Friday Flashback #12

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A little over 10 years ago, this review of XSI 2.0 appeared in 3D World, with the tag line “…is this the Softimage we’ve been waiting for?”.

Back then, XSI Essentials cost $8,200 US. Today, a Standalone license of 2012 costs $2995 US.
XSI Advanced costs $12,300. Now, a Network license costs $3745.

Here’s the intro:

Softimage has gone through a turbulent period over the last few years. It’s been tossed between parent companies (Microsoft and Avid) and seen its lead in high-end 3D animation wane, not least thanks to the popularity of Alias|Wavefront’s Maya.

The long-awaited and long-overdue upgrade to Softimage’s 3D animation system, the legendary Softimage|3D, was XSI 1.0, a somewhat lacklustre release in so much as it still relied heavily on Softimage|3D. There was no polygon modelling, import or exporting had to be done via Softimage|3D (and still does actually) and NURBS features were limited. However, it did feature two very important new technologies.

The first was Twister which was the seamless integration of Mental Image’s mental ray rendering system within XSI, complete with visual shading network and finalquality interactive preview rendering. The second was the non-linear animation system, the Mixer, that enabled artists to mix and blend animation clips as if they were mixing tracks of video.

The updated 1.5 version introduced polygon tools and Subdivision Surfaces, which helped workflow considerably. With version 2.0 it seems that Softimage has finally produce the version of XSI that everyone has been waiting for. It’s a beast, and frankly Alias should be worried.

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Per object data in ICE

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When you’re working with a point cloud, and you want to keep some data on a per-object basis, you need to use one of the Set nodes (like Get Set Or or Get Maximum in Set). Or sometimes you can use arrays, as shown below.

Here we get an array of the points that are in State 1, and then save the size of the array (eg the number of points in State 1) as a per-object value.

The Show Values in the viewport:

Finding point clouds

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Point clouds are a type of X3DObject, so you can use FindChild and FindChildren to find point clouds.

BUT watch out, the SDK docs list the wrong type constant: siCloudPrimType.
That type was for the old, obsolete particle system.
For ICE point clouds, use the constant siPointCloudPrimType (“PointCloud”).

from win32com.client import constants as c

PointClouds = Application.ActiveSceneRoot.FindChildren2("*", c.siPointCloudPrimType ) 
for pointCloud in PointClouds :
    Application.LogMessage(pointCloud.FullName )

Friday Flashback #11

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Softimage and Maya releases are now synchronized (same release data, same “version” number), but it wasn’t always that way. Here’s a timeline comparison of the XSI and Maya releases between 1998 and 2003.

And at Siggraph 1998, back near the start of this timeline, here’s what was happening:

  • Alias announced price reductions of 25 percent to 40 percent, which was welcome news to many studios interested in adding Maya to their tool set.
  • Softimage showed the 2.0 version of Digital Studio (now shipping). 1.0 had been released in Nov ’97.
  • Softimage continued to tantalize customers with extended previews of Sumatra.