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At Siggraph 2004 Avid announced a price drops for Softimage XSI. A commercial license for the Foundation version of XSI was now $495. For a short time Avid also included all of the XSI in Production DVDs for free which retail for $200 by itself. Avid abandoned the software subscription system. Buying meant owning. With such a competitive price everyone is wondering if XSI foundation is missing lots of features found in the other versions of XSI. Is there a catch or strings attached to the deal? (like Essentials and Advanced)
The following features are missing. Smooth and relax operators, Poly reduction tools, Rigid body dynamics, advanced character rig guides, Hair and fur, Syflex Cloth simulator, the built in compositing tools are all missing. So what do those missing features do and why would you miss them?
The smooth operator takes vertices and rounds out the vertices in relation to each other. It is great tool for smoothing out rigid geometry. If you are desperate for this tool you can actually get RCtools which is a free plug-in. The relax operator tries to relax the mesh while retaining the shape.
Poly reduction tools work as the name implies. It reduces the complexity of the shape while trying to keep the geometry of the shape. Most poly reduction tools for 3d are quite awful and unusable in production environments but this tool actually works well and is pretty smart about how it rebuilds the geometry.
The smooth operator takes vertices and rounds out the vertices in relation to each other. It is great tool for smoothing out rigid geometry. If you are desperate for this tool you can actually get RCtools which is a free plug-in. The relax operator tries to relax the mesh while retaining the shape.
Poly reduction tools work as the name implies. It reduces the complexity of the shape while trying to keep the geometry of the shape. Most poly reduction tools for 3d are quite awful and unusable in production environments but this tool actually works well and is pretty smart about how it rebuilds the geometry.
The texture layer editor is a tool for assigning multiple textures in very complex ways. This tool is similar to the texture layering abilities of Lightwave. Imagine being able to edit multiple layers of textures being projected from multiple directions onto one object. Cutting out shapes for texture images and then specifying the texture to place on the edges of the geometry are just a few things that the texture layer editor can do. These same effects can still be achieved in foundation but the pace will be slower. Do not mistake texture layer editor for the texture editor. Texture editor is still in foundation and still just as powerful as the advanced version.
Rigid Body dynamics is just like the rigid body dynamics in Maya. It is great for making quick simulations. Although this can still be achieved through keyframe animation it sometimes helpful to use RBD for animating a few hundreds balls or blocks bouncing around.
The Syflex cloth simulator is just about the easiest and best cloth simulator on the market. I have used the Syflex plugin in maya and it is exceptionally fast and easy to use. Sadly it is only integrated into XSI advanced. Maya and XSI’s native cloth simulators do not compare to the ease of Syflex.
Hair and fur is another Advanced only feature. If you needed to have fury characters or realistic moving hair, you will miss this feature for sure.
Lack of Compositing tools means the user will have to do the compositing in a separate package. Most 3d packages don’t include compositing tools for making a finished rendering anyways. And when they do, it’s usually pretty generic stuff.
Here is a link for a model comparison between Foundation, Essentials and Advanced
With all the missing features aside, why would you want to even bother with XSI foundation? It is obviously missing a lot of cool features. For starters, the workflow in XSI is faster and easier to manage than Maya. The construction mode system allows pre-rigged character geometry to be rebuilt without having to re-rig the character. XSI will automatically re-interpolate preset UV maps and weight maps for the added geometry. XSI might interpolate the weight maps the way user wants or the user may have to do minor touch ups to the weightmaps or UV coordinates. Construction mode allows the user to add geometry to the face of a character and the facials morphs will automatically be interpolated for the new geometry. Again XSI may interpolate the way the user wants or the user may have to tweak ever so slightly to get the desired effect. Either way it’s still a better method of working with characters and adds a great deal of flexibility. The look of a character is no longer set in stone when weights maps or facial morphs are applied.
Polygon modeling tools are a step above Maya’s polygon modeling tools. Whether modeling characters or rooms the tools to make the job painless and fun are there. The bevel tool rounds off corners amazingly well. The bevel tool must be seen in action to really appreciate how powerful it is. XSI’s edge polygon tool is similar to Maya’s split polygon tool. XSI’s edge polygon tool allows overlapping of polysplits without having to stop and restart the edge split. Holding ctrl makes the edge polygon tools snap to the mid point between the two vertices.
