Softimage XSI Essentials 6.5

Now in XSI Essentials:

• XSI Hair and Fur

• Syflex Cloth

SOFTIMAGE|XSI 6.5

New Features. New Packages. New Price.

Today, demand for compelling 3D character performances and rich, immersive 3D worlds has never been greater. SOFTIMAGE|XSI 6.5 renews Softimage's legendary commitment to 3D artists and studios by giving you everything you need to keep pushing the boundaries of art and technology—all at a simply unbeatable value.

Over 30 Feature Enhancements

XSI 6.5 boasts over 30 enhancements, developed for key customers such as Lionhead Studios, Valve, EA, Animal Logic, Nerdcorps, Pandemic, and NCSoft. 

Enhancements highlights to SOFTIMAGE|XSI 6.5 Essentials and Advanced include the following:

• TransformUV Property for multi-UV editing
• New interactive “Tight” layout for Unique UVs/PolyPack
• Shaderball support for Hardware Renderers
• Snapping tools work with Instances
• New Drag and Drop event
• New OnObjectAdded event
• New OnObjectRemoved event
• HDR image generation in RenderMap
• Satellite Support for RenderMap
• HDR color range for vertex colors
• API to convert vertex colors from shorts to floats and vice-versa
• And more...

New Renderers

With XSI 6, Softimage opened up the XSI rendering API, and we've seen an enthusiastic response from our growing community of 3rd-party developers.

XSI has long been known for its unmatched rendering workflow and deep integration of the award-winning mental ray renderer. And while mental ray, remains the core XSI renderer, our rendering technology partners are taking advantage of our open rendering API to develop and integrate their respective render engines into XSI with similar depth and control.

For more information, ask your favorite rendering technology provider about their plans for SOFTIMAGE|XSI integration.

SOFTIMAGE|XSI is the most advanced 3D animation and character creation software for next generation games & film. The XSI Gigapolygon core, capable of handling massively detailed models with millions of polygons, is the number one reason why leading entertainment companies are switching their next generation projects to XSI. Built on the newest code base and designed for the way the artist thinks, XSI empowers you to bring your creative vision to life.

Model

With the world’s fastest subdivision surface modeler and intuitive tools that make 3D modeling feel like sculpting, XSI’s non-destructive environment lets you focus on your art. A Gigapolygon core architecture that can push millions of subdivided polygons interactively lets you scale your creations to unprecedented levels of detail. With XSI, you’ll never have to wait for your 3D software to catch up to your imagination.

Animate

Fast, flexible animation is the heart of XSI. Streamlined workflows make it easy to pose and keyframe highly detailed characters. You get more keying done while watching your character in the viewports, without having to open another editor. Real-time playback means you can see what you’re doing without waiting for animation previews. A clean, responsive curve editor and dopesheet make it easy to manipulate animation. Easy animation layering and mixing simplify the process of breaking animation into parts and moving it around.

Iterate

XSI offers the best iterative workflow of any 3D package. Non-destructive tools let you add new details to rigged or shape-animated characters whenever you want, without tedious hours of rework. Full mental ray integration means you can generate full-quality previews directly in an XSI viewport for hassle-free client-attended review and approval sessions. And with XSI's built-in compositor you can preview the results of multi-pass renders without switching environments. Change is good.

Collaborate

A successful production is a team effort, so XSI features the industry’s best collaborative environment. Delta referencing technology offers lightweight, production-level referencing so multiple artists can work on assets without getting in each other’s way. Crosswalk interoperability features seamlessly transfer assets into and out of other 3D animation packages.

Reuse

Working with multiple characters often involves tedious manual tasks that you need to repeat for each character. XSI saves you time where it matters most with tools to transfer character setups and animation across rigs. GATOR transfers any surface attributes — including UVs, weight maps, skinning, and shape animation — from one character to another. MOTOR is the world’s first system for moving keyframe animation across characters, regardless of their proportions or control structures.

Shade and Texture

From scales and skin, to metal and stone, to cartoon ink and paint, XSI's Quick Shade technology 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.

Render

A shared-memory architecture with the award-winning mental ray renderer built right in makes XSI the best 3D animation package for cinematic-quality multi-pass rendering. You can delve into powerful shaders in the render tree and set up breathtaking photorealistic lighting with just a few clicks. The Gigapolygon core and shared-memory architecture mean that you can render more detail using less memory than in any other package. And integrated frame buffers allow you to render a single default pass that outputs many common channels to separate files.

Paint and Composite

Can your 3D software edit textures and image-based lighting in real time? XSI’s built-in compositor is designed to do just that. Based on Avid’s Matador, Media Illusion, and Elastic Reality, XSI Illusion is a fully integrated, resolution-independent 2D paint and compositing module. With over 130 film-quality effects and 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, morph, warp and rig images, create custom mattes and tweak the results of a multi-pass render – all without switching apps.

Develop

A Technical Director ’s dream come true, XSI lets you use the best language for the job, offering integrated C#, and support for Python v.2.5 and .NET compliant languages. A Tools Development Environment (TDE) gives developers a dedicated environment for customization and plug-in development. With a completely programmable realtime shader pipeline, a dedicated framework to host custom applications, and a rendering SDK that makes it possible to integrate 3rd party renderers, XSI is simply the most customizable 3D package available.

Features & Specifications

SOFTIMAGE|XSI boasts a vast array of tools to increase your efficiency, improve your turn-around time, and help you get the most out of next-generation games, film, and television pipelines.re

Gigapolygon Core

The gigapolygon core in XSI is the engine that moves millions of polygons in real-time and allows you to non-destructively sculpt them without losing UVs, shapes, weight maps and skinning information. It offers a built-in advantage for next generation games and film pipelines that increasingly require finely sculpted, massively detailed characters and environments. The gigapolygon core allows XSI to load this dense information into memory, reducing it in a way that retains definition so you can edit it in a manageable way.

