Friday Flashback #173


The State of the Art
SOFTIMAGE|3D is the art, skill and rhythm of 3d animation –
system for animators who have consistently produced ground
breaking animation, signature effects and photo-realistic
imagery. It is the result of a decade of evolution – from
interface design that put control back into the hands of
artists, to the breakthrough character animation of
Godzilla. SOFTIMAGE|3D The State of the Art, Defined.

3D_tightbc

Emitting particles from instances


Suppose you want to emit particles from the instances in a point cloud. For example, suppose you have a point cloud of instances of a BigFish model, and you want to emit little fish from each BigFish instance.

emit_from_instance1

One simple approach is to set up a point cloud on your master BigFish instance, and do the emitting there.

emit_from_instance2

Then when you emit the point cloud of BigFish instances, use InstanceShape instead of Set Instance Geometry.

emit_from_instance3

Friday Flashback #172


From a picture dated 12 May 2004, a variety of memorabilia, including:

  • SGI Iris Indigo, octane, and Indy
  • MegaFonts, 1001 Professional Fonts for SOFIMAGE|3D
  • SOFTIMAGE|3D 4.0 Fundamentals book
  • SOFTIMAGE|3D, SOFTIMAGE Creative Environment, and “Softimage for the Creative Mind” CDs
  • SOFTIMAGE|3D documentation set

Pictures 425

[Tip] Decluttering your XSI browser Add-on Paths


If you’ve got a lot of add-ons, you probably have a bit of clutter in the browser Paths menu. Like this:
clutter_addon_paths
You can get rid of all those add-ons by cleaning out the Addons/InstalledAddons folders in your User and Workgroup locations. Softimage checks those folders (at startup) to build the list of add-ons for the Paths menu.

Don’t worry; removing the .xsiaddon files from the InstalledAddons folder doesn’t uninstall the addons.

Friday Flashback #170


SOFTIMAGE Creative Environment User Guide
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Apparently that creature on the cover is known as Creeps (note: link is to a youtube video that isn’t available in my country).
Posted on FB by Lucca Prasso

Note the names of the books in the background: “How to be a Genius”, “How to cook a Dinosaur”, and “The Complete DNA”.

Also, what’s up with a “User Guide” being labelled a “Comprehensive Reference Guide” ?