XSI has inset and offset polygon tools that make inner extrusion easy. (The type of inner extrusions that cannot be achieved by scaling selected faces) Maya has some tools that work similar but just not as well as XSI’s. Cinema4D’s inner extrusion is the only other 3d app that compares to XSI’s (I’m not sure about 3dmax’s inner extrusion).
Maya and Cinema4D’s polygon selection tools have dots that make it easier to select particular polygons. It’s not really a big issue as that is one of those preference things. I would like to have the polygon dot selection but it doesn’t bother me that it’s not there.
Proportional modeling in XSI allows for manipulation of massive numbers of vertices. The radius and falloff amount is customizable. It is similar to the magnet tool in Lightwave. Selecting rows and columns of vertices/edges is easy. The free hand method involves holding alt and clicking two edges or vertices and XSI will select the vertices or edges between the selections. There are other tools that are interesting but I won’t mention because the tools would not be used on a typical basis.
Proportional modeling in XSI allows for manipulation of massive numbers of vertices. The radius and falloff amount is customizable. It is similar to the magnet tool in Lightwave. Selecting rows and columns of vertices/edges is easy. The free hand method involves holding alt and clicking two edges or vertices and XSI will select the vertices or edges between the selections. There are other tools that are interesting but I won’t mention because the tools would not be used on a typical basis.
There are three types of subdivision surfaces. First type is similar to Cinema4d’s hypernurbs. On a box object, pushing plus or minus on the number pad creates a smoother box with the same number of control vertices and patches as the original unsmoothed box. The other type of subdivision is similar to Maya’s smooth proxy. Located in create->polymesh->subdivision. It creates a duplicate smooth version of a mesh which can be modified by the low poly object. The last method is by using geometry approximation node which acts similarly to a hypernurbs object in cinema4d. Geometry approximation can be set to render in the subdivisions in OpenGl or just in the software render, or both. Geometry approximation also has other functions dealing with hair and fur and subdivision displacement.
The NURBS included with XSI aren’t great by any means. Modeling with patches seems to be a method of the past. Patch modeling has some advantages and sewing together patches is easier in XSI than in most applications. XSI however is lacking some very basic NURBS tools. Such as not being able patch up holes for closed splines.
The character tools work great. IK/FK blending works properly. The pre-built basic character rigs are great reference for making custom rigs. The dope sheet, F-Curve editors and other animation editors are easier to work with than Mayas. Moving collections of motions from one object to another is easy. Adjusting entire animations, and marking motion parameters and saving the parameters is easy and makes animating in XSI a lot of fun. (having fun is something I’ve been missing for along time now in 3d)
Painting weightmaps is similar to the claude bonet tool in Cinema4d. XSI automatically creates different colored weightmaps so that the user can see where one weight map ends and where another begins. Smooth painting tools as well as smoothing parameters for entire collection of weight maps is available.
Mental Ray is seamlessly integrated into XSI. Mental Ray is the primary renderer. XSI’s rendertree looks as intimidating as Maya’s Hypershade. In reality the Rendertree is easy to use. Color coded inputs let the user see what can be connected. Some outputs have to be translated to be plugged into other shader nodes. XSI automatically creates the translating nodes to make the process of creating shaders painless. (It is also kind of fun)
There are a lot of other features worthy of nothing but this is already too long. It’s a nice package for $500. Character tools are awesome and I feel they are superior to Maya’s character tools. Maya still has the edge when it comes to technical simulations and scripting ability. XSI has scripting tools but at the moment it is not as powerful as Maya’s MEL.
Special note: XSI hates ATi cards. XSI will run on a machine with an ATi card but it will probably crash very often. I am using XSI with an old ATi card and XSI crashes everytime I start painting weightmaps. I’ve had to do all my character weight maps on machine with an nvidia card. I haven’t had any problems on the nvidia machine like I have had with the ATi. Coincidentally my ATi machine also hates Maya and does weird stuff when I paint weight maps.
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