XSI for Television Post Production Artists
© Signos Post Gigapolygon Core
XSI’s Gigapolygon Core architecture offers a built-in advantage for projects that require finely sculpted, massively detailed characters and environments. It allows XSI to load huge amounts of information into memory, and reduce it so that retains definition and you can edit it in a manageable way. The upshot: you can move millions of polygons in real time and sculpt them non-destructively without losing UVs, shapes, weight maps or skinning information.
Artist-Friendly Tools and Workflows
From day one, XSI has been known for its elegant, intuitive interface and artist friendly workflows. From ubiquitous drag & drop operations, to multiple supported interaction models, to keyboard interactions that let you switch effortlessly between tools,
XSI lets you work quickly, without getting in your way so there’s nothing standing between you and your creative vision.
XSI’s interface, keyboard interactions, and navigation are 100% customizable, so you can change whatever you need to work the way you want. If you’re transitioning from other 3D package, XSI includes a comprehensive set of migration tools to get up and running in minutes rather than hours.
Complete Modeling Toolset
XSI’s modeling toolset is designed for speed and ease of use, putting everything you need to work with polygon meshes, subdivision surfaces, surfaces, and surface mesh topologies right at you fingertips. All of your modeling operations, including interactive deformations, are saved in the operator stack, which records all of the changes you make so you can go back in time to adjust, temporarily mute, or completely delete them.
World’s Fastest Subdivision Surface Modeler
XSI has the world’s fastest subdivision surface modeler so you can work in real time at any mesh resolution. You can use all polygon mesh modeling tools on subdivided meshes—even on animated characters—and move points directly on the subdivision surface. XSI can subdivide triangles, quads and n-sided polygons with all subdivision types, including mixed subdivision types for triangulated meshes. You’ll enjoy working without speed, editing or geometry restrictions.
Tweak Component Tool
The Tweak Component Tool is an all-in-one manipulation tool for fast freeform modeling that makes it easy for you to work at your own artistic rhythm. Featuring optional component manipulators and quick manipulation planes, the Tweak tool 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 neighbor's position.
Text and Logo Tools
XSI allows you to quickly create 3D text from TrueType fonts or .rtf files, giving you a virtually unlimited choice of fonts to work with. If you’re creating logos, you can import EPS files to create curves, and transform them into 3D models. Any text or logo that you create, you can deform, texture, animate, render, and more using the full XSI toolset.
Non Destructive Character Creation Tools
XSI’s non-destructive rigging and flexible construction modes make character creation easier. You can create fully rigged characters quickly, and make changes to them at any stage of the production. Imagine being able to make modeling, texturing, and even rigging changes to characters with multiple UVs, textures and envelope weights—even shape animation—without destroying any pre-existing details. Your changes are applied automatically, so there’s no need to re-construct bones, bone weights or shape animation, no need to reorder operators, and no more hours of tedious rework.
GATOR—Transfer Attributes, Reuse Assets
Using the XSI Generalized Attribute Transfer Operator (GATOR), you can transfer any surface properties between models, regardless of complexity or topology, in just a few clicks. You can transfer any attribute—including materials, textures, weights, and shape animation—even between rigged character models. You can also use GATOR to combine completed, textured, animated models without losing important characteristics.
Gator in Action
A typical character creation workflow looks like this:
Making a change to your geometry affects the entire workflow. Much work needs to be redone. Activities marked in red are all affected by a change to the base geometry.
Using GATOR, you can make changes to any part of the character without redoing work.
Increased Productivity
GATOR frees you from a linear workflow and allows you to easily reuse assets so you can produce more characters, faster than you ever thought possible.
Other 3D applications make building each character a linear process. Much of the work that goes into creating the character cannot be re-used:
In XSI, building a character is non-linear. GATOR and other non-destructive tools let you reuse much of the initial work, resulting in greater productivity and higher quality:
Some other examples of GATOR in production include:
- Having multiple people work on different parts of a character.
For example, one artist works on the model while another works on animation, and another works on texture detailing. When it comes time to integrate all the changes, simply use GATOR to transfer the attributes to the final character!
- Making changes to a character that is already rigged and animated
For example, you have to replace a character's entire head and all of the associated shape animations. XSI allows you to take the new head with shape animations and simply GATOR it onto the existing character. No need to step back and rework. You save yourself a few hours with just a few clicks.
- Reusing assets that you’ve already created
For example, you’ve spent a lot of time creating the phoneme shapes (sometimes called "blend shapes" or "morph targets") for facial animation. You now have to create 50 more characters with phoneme shapes. Simply GATOR the existing shapes onto to all fifty characters and you’re done! What would typically take weeks in annother 3D application takes only a few minutes in XSI.
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.
Fast, Flexible Animation
Getting animation just right is about fine-tuning the details without losing sight of the big picture. XSI gives you superior control over your animation with streamlined workflows that make it easy to pose and keyframe highly detailed characters.
