SHADING AND TEXTURING

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 let you build complex materials interactively. 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.

COMPREHENSIVE SHADER LIBRARY

XSI’s comprehensive shader library gives you full control over the look of your scenes. With shaders to control everything from basic surface illumination, to transparency and reflection, bump and displacement mapping, texturing, lighting and shadows, camera lens distortion, and more, it’s easy to create complex materials for your objects, characters and environments.

Materials that you create using XSI's extensive shader set are stored in libraries that you can share between objects and reuse in other scenes. Download video - right-click and save as...

If you can’t find the shader you’re looking for out of the box, XSI supports 3rd party shaders, and allows you to develop and integrate your own shaders using the SDK.

TEXTURE LAYERING

For artists who prefer a layer-based approach to shading and texturing, the Texture Layer Editor gives you Photoshop-style control over shaders and textures so you can build up complex materials using standard compositing operations. You can create, blend, and reorder any number of layers on any base shader, with complete control over which parameters are affected.

You can use texture layering as an alternative to the render tree, or together with the render tree, where you can see all of your texture layers as they appear on their base shaders, and modify them using familiar render tree workflows. This kind of hybrid workflow lets you tweak and enhance complex materials without rewiring their render trees.

Using the texture layer editor you can create complex materials using standard compositing operations, much the way you would in a 2D image editor. Download video - right-click and save as...

EDIT UVs THE TEXTURE EDITOR

XSI’s texture editor has a full suite of tools for placing your texture maps. You can use standard filters and tools to select and transform points, polygons, edges, and individual vertices, or take advantage of more sophisticated tools like subprojections to break your UVs into manageable islands and heal them back together the way you want. Bidirectional updating between the XSI viewports and the texture editor means you can select components directly on your model and adjust the corresponding UVs in the texture editor.

Helpful features like an adjustable pivot point and comprehensive snapping options help you work precisely, while a host of display options help you filter out clutter, reveal overlapping UVs and highlight seams. A built-in Relax tool and proportional mode let you make smooth adjustments for organic shapes.

At any point in the process, you can stamp your UV mesh into an image file that you can paint over a 2D image editor or XSI’s built-in compositor.

Texture projection manipulators let you position texture images without editing UVs. Download video - right-click and save as...

The texture editor is where you adjust UV coordinates to precisely map textures onto your objects. Download video - right-click and save as...

PREVIEW IN THE 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 render region to compare different settings. A handy slider lets you adjust the quality interactively.

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.

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

ULTIMAPPER - Normal Mapping

Intended primarily for game development, Ultimapper transfers surface detail from high-resolution objects onto their low-resolution counterparts. Using Ultimapper, you can bake complex surface detail into cinematic quality normal, ambient occlusion, difference, light, and albedo maps and apply those maps to your game-res models at the touch of a button. Unlike other 3D applications that make you jump through hoops to produce a useable normal map, Ultimapper requires just two models and few clicks to set up. When you’re finished, you can generate an instant mental ray, DirectX, or OpenGL preview directly in the XSI viewports.

Ultimapper generates cinematic-quality surface-detail maps from high-res characters and applies them to low-res character through a realtime, or mental-ray shader tree. Download video - right-click and save as...

THE RENDER TREE

XSI gives you complete control over your materials and effects by exposing every parameter of every shader in the render tree. Using a fast drag-and-drop workflow you can connect shaders together to create materials ranging from very simple to very complex. You can develop your own custom shaders, drop them into the render tree, and augment them using XSI’s built-in shader library. To simplify your render tree display, you can package your effects ICE-style compounds that you can share with other artists.

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 renderer integration lets you preview it at full quality directly in the viewports so you know exactly how it’s going to look.

The render tree's node-based drag & drop workflow lets you create complex shading effects quickly. This overview will acquaint you with the workflow. Download video - right-click and save as...

Take another quick look at how to get started working in the render tree. Download video - right-click and save as...

QUICKSHADE SHADERBALL PREVIEWS

XSI’s material editing tools feature integrated spatial and parametric shaderball previews that let you see how your materials look using standard lighting and geometry. More useful than simple thumbnail previews, shaderballs give you a rendered preview of your materials that update automatically as you adjust material settings. Shaderballs appear in the material manager, the texture layer editor, the render tree, and dedicated shaderball viewers, and are fully customizable, so you can create custom preview geometry.

XSI's shading and rendering preview tools?like the render region, and customizable Quickshade shaderballs?let you see how your materials look at every step. Download video - right-click and save as...

RENDERMAP

RenderMap can generate all kinds of cinematic-quality maps from arbitrarily complex models while taking full advantage of XSI’s rendering toolset. Using RenderMap you can:

• Bake complex materials into single texture images, with or without illumination.
• Create color maps, illumination maps, and ambient occlusion maps for objects.
• Incorporate lighting and shadowing into textures so you can remove lights from your scene.
• Create depth maps, texel coverage maps and other useful image files.
• Generate normal, binormal, and tangent maps for objects.
• Create sprites by putting an object in front of a grid and rendermapping the grid from a distance.

RenderMap also includes options to bake many of these maps into vertex colors, for real time display.

TOON SHADERS

Popular in advertising, animated series, and full-length CG features, XSI’s Toon shaders let you create all sorts of cartoon and non-photoreal effects. Using the XSI Toon shaders you can create ink lines ranging from bold, sharp contours to rough pencil sketches, and “paint” objects with full control over base colors, multiple layers of highlights, shadows, transparency, reflection, and refraction. You can easily combine Toon shaders with any other XSI shaders to augment the toon-rendering effect or to mix photoreal and non-photoreal rendering.