What's New in XSI 6 Foundation

Accelerated Animation Tools

Character animation has always been the heart of SOFTIMAGE|XSI, and the fast, flexible and intuitive animation features in version 6 make it clear why XSI is the leading character animation solution.

Animation Layering

Animation layers give you an interactive and non-destructive way to add keyframes on top of existing animation, and break individual motions into primary and secondary animations without having to commit to changes or edits up front. Layers make it easy to work with motion capture data without wading through highly dense FCurves.

Animation Layering in Action >>

Character Key Sets

Character Key Sets let you easily set keyframes on predefined sets of parameters for a faster animation workflow. Creating a key set means you don’t need to select an object first to key its parameters—just press K and whatever is in the current character key set is keyed.

Crosswalk—Bi-Directional Interoperability

Crosswalk is an ongoing initiative to help seamlessly transfer XSI content into and out of other 3D packages. 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.

Crosswalk in Action >>

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. Seamless mental ray 3.5.6 integration means what you see is what you get. No approximations. No compromises.

Quick Shade in Action >>

Completely Revamped Rendering Core

The XSI rendering core has been completely revamped for increased performance, scalability, and extensibility. In addition to tight integration of mental ray version 3.5.6, XSI 6 now lets you render any combination of built-in, preset, and user-defined render channels using integrated framebuffers. Special render tree nodes make it easy to extract any portion of any material's render tree to a framebuffer and output it to file as part of a render pass.

Render Channels in Action >>

Scripting and Development Flexibility

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.