RENDERING

XSI is a formidable package for cinematic production and rendering. Long known for its rendering workflow and integration of the mental ray renderer, XSI lets you create amazing looking 3D effects out of the box.

LOLA Post Production

Completely Configurable Render Passes &   Channels

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 another layer of flexibility by letting you output attributes of any pass in separate files. Built-in mental ray channels can output depth, motion vectors, normal vectors, labels, and pixel coverage data files for each pass. Preset XSI channels can output diffuse, specular, reflection, refraction, and irradiance information. You can even use special Store in Channel shaders to extract all, or part of a render tree and output it to a channel.

Customizable render channels let you output attributes of any render pass in separate files. Download video - right-click and save as...

Passes and channels are all stored in your XSI scenes, so there’s no need to maintain multiple versions of a scene to render everything you need. Any changes you make to a scene are immediately reflected in your passes and channels, and once you render , all of your passes and channels are instantly available in XSI’s built-in compositor, so you can start your pre-comp right away.

Interactive Render Region

An invaluable tool for shading, texturing, lighting and rendering the render region allows you create preview renders directly in the XSI viewports. You can draw a region in every open geometry view to preview your scene from different angles, and save up to four “memo-regions” per open render region to compare different settings. An unobtrusive slider lets you adjust the quality interactively.

Get final-quality preview renders directly in the XSI viewports using the render region. Download video - right-click and save as...

Take a look at some more advanced render tree functionality, including memo regions and the image compare area. Download video - right-click and save as...

Because the render region uses the same renderer as the final render (mental ray by default), you can set the region to render your previews at final output quality for a very accurate picture of what your rendered scene will look like.

Command Line & Script-Based Rendering

In addition to rendering from the interface, XSI gives you several command-line rendering and processing options, including:

• 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 and rendering them using the mental ray standalone.

Large facilities can augment their command-line rendering and processing power by purchasing licenses of Softimage’s 32-bit and 64-bit processing and rendering product: XSI Batch.

XSI Batch is a command-line-only version of XSI Advanced designed specifically for rendering. Each XSI Batch enables unlimited local CPUs for batch rendering and processing tasks.

3rd Party Renderer Integrations

Since we introduced our open rendering API in XSI 6, our rendering technology partners have been hard at work developing and integrating their own render engines into XSI with depth and control similar to the built-in mental ray integration. You can now enjoy XSI integrations of the following renderers:

• 3Delight
• Indigo Renderer
• Maxwell
• V-Ray (in beta)
• finalrender (in beta)
• fryrender

And more integrations are on the way. For more information, ask your rendering technology provider about their plans for a SOFTIMAGE|XSI integration.