Subscription Extra: CrowdFX Plotting Plugin

Posted on June 17, 2013 by xsisupport

I see there is an Extra for Softimage Subscription customers. It’s a plugin that adds two commands for exporting CrowdFX:
Export Crowd as FBX (Null Rig) – Exports a null rig for each actor including the animations created by the crowd simulation
Export Crowd as FBX (Null Rig and Geometry) – In addition to the null rig, it exports one geometry per actor enveloped to the null rig
There’s some docs on the Documentation tab in the Sub center.

Screenshots of the week

Posted on June 17, 2013 by xsisupport

particle flow control with turbulence
by Peter Agg

path through points
by Enduk

The Lorenz Attractor.Monkey style code retyping from C to Softimage ICE part 1

Understanding the “Doritos” (KineState Hack) Technique

Making Hurricane Andy

Vectors 101: Tubular Push with ICE

Vectors 101: Spherical Push with ICE

A Look Inside Gear – Parts 1 and 2

Friday Flashback #124

Posted on June 14, 2013 by xsisupport

Screenshots from SOFTIMAGE Creative Environment v2.66 (captured on an SGI Indy running IRIX 5.3; it only has 8-bit graphics, hence the dithering in the shaded view).

Many thanks to Aaron Rodgers for contributing these screenshots.

Lost connections to license servers

Posted on June 13, 2013 by xsisupport

Ever wonder what happens if you lose your connection to the license server?

Well, two hours after the connection is lost, you’ll get a warning:

When you click OK, you’ll be prompted to either save or discard your work.

And after you save your scene, Softimage will exit.

Wednesday Word Cloud: Advanced Support

Posted on June 12, 2013 by xsisupport

Word cloud for the Customer Guide to Autodesk Advanced Support.

On this subject, now that the AREA forums have been updated, I suspect Maya/3dsMax/Softimage customers are one step closer to forum support. From the Advanced Customer Guide:

Proactively Escalate Forum Posts to Autodesk
Autodesk Advanced Support provides you with all the benefits of Basic Support, including expedited community forum support: if the community does not respond to your posts within 24 hours, they are automatically escalated to Autodesk.

Avoiding exceptions when populating XSICollections

Posted on June 11, 2013 by xsisupport

Use the Items property. You won’t get any errors, you just have to check whether or not the collection is empty.

import win32com.client

oColl = win32com.client.Dispatch("XSI.Collection")
oColl.Unique = True
oColl.Items = "*.*.dontexist_*"
print oColl.Count

Screenshots of the week

Posted on June 10, 2013 by xsisupport

WildStar, Behind the Scenes
by Eric Chadwick on polycount

UI customizations
by kovalex

Flow along curve speed control
by Vincent Ullmann

Randomize image sequence per particle.

Fixing Scrambled UVs in Softimage

Tool for adding overrides

Protein through membrane
by gotchee

Changing start time of Modulate Value over Time
by face

Friday Flashback #123

Posted on June 7, 2013 by xsisupport

Gesture. Unparalleled Artistry. XSI v.3.5

The new tools and interface in
SOFTIMAGE|XSI are really exciting.
XSI allows for a thoroughfare between
imagination and creation that we’d
never seen or experienced before.

That mad us very ecited and made
us adopt XSI into our pipeline
as quickly as possible.

PSYOP,Inc.

Softimage 2014 SP1

Posted on June 6, 2013 by xsisupport

Get it here.
Check the README for what’s fixed.

Word cloud for the 37 bug fixes:

xsisupport vacation pics

Posted on June 5, 2013 by xsisupport

So, after three weeks of vacation in Venice, Florence, Tuscany, Rome, and Paris, I’m back. Here’s a few pics from my trip, all taken with my iPod Touch, which was a great little travel companion.