shading and rendering technologies for lighting and effects, a longstanding commitment to standard scripting and development languages, and tools that help keep data flowing smoothly in a mixed-tool pipeline.
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
Integrated Tools Development Environment TDE
A single unified development environment, the TDE lets you to create, manage and deploy all of their tools, plug-ins, and workgroups. The TDE contains multiple script editors, each with syntax help, breakpoints, and external debugging links. Its tree-based Add-On manager can create self-installing shaders, events, and plug-ins from development wizards, using standard scripting languages or directly in C++. Develop in the TDE and enjoy the refined workflow that XSI artists have enjoyed for years.
Customization & Development Feature Tour
Standard Scripting Language Support
Commitment to standard scripting languages and development tools makes SOFTIMAGE|XSI a Technical Director’s dream come true. While other packages force you to learn obscure and limited programming languages, SOFTIMAGE|XSI offers flexibility to use the best language for the job. XSI 6 offers integrated C#, a popular object-oriented programming language, and support for Python v.2.5 and .NET compliant languages.
Customization & Development Feature Tour
Crosswalk Data Interchange System
A mixed-software 3D pipeline requires an integrated data interchange system that lets content move seamlessly—and that’s exactly why Softimage developed Crosswalk. Crosswalk is an ongoing initiative to help transfer standard Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Maya® rigs into and out of XSI, and transfer standard XSI rigs and content into and out of any previously established 3D pipeline. You can transfer assets using the latest dotXSI and COLLADA standards, and take advantage of enhanced import/export tools to get assets in and out of 3ds Max and Maya pipelines.
Of course all pipelines have their own unique requirements, and the Softimage engineering team can work with you to extend Crosswalk to work with specialized content. Spend less time moving your characters and more time animating them.
XSI Pipeline Tools - Feature Tour
Open Shading and Rendering Pipeline
XSI gives you complete control over your effects by exposing every parameter of every shader in the render tree. Using an easy drag-and-drop workflow you can connect shaders together to create effects ranging from very simple to staggeringly complex. You can develop your own custom shaders, drop them into the render tree, and augment them using XSI’s built-in shader library. You can also use the render tree to create and control all kinds of custom lighting and camera effects. Whatever you create, XSI’s unmatched mental ray integration lets you preview it at full quality directly in the viewports so you know exactly how it’s going to look.
Flexible Pass- and Channel-Based Rendering
XSI’s pass-based rendering workflow is designed for complete flexibility. You can create an unlimited number of render passes to break the elements of each scene into exactly the parts you need for later compositing (lighting, shadows, mattes, color, etc). Fully configurable pass channels add still more flexibility by letting you output attributes of any pass (like lighting components or normals) in separate files. Best of all, render passes are components of the scene, so any changes you make are immediately reflected, and there’s no need to maintain multiple versions of the scene. Rendered passes and channels are instantly available in XSI’s built-in compositor, so you can start your pre-comp right away.
Rendering Feature Tour
Behavior Crowd Simulation
Available for both Linux and Windows platforms as part of XSI Advanced, Behavior is a powerful framework for choreographing tens, or even hundreds of thousands of XSI-created characters, and rendering them using mental ray.
Using Behavior, a TD can turn around a completed crowd simulation in a fraction of the time that traditional methods require. Behavior includes automatic terrain following, obstacle avoidance, rag-doll dynamics, stunt forces, automatic motion blending and curve following for flocking.
Delta Referencing
Creating cinematic-quality 3D assets is a group effort. Modelers, animators, riggers, and texture artists need to work on the same assets, at the same time, without getting in each other’s way. XSI’s lightweight Delta referencing system makes this kind of collaboration easier than ever by allowing production teams to store 3D assets, and all of the changes made to those assets, in external files. As individual artists modify assets, those files can be assembled dynamically, and non-destructively to produce complete characters, props and environments.
XSI Pipeline Tools - Feature Tour
Flexible Rigging Tools
XSI has the most flexible rigging toolset of any 3D package. You can quickly set up biped, dog-leg and quadruped rigs with intuitive proportioning guides, use the Character Development Kit to build custom rigs from predefined components, or dive right in and build your rigs from scratch.
However you create your rigs, you’ll love XSI’s powerful constraint system that lets you control offsets interactively, with full constraint compensation, so you can change your rigs at any time without breaking them. You can use constraints in conjunction with expressions and scripted operators that you can edit in the animation mixer for layered control of your characters.
“SOFTIMAGE|XSI software is the ideal front end. Since it was originally developed as a character production application, it has a lot of tools already built into it, like a 3D Math Library, a corrective Shape Manager, and an intuitive 3D Object Model.”
Andy Bueker, Zoogloo.
Character and Rigging Tools - Feature Tour
XSI Batch Rendering – Build Your Renderfarm
XSI Batch is a command-line-only version of XSI Advanced designed specifically for rendering. Each XSI Batch license enables unlimited local CPUs for batch rendering and processing tasks like:
- Rendering native XSI scene files (.scn) directly from the command line using xsi -render.
- Batch processing with command line scripts, using xsi -script.
- Generating mental ray .mi files from XSI scenes.
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