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.

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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

A mixed-software 3D pipeline requires an integrated data interchange system that lets content move seamlessly—and that’s exactly why Softimage developed Crosswalk. Crosswalk is an ongoing initiative to help transfer standard Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Maya® rigs into and out of XSI, and transfer standard XSI rigs and 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 3ds Max and Maya pipelines. Of course all pipelines have their own unique requirements, and the Softimage engineering team can work with you to extend Crosswalk to work with specialized content. 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.

Games Content Pipeline

Whether it’s a next-generation game, a casual game, a mod for an existing title or even a Flash-based 3D game, XSI provides a production-proven toolset for creating compelling 3D content. XSI supports the following game engines and development frameworks:

MOTOR - Motion transformation

MOTOR is an intelligent and dependable solution for transferring motion from one character rig to another while preserving keyframe timing. Now you can transfer motion between character rigs of all sizes and proportions. Build reusable libraries of animation by importing and retargeting motion capture data onto standard XSI character rigs. As with other Softimage technologies, MOTOR can be extended to handle specialized content. Our Special Projects or SWAT engineering team can work with you to develop custom version of motor that suit your unique pipeline requirements.

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. Like all Softimage technologies, GATOR works with standard rigs and content out of the box, and can be extended to meet the unique requirements of your pipeline by our Special Projects or SWAT engineering team.

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 architecture 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.

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