SOFT IMAGE XSI

Rival softwares often display an evolutionary symbiosis in propagating new features among themselves. New paradigms can develop across the field if, subject to darwinian selection, they find strong application among users and prove themselves indispensible.
The 3D and motion graphics world generally have felt the push for delivering increasing complexity or richness of output driven by rising hardware speeds and ever rising audience expectations. In recent times this led to a potentially bewildering maze of functions which are now being reigned in by measures like automation, tool clusterings and custom scriptings in consideration of the counterposed need for simplicity and efficiency of use by 3D artists.

SoftImage has had some catching up to do with its own rivals, particularly against some of the recent advances in Alias/Wavefront's Maya tool set. With the advent of XSI, formerly known during its extended incubation as Sumatra, SoftImage has now gained a lot of ground.
Soft has taken some leads from Maya in introducing scripting, soft body and collision dynamics and a customisable user interface. One of its more trumpteted additions, non linear animation is a feature of another of Soft's high end rivals, Houdini.

The Animation Mixer in SoftImage XSI groups animation curves into discreet modules of animation, known as "actions" which can be combined, compounded, moved, stretched or compresssed in time and blended to create overall composite animations which remain independently editable within the mix. Actions are portable between different characters and models even if dissimilar in structure and proportion so libraries of reusable actions can be built up for varied tasks or casts of characters. The animator can drag and drop an action from one character to another and if necessary assign actions to appropriate or specific parts of the character geometry. One application of this is that complex and usually laborious to edit motion capture data becomes editable from the 'outside' or can be moderated or extrapolated by mixing or adding other data. A relatively simple application of different blends can yield fresh variations on this sort of comple4x data.

Other new features include 'interactive' or live updated rendering as you work, surface mesh creation for seamless, animated, one-piece characters and a "render tree" for building shader functions by visually laying out nodes and relational connections. The scripting uses industry standard languages (VBScript, JScript, PerlScript, and Python) with opportunities for program developers. Fur and Cloth features are also flagged for unveiling at Siggraph in August.

David Nerlich