Accelerated Animation Tools

Character animation is the heart of SOFTIMAGE|XSI. Animation layers give you an interactive and non-destructive way to add keyframes on top of existing animation, so you can work with motion capture data without wading through highly dense FCurves. New Character Key Sets let you easily set keyframes on predefined sets of parameters for a faster animation workflow. Updates and enhancements to the dopesheet and Fcurve editor, improve the artist’s workflow across the board. Fast, flexible and intuitive, XSI is the leading character animation solution.

Blazingly fast subdivision surface modeling

XSI has the world’s fastest subdivision surface modeler, powered by the Gigapolygon core so you can work in real time at any mesh resolution. You can continue to use all polygon mesh modeling tools on subdivided meshes - even animated characters - and move points directly on the subdivision surface. Enjoy working without speed, editing or geometry restrictions—XSI can subdivide triangles, quads and n-sided polygons with all subdivision types, including mixed subdivision types for triangulated meshes.
 

Tweak Component Tool

Featuring optional component manipulators and quick manipulation planes, the Tweak Component Tool makes it easy for you to work at your own artistic rhythm. This all-in-one manipulation tool for fast freeform modeling allows you to move, rotate, scale or translate points, edges and polygons - all with a single key. You can also loop and range select any component or even slide your selection to exactly match its neighbour's position.

Crosswalk—Bi-Directional Interoperability

Reliable interoperability is the most important part of a mixed-tool pipeline—and that’s exactly why Softimage developed Crosswalk. Crosswalk is an ongoing initiative to help seamlessly transfer XSI 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 Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Maya® pipelines. Spend less time moving your characters and more time animating them.

Quick Shade —Advanced Rendering Workflow

Quick Shade technology takes the state-of-the-art SOFTIMAGE|XSI shading and texturing toolset to a new level. A generalized shaderball engine, gives you step-by-step previews of your materials wherever you need them, while the new material manager offers a dedicated view to create, assign, edit, and manage the materials that bring your scenes to life. XSI’s shaderball is completely customizable and fully integrated; from the render tree, to the texture layer editor, the new material manager and material panel, to the separate shaderball windows.

Completely non-destructive character set-up & rigging

XSI makes life easier by allowing modeling, texturing, and even rigging changes to take place on rigged & animated characters without re-construction of bones, bone weights or shape animation. Easily add new details to rigged or shape-animated characters without the hours of tedious rework, even in mixed pipelines.

Powerful animation mixing

The mixer is the heart of XSI’s animation power, offering both high-level control and low-level precision. Mix anything — animation clips, composite clips, constraints, expressions, shapes, textures, etc — and even sync audio using the mixer’s intuitive clip-based editing interface. Easily handle motion capture sequences using motion matching, marker placement, offsets and frequency-based transitions. Transition a walk to a run without slipping feet, or link one character’s animation to another’s in just a few clicks. Only XSI can non-destructively animate, blend, offset and re-use any motion source.

Film-quality normal map generation

Going far beyond normal maps, the XSI "Ultimapper" tool can generate all kinds of cinematic-quality maps from arbitrarily complex models in just a few clicks, while taking full advantage of the sophisticated rendering possibilities of mental ray. Ultimapper can generate normal, ambient occlusion, difference, light, and albedo maps with an instant mental ray, DirectX, or OpenGL preview directly in the XSI viewports.

Delta referencing

Delta referencing technology is a breakthrough approach to collaborative 3D animation, offering studios the first core architecture for production-level referencing. This new lightweight referencing system allows production teams to store 3D assets, and the changes made to those assets, in external files that can be assembled dynamically to produce characters, props and environments. Artists can modify assets and then update them non-destructively, for true collaborative workflow.

MOTOR - Motion transformation

MOTOR is an intelligent and dependable solution for transferring motion from one character rig to another—think GATOR for character animation. Now you can transfer motion between character rigs of all sizes and proportions, all while preserving keyframe timing. Build reusable libraries of animation by importing and retargeting motion capture data onto arbitrary XSI character rigs.

GATOR - property transfer that just works

Using the XSI Generalized Attribute Transfer Operator ("GATOR"), you can easily transfer any surface properties between models, regardless of complexity or topology. You can transfer any attribute—including materials, textures, weights, and shape animation—even between rigged character models. Gator can also be used to combine models, allowing completed, textured, animated models to be merged without losing important characteristics.

XSI Hair and Fur

Create long, luxurious, and truly realistic hair and fur with dynamic effects—all rendered using mental ray. XSI hair offers a range of specialized tools for creating hair, including the innovative proportional grooming tool. Use any native XSI deformers, including lattices and curves, for precise, natural hair styling with complete control over the animation.

Integrated Syflex Cloth

Syflex is an incredibly fast and stable simulation engine that lets you create a broad range of cloth and flesh effects directly within the XSI interface. Extremely simple to learn and use, Syflex makes it easy to create digital cloth.

Flexible scripting and development

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#, an object-oriented programming language popular with next-gen 3D game developers, and support for Python v.2.5 and .NET compliant languages.

Programmable realtime shaders

Be ready for the massive power of next-generation GPUs. The sophisticated, completely programmable display architechture integrated in XSI ensures precise visual correspondence between your work-in-progress and your target platform, eliminating unnecessary revision cycles. The dedicated XGS display SDK allows nearly any custom drawing process to be added to geometry views. XSI also features comprehensive support for .FX shaders, with real-time previewing, enabling artists to work with the exact same shaders that run in the game engine.

Integrated Tools Development Environment (TDE)

A single unified development environment, the TDE allows TD's 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.