A clean, responsive curve editor and dopesheet make it easy to view and edit animation at any level of detail. Easy animation layering lets you add keyframes on top of existing animation without having to commit to changes or edits up fronts—a huge time saver when you’re dealing with complex motion capture data. Real-time playback means you can see what you’re doing without waiting for animation previews, and get more keying done in less time. And when you’re ready, you can package your animation into clips and start cutting them together in the mixer.
Non-Linear Animation Mixing
The mixer is the heart of XSI’s animation power. By packaging complex animation into clips that you can mix together in an intuitive editing interface, the mixer lets you create libraries of actions that you can combine into complete animations without having to go back to the underlying keyframes or fcurves.
You can mix anything from animation clips, composite clips, constraints, and expressions, to shapes, and textures. Even sync audio. Like other XSI tools, the mixer is non-destructive, so the underlying animation stays intact, but instantly reflects any changes you make to it.
The mixer comes complete with tools to easily handle motion capture sequences, including motion matching, marker placement, offsets, and frequency-based transitions. You can transition a walk to a run without slipping feet, or link one character’s animation to another’s in just a few clicks.
From pre-viz through to polished animation the mixer gives you high-level control with low-level precision.
MOTOR Animation Retargeting
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.
Like 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.
Simulation–Hair & Fur, Cloth, Particles, Rigid and Soft Bodies, and more
XSI lets you simulate nearly any kind of natural (or unnatural) phenomenon. From realistic hair, fur and cloth to particles, rigid bodies and soft bodies, simulations help bring your scenes to life. Easily configured collisions, and natural forces like wind, gravity, and turbulence, add realism to your simulations. And because all simulations happen directly in the XSI interface, you can take full advantage of all modeling, shading, texturing and animation tools, and render your simulations using mental ray.
ICE - Interactive Creative Environment
XSI 7 introduces ICE (Interactive Creative Environment), a groundbreaking technology that transforms XSI from just another 3D product into a powerful and flexible open platform.
ICE greatly improves collaboration between artists and technical directors, allowing them to create custom tools and effects visually, see the results interactively, and do it all without scripting, or writing a line of code. Effects built or modified in ICE are performance tuned and multi-threaded, so they perform at maximum efficiency across all available processors.
The ICE environment – XSI functionality is displayed using a node-based dataflow diagram. Each node has specific capabilities. Users connect nodes to create a desired effect. A group of nodes can be packaged together into a “compound”, which is displayed as a single node. As a result, highly complex tools can be deployed and re-used without writing code.
ICE - Interactive Creative Environment
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. Full shape instancing means you can also use XSI hair to create anything from feathers to grass to trees, using the same intuitive toolset.
©UVPHACTORY
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.
Advanced Shading and Texturing Tools - Production Quality Previews
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 make it easy to build complex materials. A fully integrated customizable shaderball engine renders preview thumbnails wherever you need them, so you can see how your materials and effects come together.
Tight integration with the mental ray renderer means you can see finished-quality previews of all of your effects directly in the XSI viewports by simply drawing a render region. You can draw render regions in multiple viewports and save snapshots to memo-cam-like regions to compare different versions of an effect as you tweak it. No other 3D package makes client-attended review and approval this easy.
Production-Quality Preview Renders for Client-Attended Review and Approval
Tight mental ray integration puts powerful shading and rendering tools at your fingertips. You can delve into powerful shading and rendering effects, set up breathtaking photorealistic lighting with just a few clicks, and get full-quality preview renders directly in the XSI viewports.
3rd-Party Renderer Integrations
The open rendering API introduced in XSI 6 allowed our rendering technology partners to develop and integrate their own render engines into XSI with depth and control similar to XSI’s mental ray integration. You can now enjoy XSI integrations of the following renderers:
And more integrations are on the way. For more information, ask your rendering technology provider about their plans for a SOFTIMAGE|XSI integration.
Integrated Compositing and Paint
Based on Avid’s Matador, Media Illusion, and Elastic Reality, XSI Illusion is a fully integrated, 16-bit 2D paint and compositing module. XSI Illusion boasts over 130 film-quality effects, including color correction, retiming, chroma keying, morphing & warping images, and much, much more. Paint tools include 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, paint out wires, morph and warp images, create custom mattes and tweak the results of a multi-pass render – all without switching apps. XSI Illusion is fully compatible with 64-bit systems, so you can load huge effects and sequences into memory for real-time playback and interaction.
AAF\MXF HD for Avid Editors
XSI gives you multiple output options for Avid editors—including industry standard AAF/MXF, AVI and QT formats—and allows you to output HD output and create 10bit real-time playable media. Together with integrated support for Avid Digital Input/Output devices, XSI speeds up traditional methods of reviewing and editing by letting you examine any XSI view, render region, or animation directly on an external monitor and then output them to external devices.
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